Adventures in home working

After two weeks of only scanning and saving RSS posts, I have a whole load of browser tabs open and ready to read, so on my first day back at work it was down to the beach to do some serious catch up.

My favourite cafe is closed for staff holidays so I went to the local beach side cafe which is a couple of minutes walk away.  On my way back I met my wife and a friend heading to the same Cafe for lunch. 

I now have a whole load of “to blog posts” in my backlog for tonight   and still quite a few tabs to get through.  Luckily I still have some time to catch up over the weekend!

The first picture is from the window, and the second is the view from my left.  Both taken with my new camera!

I have had an excellent Minolta Dimage Z1 camera for a couple of years, but the 10X zoom makes it really heavy and awkward to carry so I tend not to take it with me.  In particular there’s no way to carry it in the gadget pocket of my everyday rucksack, or my bum bags or pocket.  As a result I have been after something that:

1. Uses rechargeable batteries – cheap to run
2. Has a docking station for charging and USB connectivity – easy to use and always ready
3. Has a USB mass storage interface – no drivers or other software to install
4. Used SD cards - which I have plenty of
5. Is small and light
6. Is robust enough to not need a carry case
7. Is cheap

Ebay came to the rescue again and I managed to find a Nikon Coolpix S2 for

I am back at work today after a break of a couple of weeks and for the first time this year a holiday has coincided with remission so I have actually managed to get out and enjoy myself and work on the backlog of work around the house,  briefly:

1. Hiked to the top of Coniston Old Man with my twin girls – 9 years old.  A brilliant day, very hard work, amazingly clear views from the top of the mountain
2. Hiked the North West of Windermere lake side with twins and second eldest daughter (from the ferry), a great walk by the lake North, then a hard climb to the top of the “valley” and then some wonderful views from on high as we walked back.  If anything the views were even better than from Coniston Old Man.
3. Hiked to the South West of Windermere lake side with my Mum, twins and eldest daughter, still nice – but not as good as going North
4. Hiked from my house to Fleetwood on my own, which is a good chunk of the Lancashire Coast – caught up on podcasts and met the rest of the family at Fleetwood – who then took me home!
5. Hiked from Arnside down to Silverdale and back with my wife
6. Hiked along the river at Bolton Abbey with the whole family
7. Lots of shorter walks, like to Blackpool and back along the beach with my wife
8. Repaired two rotten windows, which I had hoped only to paint!  A pretty depressing job as I hacked away a lot of window, but more rewarding as I made the replacements and fitted them and painted them
9. Caught up on gardening, in particular my main Strawberry beds
10. Dug out an old tree, the digging out was pretty easy, but chopping it up with a hand saw was a major test of will power!  Good job I’m used to sore muscles!
11. Went to the cinema and a new Blackpool show – Forbidden – excellent
12. Loads of reading, some of it great fun, some of it serious

The weather was excellent for the whole time, and whilst I did check email and respond to the more important ones, I didn’t really think too much about work, or read any of my RSS feeds!

Jing is a great example of collaboration done right, quick and easy to use, with just a couple of clicks I am able to create a screencast  and share it on my blog via screencast.com.

Here’s a sample screen cast I created with Jing.

Definately worth checking out the demo, the FAQ and the blog.  Right now its free to use, so start using it now and convince your boss that its worth paying for when its out of beta!

Just when I thought it would be impossible for me to write any more on the benefits of multiple monitors along came another twist – the debate between one big one and several small ones!

Lets be clear for the type of work I do more is better, here’s why:

• If you do a lot of assembly of documents from multiple sources and using lots of different content then multiple monitors are for you.  In my case I will be writing a report and assembling it from Visio, Excel and PowerPoint content, and drawing on content from the web and OneNote.  I need to see several of these apps at the same time so I can cross refer between them and keep context.
• If you are working on one thing, either creative or analysis oriented and its large and complex then one big monitor might be better,  maybe some very complex graphic or a mega spreadsheet.

I am very big on symmetry so for me there’s no alternative to 3 monitors.  Although maybe three with a forth above the central one would also work.  My desktop supports four so maybe that’s an option for the future. 

I actually have 4, right now, but ones my Tablet that I access via Synergy.

Anyway if you still want one large monitor then I strongly recommend this blog post on coding horror which has some links to really useful apps that help partition the screen.  This new post that drills into some quantified benefits and these two (one – two) on web worker daily that have useful comments.

And just for completeness here are my old posts on the topic!

LinkedIn reached a tipping point for me this weekend,  I got fed up of just accepting invites and decided to see if I could use it to deliver some real advantage.   This meant I had to get serious about using it:

1. Creating a proper profile with a comprehensive career history, I really like the way LinkedIn uses the career history for introductions and recommendations
2. Adding my contacts and establishing a routine for adding new contacts as I make them
3. Figuring out how to use LinkedIn to model the cross company working groups I am a member of so the members actually know about each other and can keep track of our changing roles over time
4. Making some recommendations for the people who have impressed me most throughout my career

At this point I only have about 30% of my contacts in the system, so I’m not at critical mass but already I can see the value of it, and I like the fact that I can synch it with Plaxo to keep my contact database up to date.  I’m looking forward to getting some recommendations myself and to start using the Answers functionality and making contact with some of my old colleagues.

