Adventures in home working » Family

I love growing my own fruit

Steve Richards — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:12:00 +0000

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!

On holiday this week

Steve Richards — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 00:27:23 +0000

I am on holiday this week and all 4 kids are doing activities (film and video, drama and sports club) so Debbie and I are able to spend from about 10:00 – 16:00 on our own just relaxing in and around our home town – St Anne’s on Sea. At home I like nothing more than a mix of long walks along the coast (east to Lytham and West to Blackpool), simple Cafe food, cycling, meditation and reading and the last few weeks the weather has been superb, with glorious sun with a warm breeze. When the kids get home it’s time for swimming and beach games – perfect.

4 days into this relaxing routine and it’s also noticeable that my arthritis pain is fading fast, a few years ago and after a weeks holiday it would be gone completely, now it never goes completely but relaxation and many hours of exercise definitely still has a very beneficial effect.

For the love of movement

Steve Richards — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 00:18:00 +0000

Kathy has yet another amazing post on her Creating Passionate Users site about the fact that animals love exercise, and she questions why we don’t. Well whilst I think its a great article with wonderful pictures of her horses if she came around to my house and saw my four girls bouncing on the trampoline she would see a lot of parallels with her horses. Some of us love exercise too, and its not just the kids round here who love the trampoline, the beach, the sand dunes, the tennis courts, the swimming pool and their bikes!

My normal workday

Steve Richards — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:55:09 +0000

As regular readers know I work from home and have a pretty structured workday, partly because of the demands of my job and partly as a coping strategy for a rare form of systemic arthritis that I suffer from. Having recently read a post titled Don’t take orders from your calendar on the Thinking Faster blog and also a whole raft of posts on attention deficit disorder in tech workers I thought it was about time to share how I structure my day to:

make sure I get plenty of exercise
make sure I find time to relax and meditate
make sure I keep up to date and contactable, without falling victim to attention deficit issues
make sure I achieve something significant each day/week, and don’t just fritter the day away in meetings and email and RSS
make sure I don’t over commit myself or get too stressed
make sure I don’t work too long

To get a good understanding of my day you need to get an overview of my week

Friday – I do a weekly review, what have I achieved, what new work has been added, how have priorities changed. I update my work tracking application OnTime to reflect all this.

Saturday and Sunday (when I get an odd minute) – I open up a group (called “to blog”) of tabs in my browser (Maxthon), each tab is a web page or document that I want to blog about, I then work through as many as I can, sometimes I will loose interest in a topic and close the tab, on Sunday night I will save all the open tabs back as a group I will have another go next week.

Sunday – Having reflected on my priorities over the weekend, I scan my project list and select 3 things I really want to achieve next week. I write these at the top of my white board, which is on the Office door, so I see it 20+ times a day.

Each evening – I scan through FeedDemon and open tabs in Maxthon for every feed that I want to read in more detail, I then save these as a group on my Tablet. I also write up on my Whiteboard (below my weeks priorities) the appointments I have the next day and the tasks I want to achieve that day.

Before I go to bed – I fill in my pain diary, this is a simple Excel spreadsheet which takes 2 minutes to fill in but records which joints or muscles have just been aching, which have hurt or have hurt so much that it has stopped me working, I also record how tired I have been, my ability to concentrate, how feverish I have been and how bad my head aches have been. I also record how hard I have worked, how many hours, how stressed and also how good I have been, diet, exercise, meditation, relaxation, meditation. Doing this gives me a graph which helps me to visualise how I am improving and where I need to work harder. It really works, over the last 4 months I have significantly reduced my symptoms through focusing on the stuff that helps and reducing the stuff that makes me worse.

First thing (8:30 – 10:00) – I check my Email, grab my Tablet and my Treo and go for a walk, like all Arthritis sufferers I get morning stiffness and more often than not a lot of pain in the mornings. I have trained myself over the years to walk through the pain, stop limping etc, after half an hour I am feeling much better. Half an hour is my half way point and I will stop at a local fitness trail by a lake and do some upper body exercises and then walk along the beach into town. During this walk I will either be on the phone or listening to podcasts. I generally listen to about 1.5 hours of podcasts a day and these are mainly technical conferences.

Breakfast (10:00 – 11:00) – I breakfast everyday at one of three beach side cafes, as I arrive I switch off the podcast and synch my email and go have a chat and order breakfast. When I come back my Tablet has started up and my Treo has synced up. I check email for new appointments, reschedules, emails I need to respond to or calls to make then I start reading. I read through the group of browser tabs that I saved from my desktop the night before, these contain web pages and documents. After I have read them I either delete them, save then for reference (using NetSnippets) or save them in another Maxthon group (for example “To Blog”). This is quiet time, I have no distractions and it lasts for about an hour. I often don’t read everything in which case the unread stuff gets carried over to the next day.

