The Art Of WFH

Yet another day working from home (or WFH, as it shall be referred to from now on) which takes the total days for this week to three. A new record for me. Must confess to still not being as effective as I would like to be. I have to improve this if I want to continue with the WFH routine. Having to work on the family dining table is not ideal and there are many, many distractions throughout the domestic day to contend with.

Yesterday I popped into the office for some traditional desk action. The highlight being confirmation of the tech specialist conference in Karlsruhe. Hotels and flights now booked, this trip is on! Looking forward to a bit of travelling, something I haven't done for a long time.

Giving Githead A Miss

A second day working at home. My neck was stiff this morning (and still is now) so I gave the commute a miss. I was planning on going to see Githead tonight at The Garage in London. But laziness got the better of me. I don't expect that the set has changed much since the QEH gig so I'm probably not missing much. Would have been good to catch up with the IC massive but it's a long way to drive on a wet evening just for that.

Now THAT'S What I Call A Salad Sandwich!

Sometimes 'Working From Home' has it's advantages you know. Had quite a productive session this morning and stopped to make this beast of a sarnie. Probably my favourite ever meal, the salad sandwich. Oh well, blog post done, break over, back to the Functional Spec.

Drink At Heights

My new desktop background, showing off a composite I assembled this morning from our visit to the Heights Of Abraham last weekend.

Took Dylan and Sofia to Dions party today and left Harriet playing with Aksa. Everyone had a great time. Jacq and I planned to get lunch at the California Pizza Factory in Harborne, but on arrival we were disappointed to find that it's closed down. Some new thing in it's place. End of an era for us.

Dylan has discovered the telephone. Spent ages on the phone this afternoon to his mates Sumeet and Arron. It was so funny listening to him chatting away.

A Nice Saturday

A nice Saturday today with swimming lessons this morning then the afternoon spent at the Belbroughton Scarecrow Weekend. Lizzie, Steve and Theresa were there too. Weather was nice. All in all it was very nice just wandering around the place.

Worked from home again yesterday. Quite a productive few hours. Getting back into the discipline of it all.

Quite a good week just gone. As Phil mentions in his blog, there's a Technical Consultants Conference in Karlsruhe at the end of November and we've been approved to attend. If that comes off it should be excellent.

Tags

Tags are great! It is such a cool way to organise information now that I've finally got the hang of using it. My first experience was with Flickr, and like most things I mused too much over what words to use. But lately I've loosened up a bit through tagging my bookmarks in My Web and I've found that the more tags you use, the better resource of info you have at the end. Obvious really, but it takes me time.

Tags are being used more and more by different sites, there's even a name for it, Folksonomy. Not very catchy. There was an article in The Guardian about it recently.

Would you like to see my tag cloud? You may have to sign in to see this, not sure.

Revolution Controller

Nintendo do it again! Always prepared to think that bit wider. The new controller design is a classic example. Like many, I first saw it and thought Nintendo had lost the plot. But now I'm convinced that it's going to be awesome. The thought of using it as a sword / lightsaber will be so much fun. Check out an article about it here.

Cold In The Shade

Working at home today at the end of an ok sort of week. I'm plodding through my current tasks as best I can. Jacq not feeling too good so I left her in bed and took the kids down to school this morning. A cloudless blue sky. Bright sunshine, but cold in the shade. It's starting to feel a bit like autumn. Soon the back garden will be full of leaves.

Chugged away at my documents all morning while the home PC was busy hoovering up on Soulseek. Quite a haul. More than I've had for a long time. Listened to a few tracks from the forthcoming Boards Of Canada CD. That's one I need to buy for real.

Puters Gone Crazy!

Have had a whole heap of problems trying to keep my puters online recently which has had me suspecting router problems. Tracked the problem down to a DNS failure which could be bypassed by manually setting the addresses in the TCP properties. Finally tonight I found out thanks to a forum post that it's iTunes 5 that has caused the mayhem! Apparently some bundled service called Bonjour is causing DNS conflicts. I'm glad that there is an explanation for the craziness and hope Apple sorts it soon.

