Adventures in home working

I am currently changing my approach to spending money, in the most obvious, (in hindsight) way.

First I did an audit of how I spend my time, then I looked at how much I could improve my level of enjoyment or productivity by investing money in support of each activity.  I also looked for new activities that I could add to my life if I spent some money.

I ended up with a fairly simple list in order of Return On Investment.   Without going into all of the details here are a few of the outcomes:

- I have sold a whole load of old gadgets on eBay, because I only used them for a couple of hours a month

- I reaffirmed my decision not to spend any money on cars for a long time,  my current car get used for about an hour a week, although my wife uses her’s more, so we won’t be investing in a second car when hers gives up in a few years time.

- I invested in some great walking gear and swimming gear because that’s an activity I do every day and I want to maximise my enjoyment and minimise the opportunity for excuses

- I cancelled a load of magazine subscriptions, because I can read the same stuff on my Tablet

- I felt happy at all the personal money I invested in my work computing environment, because I use it for 4-6 hours a day and this provides by far the greatest ROI.

- I am considering upgrading my TC1000 to a TC1100 off eBay because I use it for about 1.5 hours a day which aside from TV is probably my second most important activity, that can be improved.  (now that I have GPRS)

- Next years bonus is going on upgrading the TV, because we spend about 2 hours a day watching TV

- Debbie and I go out a lot more on our own, because time alone is very precious when you have 4 kids!

- We give more to charity because the return on charity investment is hundreds of times greater than the ROI we get investing in ourselves!

Tarantella has always lagged behind Citrix, but with the advent of “Secure Global Desktop”, reviewed here, and at $60/concurrent user it offers incredible value for money and near key feature parity, especially for enterprises with a very low concurrent to potential user ratio.

Its great tgo see that even in a application space dominated by the big boys MS, Google, yahoo etc there is room for innovation, check out Beagle on Linux http://nat.org/demos/, great UI, Command Line, API etc.  Of course being a die hard X1 user it won’t tempt me, especially now that they have confirmed Lotus Notes support is on the way!

By the way make sure you actually look at the demo’s.  its amazing how much more powerful they are than screenshots!

After The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons Dan breaks away from the religious theme and writes a traditional thriller.  Its got good pace, lots of mystery and conspiracy and some interesting science.  Like all of Dan’s books he opens them by stating that all of the technologies he describes all exist, which gives the books that extra bit of interest. 

I liked this book.  In some ways it was better written than the previous two which made up for the fact that the subject matter was not quite as facinating.  Not a book you will remember for long, but if you want a good book for a long plane journey, train ride etc it’s ideal.

Dan has a web site where you can find more details

I wrote a short article yesterday about how my SwimMP3 player has transformed the way I swim.  In this article I will provide a better review of the device itself.

First off it looks quite strange, you get lots of looks whilst swimming.  If you like to chat to people then it’s a good ice breaker!

It has 128MB of memory, which is reasonable for music, if you set it to random then most people won’t get bored even if they swim every day.  If like me you listen to talk shows, conferences etc then 128MB is more than enough, in fact the way I use it I tend to load it up with just 2 * 30 minute MP3 files, less than 30MB, why 2, just in case I don’t fancy the the content of the first one and need an alternative.  Each day I just delete the talks I have listened to and download another.

My main source of talks right now is IT Conversations

I find that lots of the things I want to listen to are too long for my swims, so I split them into 20-30 minute sessions depending on how long I want to swim that day.  I use Cool MP3 Splitter for this.

With a couple of clicks, and in a couple of seconds, you go from:

Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity.mp3

to:

Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity-001.mp3
Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity-002.mp3
Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity-003.mp3
Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity-004.mp3

So how does this thing work.  Well you wear it just like a pair of goggles, it comes with goggles, but you can fit it to your own.  The MP3 player itself is at the back of your head and its easy to reach and locate the controls.  Two pads rest on your cheek bones and the vibrations reach your ear through the vibration in the cheek bones.  The quality is OK, not fantastic.  Even with ear plugs you can still hear the splashing of the water as you swim, especially with front crawl or butterfly. But set of max volume I find I can follow 95% of a well recorded talk and music of course especially rock, is no problem.  I have found that if the speaker is quiet, or the recording is not very clear then its a bit of a struggle to make out very word, (and there is no way to got back if you miss a bit).  Another quirk is that the volume is higher when your head is under water, so if you are doing breaststroke you need to get used to the fact that with each stroke there is a slight volume variation as your head rises and falls.

The MP3 player functions themselves are VERY basic. On, off, pause, random, next track, previous track.  If you listen to music thats not too bad but if you listen to a 30 minute talk, then basically you can start it and stop it but that’s it.  You also need to take care with pause – which is achieved by pressing next and previous track buttons together – because a few times I have failed to pause and instead done a next/previous.  This means you have to listen to say 15 minutes of talk all over again as their is no fast forward!

The battery life is claimed to be 4 hours and it charges through the USB connection, not many people will find this a limitation!  There is some PC software with the player, Music Match, but I have not tried it yet (and don’t expect to).  The player just appears as a Drive in explorer and I drag and drop files to it.  The USB cable is yet another unique type to add to my collection – sigh!

It only supports MP3 format, which is a bit of a pain if you have all of your music in WMA as I do, but there are plenty of batch converters around and with Windows Media Player 10 you can switch the default to MP3.  Note if you use Windows 2003 Server like me you have to wait for SP1 to get Windows Media Player v10!