Walk home (11:00 – 11:15) – It’s a short walk home, I make any less urgent calls or continue to listen to a podcast.

Personal work time (11:30 – 13:00) – After unpacking, and doing a bit of house work, for example putting the washing in the drier) I am ready to spend 1.5 hours doing some serious work on my own. As I generally work with people in the USA or Australia I tend not to be interrupted until 13:00. Typically this work will involve the development of presentations, writing documents or doing analysis. Towards the end of this session RSI Guard (software that sits in the status bar) will kick in and tell me I need to take a break and do some stretching so I do that as I get ready for my first conference call of the day.

Conference calls (13:00 – 16:00) – During this window of 3 hours I tend to be in conference calls for 2 of them every day. These tend to be pretty complex with 4–5 participants and an accompanying web conference where we will work collaboratively, review, check on status or discuss several projects.

Lunch and Meditation (30 Mins) – Sometime between 13:00 and 15:00 I will try and find time to meditate for 20 minutes and to have a snack, usually fruit.

Family time (16:00 – 16:45) – Time for tea with the family and finishing off some household chores like putting the dry washing away

Take the kids somewhere (16:45 – 18:00) – depending on the day I normally take the kids swimming, shopping or for an evening walk to the park. We always walk, if it’s swimming I will sit in the pool side lounge and watch a video of a conference session like Microsoft’s PDC or LotusSphere or do some reviewing on my Tablet.

House work (18:00 – 18:30) – I tend to put the clothes away and listen to a Podcast while I am sorting, folding etc.

Catch up on email and scan RSS feeds (18:30 – 19:30) – I will check emails that have arrived since 16:00 and will then scan through all my RSS feeds and collect articles that I want to read tomorrow as a group in Maxthon.

Read (19:30 – 20:00) – I try to spend a bit of time relaxing before I finish work for the day and normally I read, sometimes a business or technology book, and sometimes a novel that I am working through ready for discussion at the local reading group run by the library at the end of the road.

TV Family time (20:00 – 22:00) – 5 nights a week my wife and I watch TV with our two older daughters, we enjoy the family time and because we have Tivo we can pause the programs and so have lots of discussion which greatly enhances the experience. Two nights a week the girls are out at clubs.

Reading in the bath (22:00 – 22:30) – I complete my pain diary, do a final sync of all of my computers and then I like to soak in a very hot bath and read, its good for my arthritis and helps me sleep, I get further help because I take muscle relaxants and pain killers.

The end of the holidays

Steve Richards — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:33:00 +0000

I had 10 days off over easter, and we walked every day, and had good weather most days. We didn’t travel very far afield but there are loads of great walks within 20 miles of my house. By the end of the holiday I was feeling great, a few aching muscles from over use but generally better than I have felt for 6 months. I spent my time walking, gardening, reading, cycling, cooking, cleaning and playing.

I have been back at work now for 2 days and the only change (as I work from home) is that I have been sitting down for an extra 6–7 hours a day, end result my hands, chest, ankles, knees, wrists and elbows are all pretty painful and I have had a headache for 2 days. The relationship between mobility and my arthritis could not be more striking, add in a bit of stress (none of that so far though, as its been an easy 2 days) and it’s even worse. In some ways it’s almost better not to have holidays, that way I would start to forget how great it feels not to be ill every day.

Stop smoking!

Steve Richards — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:52:00 +0000

My youngest daughters (twins) have been studying smoking, Tessa has just finished her anti-smoking poster, which I wanted to share with you:

Don’t smoke because people out there have died.

Just because of cigarettes and people suffered from lots of illnesses.

So you will get illnesses.

Children can get Asthma if smoke is around them.

So after you have read this bit of information

Please stop.

Please.

This is one of my favorite images

Steve Richards — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 03:48:49 +0000

Find what you love

Steve Richards — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 17:53:00 +0000

I am still on a journey of discovery to try and “find what I love doing”, I am fairly content in my work, find it interesting and challenging, but I don’t feel I make a difference, at home I spend most of the time with my family – which is great – but very internal focused. I would like both work and home life to change over time to be more community centred and to feel that I am giving something back to the world and that I live in a more natural and sustainable way. My relatively poor health is currently the excuse I hide behind that stops me taking the risk associated with change.

I do however continue to be on the lookout for advise in this area and I recently cam across these two articles, one by Steve Jobs – You’ve got to find what you love and the other my Dave Pollard ‘Business’ Advice for Young Adults (and Their Parents & Teachers). Check them out if you ever think about your work or worry about how you are preparing your kids to help them make good choices about their future work choices.

