It's Yule in Shetland today, old Christmas. Our tree is still up. Traditionally (if you go for 12 days of Christmas doctrine), the tree goes up on December 24th and comes down on January 6th. It's also often when school started when I was a kid so there's that. My Da used to use the excuse of putting up the Christmas tree as a good way of keeping out of my mothers hair. Never underestimate the hours of fun and distraction you can give kid's with a Christmas tree.
In our home, our tradition is to go to our small wood and find one of the baby pines that is in a place we don't want it and bring it back. It may not be a uniform Christmas Tree that you can buy, but it's ours. The baubles and decorations on it are cheap as well. In our bit France, outdoor Christmas tree's are simply decorated as well. Often you see decorations of Santa climbling into a window. C'est la France, C'est Noel!
We got a catchup call with a friend from Australia and updated him on what we are trying to do with Librecast. I need to catch up on alot of work and see what the rest of the community has been up to and catch up with our contact at the project that is funding us at the moment.
With COVID unlikely to be clear by the end of this year, I suspect that the nature of work will continue to change. People won't want to go back to work. Perhaps more people will move to the country. Who knows? We know that Europe has already been spending lots of money on infrastructure with Horizon 2020. Now with the next Generation projects there will be potential for even more innovation.
Already the physical infrastructure (roads, rail, internet) is being improved across the continent. However as more people stay at home and use online resources this is going to overload our current internet infrastructure. Soon all of the patches we put in as work-arounds will not cope. It's why funds like NGI Pointer exist. We know we need a new internet. Multicast has the potential for this.
Our friend in Australia can also help, as a few New Zealand individuals are very interested in ways for disaster relief technology can be made more efficient to get kids back to school with remote learning. I suspect there's been alot of work with that already this year with the lockdown in New Zealand. GO JACINDA! There is the potential for Australia and Europe to work together on this. The EU and the US already are starting to with schemes like NGI Atlantic. But global problems need people from all over the world working on this. I suspect that China is making huge inroads with Multicast over the mobile network as it helps to improve infrastructure in Africa. The Romans knew that to foster trade and power you needed 2 things. Peace and infrastructure to foster commerce. The silk road was an example also. The modern silk road is being built. It's not just physical it's digital, the current physical infrastructure cannot cope with what's coming. Do we want to help to build it or merely use it?