Meeting with people, these days

Carol wrote about several ways to hold virtual meetings last week. If you use an iPhone, and your friends and relatives do too, then Facetime couldn't be easier. It's not for holding a meeting really, but I love doing Facetime with my family and I have to say, we've been staying in contact more and I get to see them all. So, silver lining of sorts.

The AVFD just held a special Coronavirus meeting with the department, and we encouraged everyone to use Google's Hangouts. I'm pretty new to this, so it was interesting to setup, test, and use. It went pretty well, and about a third of the department used it. We need to get better at that, and we will, but for a start, I was pleased. Hangouts says it allows up to 25 people to get into the meeting, which was perfect for us. Recording the meeting was not an option that I could find, except for the paid version.

It turns out that one of our members has a paid subscription to Zoom. We tried it out between ourselves and it worked great. Her version can record, not sure if it's because it's a paid version, but we'll likely switch to it for that feature. Otherwise, it seemed similar in functionality. 

This might be the time to try out one of these, or any of the others out there. You can do some business, or you can have a virtual family reunion, or at least a get together. Visit friends, family, neighbors, but please, stay home and stay safe. Just for now. Just until this passes, as it eventually will.