Role change weekend

Steve Richards — Sun, 15 May 2005 22:51:00 +0000

As I work from home I tend to make sure I do my share of the housework. My normal daily jobs include:

tidying the bedrooms
making the beds
washing, drying and putting away the clothes

Well Debbie and I have been finding our respective daily tasks a bit of a grind, so on Friday we decided that we would swap jobs every weekend. So this weekend I have been:

making all of the meals
setting the table
clearing the table, washing up, drying and putting away the pots

it’s been a great success, I have loved not having to do my jobs, and really enjoyed my new weekend jobs. By Sunday I had change the routine and made it a lot more organised and peaceful and had written up (stephie laminated for me) a crib sheet that tells me all of the kids favorite meals, vegetables, fruit, drinks etc, as with 4 kids I am always forgetting Hopefully a weeks break from them will mean I enjoy these tasks every weekend, as they say “a change is as good as a rest”.

More evidence that going paperless is a good idea!

Steve Richards — Sun, 08 May 2005 23:12:00 +0000

I have thought for a long time that going paperless was a good strategy. Now I know why, Microsoft has posted 3 great videos that demonstrate the dangers of office stationary. They really are worth watching, preferably with the family as they are very funny. Another tip, make sure you watch them through a few times watching the background characters as well for best effect!

First up, the Elastic Band next the Paper Cut and finally the Bad Pen

Visit the web site for more information

100 things about me

Steve Richards — Sat, 07 May 2005 04:00:49 +0000

I was born in Lincoln in England in 1963
I have one brother 2 1/2 years younger than me
My Grandma claimed to be a medium, she was certainly very wise, and she told very convincing stories
My Mum’s Grandad was Major of Lincoln
I grew up with tremendous freedom roaming the countryside, building sites, abandoned airfields and gravel pits and reading
My parents were amazing, I don’t ever remember being put under pressure, or ever feeling that I needed to work to gain their love and approval
I grew up in a house with a huge garden and 50 tree orchard, the source of endless play
I was a slow starter at school, I was 13 before I actually started to move up the sets, and never really found my feet academically until I was doing my first degree
I suffered badly from acne as a boy and still suffer a bit now at 41, but I learned not to let that sort of thing bother me, and learned to be happy with myself
I suffered very badly from Migraine and Hay-fever as a child and remember spending lots of days debilitated by one or the other
When I was about 4 I woke up one morning in the spring and a wasp was crawling up my bed, I could not get out of bed and still don’t remember what happened. I have a phobia of wasps to this day
When I was about 14 I had to read Shakespeare out load, I had an asthma attack from the nerves and could not read at all fluently, people laughed. I still have a fear of public speaking, although 10 weeks of speakers club helped a little
I always remember working, my childhood jobs were gardening, apple picking and selling, washing up, preparing fruit and veg for bulk freezing, running errands for old folks, pumping water from the well, window cleaning round, school librarian, school lab boy, school odd-job repair man. I was never short of money!
From a fairly young age I had an allowance for, and bought, my own clothes and food
I love home backed bread and other simple foods
I used to help my dad repair cars and we also refurbished an old army ambulance to make a camper, it was great fun and I wanted to be a mechanic
I had two childhood pets a tortoise called Micky who turned out to be a girl (she laid eggs) and a cat called Scamp who had to be put down due to injuries from a car or dog (I never found out which).
I had my finger sliced open at school by a closing door, I was accompanied to the hospital by a careers teacher who said he thought I could do better than be a mechanic, from that day I decided to be an engineer and have never tinkered with cars since
On one of our holidays in the camper the big ends went in Kendall. Dad and me tried to fix it but we only got 20 miles before it failed again. We got home by train and Mum bought a copy of Here’s Health at the station and her life started to change. Ours changed as well but to a lesser extent.
On another holiday shortly after, Dad broke his ankle rock hopping, this was the beginning of a string of bad luck with his health that partly drove Mum and Dad slowly apart, (drinking and smoking didn’t help either)
I was shy at school and still am, especially in social situations. Years later a Vice President at work said “did I realise I probably had mild Asbergers Syndrome”. I looked it up, realised it was true and have never felt bad about being shy since
I have always been very positive
I have never been religious, for three main reasons. First I can not accept something so profound based on so little evidence, I can not accept the concept of a vengeful god as described in the bible and I can not accept the concept of a god that would want to be worshipped.
I have always been content with myself and never felt the need for a God to make me whole
My Dad spent most of his spare time working in the garage, or more truthfully tinkering. My Mum was always busy in the house and garden. I promised myself I would spend all of my spare time with my wife and kids
I had plenty of friends at school, but few that I really wanted to spend time with outside of school
I got 8 O Levels (4 A and 4 B) and took 9.
I decided that I was never going to get a good mark in German so I decided to sacrifice it, and that it would be better to get ungraded because that did not appear on the certificate
At A Level we were taught the wrong Maths syllabus so I got an E, I didn’t have the patience for Tech Drawing so I got a D and I got an A in Engineering and a B in Physics. I got an apology from the school for teaching me the wrong maths, but lost my place at Loughborough. So I went to Trent Polytechnic
I never regretted for a moment going to Trent, it was a great course and I met my wife
