Rework

• Change The Way You Work Forever
• Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
• Business

I listened to The Conversation over the weekend and Dan, Garrett Dimon and Jane Quigley were talking about running your own business and working from home.

I can’t think of any other profession where working from home would be possible or practical but if you’re a software developer then it really is a no brainer. You’re someone who just needs a laptop, an internet connection of some kind and a phone. In fact if it could be done over a paid Skype connection then you don’t even need a phone for calls.

With my previous job I don’t think that working remotely would have been possible. I was a software developer but most of my time was spent supporting PC users, running batches of reports, distributing print-outs and taking phone calls. The software development side of the job became smaller and smaller over time which ultimately lead to me leaving the company. I did work a few odd hours over the weekend, dialled (yes, dialled) into the main machine using a DEC VT210 dumb terminal and a 14,400 baud modem. I disliked it so much that the terminal was on a table in the loft and I had to drop down a telephone cable to plug it in. But I was paid overtime so that was a good thing.

Nowadays working from home is the norm. I've been doing this for the last 3 or 4 years. This was more or less out of necessity as the company I work for moved the office further away. What was a pleasant half hour drive would have become a 2 train 2 hour trek. I've never even tried to drive to the office, I just presume that it would take a similar time, but with the added hassle of parking.

I had worked the odd day from home before the company moved so I did have some idea of what it was going to be like. We already had company cell phones, we had laptops, so logistically we were set. But it was just a shock not seeing anyone across the desk that you could just chat to. As time went on I just became used to it. It must be harder if you are just a one person company, at least I can Skype or phone my colleagues, but if you are on your own that’s it. You only have immediate family or friends to talk to.

The location of my desk in the last office that I worked was in the centre of the room, immediately in front of the only working door. So anyone coming in or going out disturbed me, my desk became a dumping ground for anything coming into the office, I heard practically every conversation that anyone had. But thankfully, once the blinds were put up, at least the sun didn’t reflect on my screen. At home things couldn’t be more different. I have the minimum amount of equipment, my desk is clear and I only have Skype IMs, emails and phone calls to disrupt my concentration. All of those can be turned off or muted, something which I need to do more often.

From seeing people every day to see nobody wasn’t really such a culture shock. When I'm working I talk to my colleague at least once a day just to touch base, gripe about management and on occasion talk about work. Weekends were mostly spent in front of my iMac at my desk so during the week I just sit on the other side. Having a permanent place to put your work stuff is important even if, like me, you pack it all up after work on Friday so you don’t have to see it when you aren’t working.

Getting out is important. I think my personal best is about 4 days without leaving the building and without seeing anyone. After that amount of time just walking seems strange. Seeing the world from ground level instead of looking down on it from a second floor flat gives everything a strange new perspective. But oddly I don’t miss seeing real people, as was talked about in the show. I wouldn’t go to a coffee shop and try and work for an hour. The phone would keep ringing which I think would just annoy me more than anyone else in earshot.

It doesn’t suit everyone I guess. Trying to work from a different location is difficult for me now. I'm used to having everything set-up the way I like it.

Das Keyboard

Boy, this was a long time coming. I'm sure it seemed longer because I was still stuck with a crappy Microsoft keyboard that I'd been using for work. It didn’t help that I ordered it just before they revamped it. I'm not sure what they changed about it, maybe the blue LED’s, possibly the powered USB ports, I don’t know. Then they had a minor problem with some units after they were shipped, which delayed my delivery even further. From the end of September 2009 to the middle of January 2010, but was it worth it?

The Microsoft keyboard was one that kind of curved. It wasn’t as if it was split, like some of them are, just bent enough to make it annoying when you switch from a it to a straight keyboard. It must have only cost about £30 and that was in a set with a mouse. After a year or so of heavy use it started to develop problems with some of the keys. I unscrewed it, which was certainly not easy considering the 12 or so screws of different sizes, and looked inside. There was nothing. It was just a rubbery membrane and a sheet of contacts. Nothing broken exactly but just something that was stopping some of the keys from registering.

The Das Keyboard is just a joy to use by comparison. The keys themselves have a satisfying little click just before they are fully depressed. I haven’t managed this yet but I'm sure that you could adjust your typing so that you just hit the first click without pressing the key all the way down.

I ordered the Ultimate, because I can touch-type, but I was a little concerned about entering cryptic passwords that have upper and lowercase as well as numbers. To be honest I haven’t had to do this yet and even if I did have trouble I'd just use the laptop keyboard.

One thing that I used to do with the old keyboard was to look down at the keys when I was hitting the numbered keys above the letters. Now, not having the keys marked means that I have to move my right had up so that my index finger is on the 7 and my little finger is on the 0. After the last week or so I have started to do this simply because I have no choice. The same goes for brackets and the other shifted symbols, there is no visual guide so you have to learn where they are. The numeric keypad is never used. I'm sure it’s only there for accountants and anyone needing to total long lists of numbers. I also have a habit of using one hand to hit an uppercase letter or for control key combinations. It’s these bad habits that I'm going to try to unlearn over time.

