Busy Day One for President Biden

President Biden is not bidin' his time. Immediately after yesterday's inauguration ceremony he went to work in the White House, signing a slew of executive orders.

Image from Newsweek

Among the orders President Biden signed on Day One— not even his first full day in office yet— are:

• Stopping construction of the border wall on the US-Mexico border
• Requiring mask wearing on all federal property (offices, courthouses, national parks, etc.) and encouraging states and localities to do the same
• Rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change

...and a whole raft of others. See, for example, this Newsweek article (updated 21 Jan 2021).

After a busy Day One, President Biden is not jetting off to his golf course to relax or hiding in his residence watching opinion shows on Fox and tweeting their phony conspiracy theories. Day Two is more work for Biden. A lot more of it. As he and his team dig deeper into establishing a better Covid-19 plan, news coming out is that they're finding there isn't even a plan today. Twelve months Trump has known about Covid... 6 months he's been telling us a vaccine is right around the corner... over a month since vaccines have actually come out... all while the US death toll climbed past 400,000... and Trump and his administration did basically nothing to get ready for it.

Zoom In, Zoom Out. Again.

My company is ditching Zoom, the popular web conferencing tool that has become virtually synonymous with distance communication since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic. We standardized on Zoom in 2019 after an internal shoot-out between it and Citrix GoToMeeting, which we'd been using for a few years prior. I liked G2M better but I was outvoted. In April last year we unplugged Zoom when major security flaws were exposed. Then we returned to Zoom after the company acted suitably chastened. Now we're leaving Zoom... again.

This time our departure from Zoom is strictly financial. We've been Google Suite customers for many years. Google Meet is part of G-Suite, and we've been using it alongside Zoom for some of our meetings. Meet is not as richly featured as Zoom, though; nor does it scale as well. But apparently it has more features when you license a higher tier of G-Suite. Until now my company had avoided the more expensive tier as the added features didn't seem worth the price, but last month we got a year-end deal that made it attractive. So now we're unplugging Zoom and switching everything over to Meet. I'll see soon how much better than before it really is. And probably, in 11 months, I'll have to switch back to Zoom when our bargain-price subscription ends.