My wife’s name is Debbie, we were on the same course at Trent – Mechanical Engineering – I really got to know her when she got glandular fever, she had to go into hospital for a week or so and I popped in to see her, I decided on the way home that we would be married. I had to win her away from her boy friend so it took a few months before we started to go out, we were married shortly after graduating
My Dad had a bad accident on his motor bike, the front of his leg was ripped off by a car that hit him. I am pretty sure it was not his fault – although we don’t talk about it. He was on hospital for a long time, had grafts etc. The leg never properly healed. Dad was never very keen on exercise after this.
I started to mentor people seriously during my time at Trent and have continued ever since
My first real job was working for Debbie’s Dad on work experience one summer
Then I worked for a GEC company called English Electric Valves, who decided to sponsor me. Debbie was already sponsored by British Aerospace
Debbie and I lived together during the 3rd and 4th years at Trent, it was a great time. We were both sponsored so we had plenty of money
My Mum, after a life at home, decided she would lease a market stall and sell whole foods. It changed her life, but my Dad didn’t change and they grew apart and separated shortly after I graduated
I graduated second in my year with a First, Debbie also got a first and came 4th. We were both pretty pleased
I got offered all of the jobs I applied for, but decided to be near Debbie so took a job at the same British Aerospace site – Brough near Hull.
After a very boring year working in Airframe Systems, I applied for an internal PHD in IT, this fell through but the IT department offered me a job and I never looked back
We had two kittens Salt and Pepper, both black and white and brother and sister
I was sponsored to do a part-time MBA in Engineering Business Management at Warwick University. I did pretty well.
Debbie and I had our first child – Stephie
We also took on two more kittens, one I found at work after her mother had been poisoned. She was a wild cat we called lucky. The other was a friend she made at the Cat Protection League – Joshy.
Three of our cats died in car accidents, lucky is still with us, and still pretty wild unless she wants feeding
I worked mainly in IT systems to support manufacturing engineering doing development and systems integration
I learned to programme in Modula 2, Fortran, Pascal, Visual Basic, DCL, Perl, Python, VB Script
I was a very early adopter of Windows NT 3.1
I moved to do IT systems in support of engineering design
I moved to do IT infrastructure architecture
We had our second daughter – Jenny
I decided there was no future in Brough so we moved directly across country to Warton
The happiest I have ever been was in a small flat in Lytham St Annes, we put most of our stuff in store and lived a simple uncluttered life by the sea.
I have lived in 14 different homes so far
I have only ever had one job that existed before I took it, my first. I have had 10 jobs since and every one I have either invented or has been invented for me
I moved to do IT solution design for major programmes
I have Adult Onset Stills disease, It took 4 more years to get it diagnosed.
I have Twins Tessa and Anna
That’s 4 girls if you don’t count the cat
Debbie, decided to re-join a church, just around the corner, after years away. It has made a great difference to her life, and continues to be very rewarding from both a spiritual and community perspective
I once wasted a lot of money buying a posh car, and then deciding a year later to buy a practical one. The practical car kept cutting out on me and failing to start again for an hour or so, after a year they gave me a new one. I don’t bother about cars these days
My life has been changed by Stills Disease, it means I have to work from home and only on specific types of work but it has changed my life for the better in many ways
I live with daily pain
I like gadgets, especially IT gadgets
I like to make my own rules, that comply with the principles that underly the applicable rule book. I don’t feel compelled to follow “stupid rules”
I rarely give in, I have spent too much time debugging thorny problems, that always have a solution in the end
I know that most problems are probably my problems, I have spent too much time debugging my own code!
I don’t like it when things don’t work properly
I dislike conflict and competition that is not friendly
I have strongly held opinions
I like to work in small teams
I like to mentor/develop people
I read a lot, all sorts of books, even more variety since I decided to join a reading group at the Library
I like to go to the cinema and theatre
I love to walk and do so most days
I love to swim and do so several times a week
I love to cycle and do so once or twice a week, but wish I could do it more often
After 12 years Debbie and me finally found a reliable baby sitter and now manage to go out once a week
I like to build things
I am a perfectionist at work and a “good enough” bodger at home
My favorite book is The Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
I am pretty emotional, for example I often cry – a little – when watching a good film
I love open spaces, particularly the beach
I am very lucky to live by the sea
I like to eat out, I have my breakfast at a beach side Cafe most days, and the kids come too weekends and holidays
I do all of the washing at home
I like things to be neat and tidy. I find it difficult to relax in a mess
I do not like large groups
I don’t drink or smoke. I never liked the taste and did not feel peer pressure very strongly
I am very picky with my food, I like what I like, and thats simple fare. That said I enjoy my food very much
I don’t like hot drinks
I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle
I love a sunny day
I have sun sensitive skin as a result of a reaction of the medication Roacutane, so I have to wear sun screen most days
My favorite place is Filey in North Yorkshire, a sleepy fishing village
Although I am not a Christian I admire the teachings of Christ
I meditate most days
I have been very poor and am not afraid of it
I value my time
I am happy with my life