Here’s my profile —> http://www.linkedin.com/in/steverichards

Over recent weeks I’ve been asking myself why we “hide” so much behind the firewall.  In my company for example we have recently setup or planned wiki’s, blogs, expert location systems, social tagging etc – all private.  The immediate reaction is that this is a good idea, this is confidential information, but on reflection I’m not so sure.

It seems to me that all this stuff behind the firewall is just a sub-optimal version of what’s on the Internet, lets take a few examples:

1. We have a wiki which is intended to be a knowledge base on collaboration.  Clearly this knowledge base isn’t going to compete with the information that’s already available on the web.  In fact with less than 100 users it’s not likely to get a lot of attention. If we put that same effort into an Internet accessible wiki, that’s layered on top of existing knowledge in wikipedia etc then this would get a lot more content and critique, be more accessible even for our own employees and certainly our customers and generally enhance our reputation.  Now there may be small snippets of information that are confidential, but generally this will relate only to costs and partnerships.  Most confidential information is rarely of greater competitive advantage than reputation and visibility are.
2. We have an expert location system, its sophisticated but no where near as easy to use and useful as LinkedIn would be.  If everyone was on LinkedIn we would see a lot of advantages – our customers would find it much easier to work with is, as would suppliers and partners and we would have a way for our employees to invest in building their reputations in a way that continues to be relevant if they leave, which means they would put more effort into it!  Of course it would be slightly easier for competitors to harvest information and recruiters, but it’s pretty easy for them to do that now anyway just from personal use of linkedin and blogs and of course from people they have recruited.

So my general point is that perhaps our default choice should be to make things public and to use systems that leverage the network effects of the Internet, rather than to default to private systems.  I’m sure there are challenges which ever approach we take, but it’s an interesting thought to debate.

Worklight – an enterprise RSS provider – have a really useful white paper on secure RSS, which complements and extends some of my previous posts on this topic.  Other posts on this topic can be found here.

My second hand Thinkpad X60 tablet arrived today via HireIT and eBay.  Its an ex eval model and in perfect condition even though it was less than half price.  Even better HireIt seem to give you whatever model they have available and in my case the spec was up-rated quite a bit from the model they were selling on eBay.

So that’s the good bit,  the not so bad bits were:

1. I got the Tablet and the power supply, no manuals, disks etc.  No loss really
2. They had installed their standard image onto the machine,  not too bad an image as they go, but unbelievably on a TABLET they had installed XP Pro!!

For the average user this would be a bit if a issue, but not for me as I was going to blow the image away anyway and install Vista.  This is what I did to get a completely clean Vista install:

1. First off I wanted to delete the IBM hidden system restore partition as I don’t need this backup capability.
2. To do this you need to go into the BIOS by pressing F1 during boot and pick security,  and then PreDesktop and then select disabled.  The partition will then be visible to Vista
3. Boot from the Vista DVD by pressing F12 during boot, initially go into repair operating system, and open up a command prompt
4. At the command prompt run diskpart – you will use this to delete the partition (5GB)
5. The following instructions DELETE ALL YOUR PARTITIONS, i.e destroy all data on your disk!!!
6. I don’t remember the exact DISKPART command but it goes something like this.  Type SELECT DISK 0, LIST PARTITION, SELECT PARTITION 1, DELETE PARTITION OVERRIDE.  do this for every partion on the disk. 
7. Reboot and hit F12, this time install Vista rather than repair.  You will only be presented with the option to do a customized install because you have deleted the old partitions
8. Install Vista
9. In my case at the end of the install both wireless and wired networks were working fine so I left Vista alone for an hour to download and install all the updates
10. I then installed an Anti-virus product, in my case the free and excellent AVG Free
11. The I installed the excellent Thinkvantage system update utility and installed everything except the rescue and recovery tool (this is the backup product that I didn’t want to use)
12. This downloads and installs most of the drivers, help files etc that you need, but strangely a few are missing.
13. You also need to install the Active Protection System, this is needed it you want the auto-rotate function to work
14. And you want the Shortcut menu
15. Once you have installed the shortcut menu press the key associated with it – between screen rotate and escape, and pick settings (lower left) and enable ActiveRotate
16. That’s all I’ve noticed so far

I grew up with a large orchard and I still love growing my own fruit.  I don’t have room for many trees so I have them growing in metal dustbins all the way down the drive at the side of the house. 

This month I’m picking cherries every day – I have 3 cropping trees this year, with another one that should start to crop next year!