Steve's Seaside Life

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All Posts / Living Well

My typical working day

  1. I get up at about 7:30 and have breakfast

  2. Then before 8:00 I start working,  normally I try and get some good quality work done for about 2 1/2 hours

  3. By 10:30 I am ready for a break, so at that point I print off some reading material or download it to my tablet

  4. I then go for a walk and usually end up at one of my nearby beachside cafes, where I settle down for lunch, and review whatever paperwork I have taken with me, and then wander home for about 12:00 – 12:30

  5. I then try and get another 2 1/2 hours work in until about 2:30

  6. Then I go for another walk, usually to my local health club and spend about 30 minutes swimming, probably spend 15-20 minutes reading and then head back home, usually arriving at about 4:00.

  7. I try to get another hours work done then and then have tea with my wife and four kids

  8. Depending on kids activities then I will generally get another hours work done sometime before bed.

All Posts / Chronic Illness

Why home working?

I called this blog, ‘adventures in home working’.  Why did I choose this title?  Well it sort of sums up a lot of things for me:

 

1.     I have this disease, AOSD,  and home working is more suited to people with this condition

2.     I am an IT guy, and for a while I have wanted to see how viable it is to work from home

3.     I have 4 children, and I wanted to spend more time with them, and be able to arrange my work life more flexibly

4.     I have always been a person who works better with people I know and interacts with them face to face.  I wanted to get beyond these limitations and extend my circle of friends and contacts

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SharePoint RSS and more …

Just came across this great Blog that describes how to really exploit WSS.  One of the interesting points in here is about how to reuse existing WSS functions using for example XSLT, rather than writing custom web parts.

Several useful things, but the one I liked was the web part to present lists and document libraries as RSS feeds.

http://www.asaris-matrix.com/sweber/playground/downloads/forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=6

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A good description of WinFS?

I have been looking for a good description of how Longhorn would behave in a client server environment.  The Longhorn evangelists have been posting some scenarios, but they don’t completely work for me because they are not general enough to allow me to easily extend them to my own environment. ...

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My personal productivity challenge

In my previous post In Pursuit of personal and team productivity I talked about general problems.  In this post I talk briefly about my problems.  My company:

  1. Uses Notes for email and some applications

  2. Has an extensive Intranet for functional web sites, news, standards etc

  3. Uses Plumbtree as its portal and to host communities, some are still hosted on Notes

  4. Some of the projects I am working on use MS Project Server

  5. Others use just MS Project

  6. My company uses Lotus Sametime for IM

  7. One of my project teams uses Microsoft Exchange IM

  8. External contacts use MSN IM

  9. Some of the projects use a Windows file server for project files

  10. My function uses a Notes Database as its repository for Work In progress and approval

  11. Some of the projects use WSS, for documents, risks, issues and changes

  12. Some use spreadsheets

  13. Some of the projects use an in house developed collaboration server

  14. My customers use even more systems, some MS Team Services, others use Documentum

What do I use, in addition to all of the above:

  1. I use my local disk for all my work in progress, archive, to read, to review, to watch etc

  2. The family email is accessed using Outlook express

  3. My …

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In pursuit of personal and team productivity

There is a conflict between people and the companies they work for, (well probably lots, but I’m only going to talk about one of them). The bigger the enterprise a person works for the more focussed that company is likely to be in central server centric computing, central support, consolidation, BPM, single sources of information etc. All very important for sure, but these companies will probably not even consider team productivity and almost certainly personal productivity as worthy of investment. These companies are on a crusade to save money, real money, i.e. savings off the bottom line. 1 hours labour saving per month for a big company project would be amazing….

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Too many PDAs!

I have 2 pocket PC’s, a Blackberry and a Tablet, all of them play music but I also have a Creative Nomad 20G.  How did I get in this mess.

Well it started with one of the original IPAQ’s which a few years ago I thought was a marval.  I carried it everywhere and loaded it with loads of useless software and tried to squeeze a CD’s worth of muisic onto it.  After about 3 months I hardly ever used it because the battery life was too short and the synchronisation too much of a chore.  My 11 year old daughter has it now, and after a month of enthusiasm hardly ever uses it either.

Then I got the Nomad, I copied all my CD’s onto it and hardly made a dent in its 20GB, I converted all of the Tech-ED conference DVDs into WMA files so I could listen to them in the gym and out walking.  It got used a lot for a few months, and still gets used perhaps once or twice a week.  But if I lost it tomorrow it would not have much of an impact on my life, in fact I probably wouldn’t even notice….

All Posts / Chronic Illness

Visit from the occupational therapist

I had my first visit from an occupational therapist today.  I have been referred to her to assess the type of work I do and how that can best be adjusted to make it easier for me to cope.  She arrived 2 hours late and stayed for 4 hours.  The visit itself tired me out but it was very useful.  She helped me to see my condition in terms of its affect on my work, and the affect my work has on the condition.  The process she went through was enlightening, and should be useful.  Not suprisingly she has not worked with anyone with AOSD before but she says that the symptoms and affect on work are simillar to those that people suffering from chronic fatigue go through.

She wants me to start an 8 week controlled trial, where I will work from home on well bounded tasks and keep lots of records.  For the first 4 weeks she wants me to increase from 20 hours a week to 37.5, my normal hours in gradual steps.

All in all 4 hours well spent.

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Tablet PC related Software I still use

Tablet PC related Software I still use. 

I have played around with pretty much all of the software, but not much of it has survived the several rebuilds I have done for various purposes, eg HD upgrades, beta tests etc.  This is what’s left.

So why did these survive:

Zinio survives because in my enthusiasm I went and subscribed to a couple of magazines.  My feeling is that its not quite there.  Its a bit slow, the TC1100 screen size is a bit too small, and the 1024*768 resolution a bit too low.  In addition it does not maximise correctly, if you have your task bar at the top of the screen as I do. 

Top Desk is a real find.  Its a bit of freeware, that sits in your tray and when you click it it shows you all of the shortcuts on your desktop.  if you are anything like me you have far to many applications to fit on the Start menu, so this provides much more room.  If you are ultra-tidy it also lets you hide everything from your desktop, which makes …

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I have so many gadgets!

I have so many gadgets!.  I realised as I was thinking about things to blog about that I have a lot of gadgets.  Some of them are useful and some are toys.  Often I find I am wildly enthusiastic about one of them for a few weeks, telling everyone they...