IT Conversations – Games in education

Steve Richards — Fri, 06 May 2005 23:58:48 +0000

This is my first mini review of a talk from IT conversations, it is an interview by Moira Gunn with Dr. Henry Jenkins and explains how he thinks video games will revolutionise education. Dr. Jenkins is the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-editor of Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Media in Transition). The talk is truly fascinating, and pretty scary when you think about the dramatic affects it will have on the capability and outlook that the kids of the future. Surprisingly this talk and others point out that the gamer generation will have different attitudes to work and will need to be managed differently, this talk by John Beck, a Senior Research Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center of the Digital Future, is on that topic.

I particularly liked the description of the teacher, as more of a coach and leader, and the emphasis on experience as a tool for learning. In the games that bring history to life it is interesting how it will be possible to provide a real insight into what life was actually like for those experiencing key events from different perspectives, it will no longer to a sequential textbook description. He also talks about a science game where students try and master magnetic fields by learning to navigate through them, the teacher then explains the theory and the kids can try again this time with an evolved understanding of the underlying theory. He mentions that in the classroom of the future kids will use textbooks as “cheat sheets” that help them play the game better. This is much more true to life in the real world which is of course all about doing things and researching to do things better.

The best part of the talk was where Henry talked about about the process of producing a game. The producer asks the teacher “why are we teaching this – what is its purpose” ie what is the relevance of the knowledge learned to some real activity. You would hope that the teachers had a good answer but invariably I suspect the answer is “it’s important”. As someone who likes to learn by experience and apply what I have learned the whole talk was music to my ears.

That said I am not a gamer! why? because I am worried that I will get drawn into it and never get any work done or spend time with my family etc, I have an addictive personality and games certainly sound addictive!

If you want more, then try reading this interview on Education and Violence, these books, and this wide ranging interview.

Bank holiday weekend

Steve Richards — Mon, 02 May 2005 20:03:00 +0000

It’s been a few months since I have been well enough to taking the kids out playing on the beach, so this bank holiday weekend has been pretty special. We have played ball games every day on our local beach and today we went into Blackpool early (never go into Blackpool late on a bank holiday unless you like the “party atmosphere” – ie drunken louts!). Anyway early on a sunny day is great fun. The girls spent an hour in the amusements and we had a good root round the shops and good fun on the beach.

Market day by the sea

Steve Richards — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 16:23:00 +0000

I have mentioned before that I live in St Annes on the Sea, a small town that enjoys a micro-climate. Well it was forecast snow today, but for us it has been a lovely sunny day, which is lucky because it’s market day and what a market it was! Today we had a speciality continental market, very expensive but a visual delight!

St Annes on the Sea celebrates

Steve Richards — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 17:23:00 +0000

Today in our little town we were celebrating the fact that after much campaigning we now have our own town council which gives us a more effective voice at the Borough Council, celebrations were mainly of a musical nature, and this picture is of one of the local bands. The town was buzzing, helped by the fact that its was a gloriously sunny day. We walked home along the beach playing football, which regular readers will know means that physically I am on pretty good form today.

As a small town we face many challenges and difficult decisions concerning for example striking a balance between development, especially Tourist development, and maintaining the spirit of “The garden by the sea”, which was how the town was known in Victorian times.

In recent years we have seen a lot of money spent on appropriate development, which has successful regenerated the town centre and this year we are hoping to see further investment in our promenade gardens and in our town centre park. This picture is of my mum and the kids in one of the beach side cafes.