In other news, there isn't much news. Yesterday was an in-the-house sort of day and today was a quite good office day. Picked up The Guardian and I love the new size, but still getting used to the logo. Got a 19" TFT monitor for my desk today which works lovely in dual desktop mode with my laptop. I was enjoying just dragging windows from one side to the other. Easily pleased me. Not that the wife would agree.

One More Go

Worked from home yesterday for the first time in ages. Good to be not driving to Coventry. Even better to see the kids in their new uniforms going into school.

Inbetween doing work stuff, Jacq and I shopped for clothes for Harriets trip next month. It was much easier picking up the clothes without dragging the kids around the shops. Thankfully it all fitted at treat when tried on at home.

This morning the kids had swimming then we went over to Lizzies for the afternoon. She did a curry which was very nice. Steve and I discussed the imminent design changes to The Guardian which I was completely unaware of. The merits of the new masthead typeface were discussed and we both agreed that we didn't like it much but that it has probably been considered long and hard by others way more qualified than us.

We took Super Monkey Ball Deluxe over to play which I picked up yesterday for a good price (20) at Game. A top game it is, with great little mini-games inside. The footie game is a fave of mine. The main game itself is the kind of things that provokes screams of pain upon failure, but always results in the urge for 'one more go'.

Up Early

The hum of a police helicopter over the house woke me at 4:30AM from a sleep that wasn't very restful to begin with. Too hot and mad dreams about work stuff meant I had to go downstairs for a drink. The PC was running so I checked that my Soulseek downloads had completed and started this post. I'm thinking now that I might as well go into work early and get some more hours in.

Back To School (Learning Stuff)

Kids back at school today. Jacq says they both have nice teachers. Harriet is in year 5 now. So next year is her last before senior school. Gosh. Time is marching on. Dyl got a sword from the local post office as a treat on the way home. A splendid samurai type blade that we played with over at Jims tonight.

Got Laika best of CD 'Lost In Space' in the post today. Top notch bargain at 3.99 off eBay. What a top quality band Laika are. Yet totally ignored it seems. Pleased to see in the liner notes much respect for Wire.

Mike couldn't make the sesh tonight so I had another hour with Ableton. Still getting familiar with the program and trying to establish a workflow. Not sure if I'm doing stuff correctly at the moment but it's fun and I'm liking my current results so that's good enough. Need to do much more though. These current things are just the necessary initial experiments.

MUST just mention this article spotted over at Lifehacker. Absoultely spot on stuff. REALLY connecting with this. Read it here, 11 Tips to surviving a day job with your creativity intact.

New Sofas

Had my first look at a PSP this morning in a Game store. Have to concede it's quite a sexy beast but not sure that I really want one. Played with Wipeout Pure and the graphics were stunning but it seemed a bit sluggish to me. I like the fact that it can browse t'web but if that's something I really need then I'd get better functionality from a PDA.

This afternoon we ordered a couple of new sofas. Our old ones are too big. Smaller sofas will give us some flexibility in organising and decorating the living space. Included two stools in the order for some feet-up time when kicking back in front of the telly.

Sorted!

Harriet passed her Level 7 swimming test this morning with some superb technique. I'm so proud of her. Dylan did well but still needs to concentrate more. He's still just in there ducking his head under water when Keith is trying to talk to him. He's always having fun. We went swimming yesterday afternoon and he spent the whole time underwater.

In the afternoon I spent some time with my central heating system trying to understand what is going on with it. Having changed the diverter valve recently I've been focussed on the fact that the independent control of HW and CH I expected is not available. After much digging around with my meter I started rechecking the wiring around the programmable controller and stone me if I didn't find that the damn thing was wired up wrong from the start! I was well chuffed by this discovery and after changing the connections I had full control of HW and CH. Sorted!

Tonight Jacq and I watched Manhattan. An absolute classic. A wonderful movie. Worthy of a copy.