This is a picture of a real whiteboard, which is not the same as a digital whiteboard. A picture of a digital whiteboard is just a white rectangle.

Stay Safe. Make Intros.

I don't know that too much gravitas is expected from a simple online intro maker, but it seems pretty shitty to not even acknowledge what's going on in the world right now. We pulled our kids out of school on March 13th, so we're just wrapping our second full week of home school. My immediate family is lucky to be still employed and working from home, but the sudden lack of a commute hasn't magically given us more time to work.

Here's what I'm doing right now:

Stay Safe

My immediate family is on "co-quarantine" with my brother's family to spread the childcare load around. We're each taking "kid shifts" for around 3 hours at a stretch to let the other grown-ups get some work done. My mom (a retired teacher) is doing a Google Hangout for a couple of hours a day to teach the 5 year olds, while my 8 year old is mostly doing self-guided classes online. I'm trying to stay healthy while in quarantine with a mix of jumprope, Beat Saber, and my indoor rowing machine. We're also cooking a lot more, which probably means healthier food overall with less restaurant food.

Keep Servers On

Traffic is currently running about 70% higher than it was two weeks ago, but I haven't seen any real jumps in search positioning. There are just a LOT more people with free time right now, and it seems like a good chunk of that free time is going towards video games and making YouTube videos.

I'm checking on the servers more often to make sure they're working properly, and I'm thinking about adding some more capacity until all this blows over.

I'd love to be able to work on new videos and content right now, but for the immediate future my goal is "not broken."

Play Video Games

I came just a hair short of platinum last season on Apex Legends, and I'm determined to get there this season. Hearthstone has a big new update coming out in April, and that remains a good diversion for me. I'm slowly grinding my way up to 1,000 wins with every class (I'm over 650 with all of them right now). My kids have been into physics/driving games lately, so I just picked up Trials Rising on the Switch. If I had more free time, I'd be sinking some more hours into the Star Ocean and Puzzle Quest remasters. One Step from Eden just launched and looks like it will scratch my deckbuilding/tactics itch nicely.

Make Whiteboard

Online whiteboards are kind of trash for my use case—a small tutoring session with one teacher and a few small kids. Things like infinite scroll and PDF highlighting tools might be useful for a business meeting, but I need something a lot simpler with some pretty strong teacher controls. I tried 5-10 different whiteboards out there and none of them work how I want them to, so I'm making my own.

If you're in a similar situation and trying to set something up for your kids, follow along on Twitter! I don't know yet whether it's going to work or whether it would be useful to anyone but me, but I'm posting regular updates there.

I expect this situation to last at least a couple more months, so hopefully I can get the whiteboard into a good place and spend a little more time working on IntroCave.

Stay safe out there!