Students to watch
Los Alamos trio, now enrolled at Arizona State University, launch timepiece company
We have had some good news: New contracts are showing up, and one of the businesses is to receive an award for entrepreneurship from the New Mexico Small Business Administration.
Sen. Martin Heinrich was due to visit next week, but the Senate is not being allowed to recess until the new COVID-19 aid bill is passed, so the visit had to be postponed. However, the lab is super tidy now, and we now have signs up.
We would have shown him what we are doing in virtual reality at SciVista, showing what we are building at Compact Fusion Systems in VR and the layout of the experiment we are building next door as it is. Perhaps we’ll still get the opportunity.
It’s exciting to see our team continue to grow and pull together during these difficult times. We had a “leaving party” for one employee who went back to his hometown in California, and we are in discussion about how to make that work for him and us.
Another key team member is moving to Vienna, but this is presenting an opportunity for us to set up a new base and be closer to EU customers.
Despite the chop, we are finding great people to work with through Santa Fe Community College’s PILAS internship program, and continue to find support through the Santa Fe Business Incubator.
At home, the elephant in the living room is the start of the school year, which is upon us. Distance learning is happening for the foreseeable future.
We are impressed with the teachers and local authorities adapting to the situation, and their proposal to continue to adapt, but my goodness, how do we do this? Really? I’m working 12-hour days, and Mrs. W is already frazzled from the summer.
With both kids doing full school days at home, my wife and I will get back into the tag-teaming and getting up super early to get a head start on things. Proper prior planning, they say, prevents particularly poor performance.
But what is missing for us all is a social life. There is a healthy daily family rhythm, but we are not getting to see anyone, ever!
Mrs. W watched our kids find friends to play with online. She’s thinking she might need to do the same.
Perhaps there is in fact a new social frontier for us to explore online. Our data visualization company has developed a collaborative platform for virtual reality — you can meet and greet others in VR, much like you might in a Zoom call but better because the environments are fully immersive, and for a while you feel transported somewhere else.
I recently tried out my new Quest headset and found a meditation app that put me on a desert island with a beach with gently lapping waves, and there was some escape to be found, a bit of relief from being in my office, being at home or being in my home office.
Perhaps I can get Mrs. W a headset, too, and we can go on a virtual date someplace next to water, perhaps meet some of our friends there (employees afar, too). Perhaps that’s another new (virtual) reality of this odd period in history thanks to COVID-19.