There is no display on the device, so you have to find the track you want using next and previous, and no concept of playlists etc.  For music I device my mood then just download a folder of songs for the day and set to random.  For talks as I said before I just download 2 maybe three so next and previous navigation is no problem.

Although the manufacturers claim ear plugs are optional, I don’t agree, unless you have your own silent pool and swim breast stroke only then its unlikely you will be happy with the level of background noise.  I tried the molded plugs that were supplied with the player first, they fitted really snugly, but I found they leaked slightly but suppressed the sound well.  Then I tried foam plugs and these were leak-proof and suppressed the sound just as well so I use these now.  One set lasts about 20 swims if you dry them off on your towel each time and leave them for a couple of days to dry.  Just a tip – buy them off the Internet in bulk, not two a a time from the Chemist, they are about 50 times cheaper!

Overall summary – very expensive – but in my case it has resulted in me swimming longer, more regularly and being more productive.  I think it payed back in about a month!

I have recently restarted swimming.  It’s a great way to keep fit and it really helps ease my aching muscles and joints, but it’s really boring!  I recently found the solution though.  I purchased a waterproof MP3 player, that looks like this:

and it works by bone conduction of sound. When the device is placed on any bones of the skull (i.e. the cheek bones or the mastoid tip) it leads to vibration of the fluid in the inner ear. Thus I can enjoy clarity of sound with the SwiMP3 device that was never before possible.  Jon mentions it in his blog as well.

At first I thought I would use it mainly for music, but then I discovered the IT Conversations web site, which is chock full of really interesting downloadable talks, many of which are so relevant to my job that I can make a valid claim to be doing research while I am swimming!

I found a slight glitch in that there is no way to bookmark the point you get upto in a talk and restart at that point the next day, so for longer mp3’s I have had to split them into 20 – 30 minute segments, and after trying quite a few splitters I finally chose Cool MP3 Splitter mainly because it’s the only one that worked without admin priv on Windows 2003 Server, and it was really simple and cheap and fast.

All in all a great contribution to work life balance, and a great talking point as well!!  Oh one final tip, I find foam ear plugs much better than the fancy molded versions that are supplied and if you buy them off the web in bulk they are really cheap, great of your wife snores as well!

After a good swim,  I often sit by the pool (there’s a great chill out area) watching the kids play while I continue working on my Tablet PC, which is great at night when they put the lights down (too dark to read otherwise) and of course I can continue listening to talks on the tablet as well while I read cached web pages or do document reviews!

1. Establish a healthier way of life (now that I seem to be “fairly” stable and know which activities help keep me that way)

ü      Cycle or walk daily

ü      Swim daily

ü      Take plenty of short breaks

ü      Don’t eat sweets or dairy products

ü      Reduce the amount I eat at night

ü      Drink more water

ü      Learn to cope with pain and frustration (cognitive therapy or meditation)

ü      Make it possible to work in as many enjoyable places as possible

ü      Continue to improve on the limited success in not biting my fingers and lips!

ü      Get my weight down to 11 Stone

ü      Use my blog as an outlet for my interests (mainly those not funded by my company or shared by my family)

2. Eat out once a week and take Debbie out at least once a week (Friday and Wednesday)

ü      Wednesday is evening meal, Cinema or Theatre and maybe in the summer just walking/cycling

ü      Friday is a walk and lunch or breakfast together

3. Establish my new role at work

ü      Final edit of what I think the conclusions are and my requirements

ü      Have a meeting to agree them

ü      Agree my work plan and key relationships

ü      Prepare my development plan

ü      Decide which vendors to establish relationships with

ü      Write a letter to suppliers to use to ask or access to on-line materials and virtual conference attendance

4. Learn a modern programming language (it’s too big a gap in my understanding of the fundamentals of modern computing)

ü      Choose object oriented language with excellent support for manipulating XML and a reasonable GUI (Python or Visual Basic.NET)

ü      Learn Object Orientation Principles

ü      Properly understand XML, XPath, XQuery, Web Services etc

5. Improve how I cope with my mild Asperger’s Syndrome

ü      Learn the names of people I meet regularly, cafes, health club, restaurants, work etc

ü      Use peoples names and try and make small talk

ü      Cold call people for a chat as well as using IM

ü      Use work meeting opportunities to have social meetings as well

ü      Keep attending Library reading group

ü      Keep momentum behind “old friends monthly lunches”

ü      Present some “Lunch and Learn” sessions at work

6. Increase the variety in the kids lives

ü      Try and plan an activity each week either one night, or Saturday/Sunday afternoons, in addition to their wide array of regular activities

ü      Get their friends involved or get them more involved with their friends

ü      Make sure we take a good range of holidays

7. Improve how I present written work and presentations

ü      Improve my PowerPoint skills

ü      Learn to write more clearly and with greater brevity

ü      Develop a Documentation/PowerPoint style that allows people to tunnel into detail only when they need it

ü      Improve my grammar

8. Read more widely

ü      Business Strategy

ü      Innovation

ü      Solutions Architecture

ü      Sustainable Living

ü      Personal Knowledge Management

ü      Business Process Management

ü      Political Autobiographies

ü      Reading Group books

9. Take lots of short breaks

ü      London (train ticket voucher!)

ü      Scotland

ü      Chester

ü      Lake District

ü      Filey

ü      Paris

10. Refine my home lab and personal productivity

ü      Learn to touch type

ü      Learn to use voice dictation software

ü      Refine my backup procedures – combination of Robocopy and Drive Image to USB drive