It certainly isn’t without it’s faults, but they are only minor. The connection to my Dell laptop is via 2, yes 2, USB ports. The cable out of the keyboard splits in to 2 USB plugs. The laptop has 4 thankfully, the other 2 are for the mouse and a mini-USB cable for my phone. I can’t see why it needs 2 USB ports, possibly for the powered USB sockets that are on the right-hand side. This is another problem. Those ports are right next to my mouse and mouse mat. I wouldn’t use them because any wires would hinder my mousing hand. These ports, useful though they may be, should have been moved 90 degrees anti-clockwise so that they are on the same edge as the main cable. They could even still keep them on the same bump as the Das Keyboard lettering.

Those quirks aside the Das Keyboard is good enough to almost make my job more enjoyable.

Related Links
Das Keyboard Model S from getDigital
Das Keyboard flickr set

Practices of an Agile Developer

• Venkat Subramaniam & Andy Hunt
• Programming

Yes, yesterday I received an SMS message saying that O2 had connected my broadband that it was now safe to plug in the router. Why you can’t do it beforehand I don’t know. I just did what they told me.

After setting up the router, that is just plugging it in, I went straight to think broadband and did a speed test. 10 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up, which probably what you would expect from a 16meg line. On an 8meg line with Pipex the fastest down was just 3Mbps, but possibly I only ever tested the speed if it was really slow.

So the fun began, downloading email, news feeds and the podcasts that I'd missed over the last week. Then it was just a case of setting up the wireless connection for my Apple TV and the Dell laptop that I have for work. All connected to the O2 router fine.

I hit Send/Receive in Microshite® Outlook 2000 on the laptop and downloaded the three waiting emails. Then, for some reason, I had to send an email, no doubt to let the world know that I was back and online. The indicator kept saying that it was sending, sending, sending, failed. I hadn’t changed anything in Outlook. It had worked fine at my sisters house the other day. Try again… and again. Nothing. I phone the company tech guy and he suggests deleting the account and adding it again. I take screen shots of the settings, delete the account and add it again. Still nothing. SMTP was timing out, obviously when trying to send. I switch off the firewall in the router and try again… nothing. I delete the dial-up account that Pipex had given me that didn’t work… nothing. I change the sequence of the wireless connections, my sister’s being the top one… still nothing. But if I connect to the office I can send email fine. I install the O2 software from the disc that came with the router, just in case… nothing. I start looking at the firewall settings in the router again… nothing. Not a problem, I’ll switch to the Belkin router tomorrow.

This morning I reset the Belkin router and try to get it working with O2. You can see why O2 supply and support their own router. All this is tricky enough if know a little about how this stuff works, but if you don’t you’ll be screwed. I restored to factory settings and spent about an hour trying to get it to connect to O2 with no luck. Annoyed, very annoyed. Considering that my iMac worked fine with the O2 router and that my laptop worked fine with the O2 router… except this little problem sending email. I put the O2 router back tried to do some work. But a little problem like this just nags and nags. You think that it’s just going to be a little setting or a check-box that you've overlooked. So I downloaded Thunderbird. God knows why a software company should still be using Microshite® Office 2000 anyway. I set up my pop account and it sent email fine. I imported my contacts and old emails from Outlook and haven’t looked back since. It’s all working fine.

I just hate the fact that I wasted over a day trying to get something that simple to work, even if I was being paid for it. Good old Microshite®!

If I had to ‘make believe’ that I worked in a suit, at an office that is two hours away, at a tiny desk with nothing on it except a dusty, grubby laptop that wouldn’t boot then I wanted to be called Clint!!

The Magic Circle

Yes, I have stood on the stage of The Magic Circle in London.

Something that I didn’t know is that you can hire The Magic Circle for corporate functions and conferences. The company whose software we use at work held a conference to demonstrate the new functionality available in the next release. Certainly reason enough to attend as we currently use the oldest version of their program compiler and user interface. Yes, you would think that all information technology companies were on the very cutting edge of their profession. We are so far away from the cutting edge that we are practically Amish.

The fun started before lunch with James “The Man of Steal” Freedman beginning his performance by saying that banks, because of security concerns, have to be sure that you are who you are. He asked members of the audience various questions, name of a school, how much change they have and the name of a bank. This he wrote on a piece of paper. Then I was picked to go up onto the stage and he asked if I smoked. I don’t so he handed me a cigarette lighter. He asked me to light it and touched the note to the flame and it flared up and disappeared. James then took out his wallet. Unzipped a compartment and pulled out a piece of paper which he asked me to read. It was a letter from a bank which mentioned all the items of information that the people in the audience had chosen at random.

James performed a few more tricks before introducing Martyn Rowland who did some more. During lunch both of them mingled around doing card tricks and we were all really amazed. I'd seen the same kinds of tricks on TV before but never live and never that close up.

The first floor of the building had display cabinets containing magic props, Tommy Cooper’s fez and his Martini bottles, and also a few items that belonged to David Nixon, if you’re old enough to remember him. The auditorium was on the second floor and could seat about a hundred people. Each of the seats had the members name on it. The only name that I recognised was behind me and was for Geoffrey Durham.

After lunch we had a quick tour of the museum in the basement. Two of the doors in the corridor were labelled ‘Members Only’. One was an extensive library and the other a prop room.

The Magic Circle really is a great and unique venue for corporate events.

Ruby on Rails

I've been busy learning, or at least trying to learn, Ruby on Rails. For people who don’t know this is a new programming language/application which allows programmers, like myself, to create web applications really fast.

At work we have one of our applications written in ASP.NET and since the beginning of last year I have been the unfortunate soul who has to debug and maintain this piece of software. At first I did think that it was pretty good. Towards the end of last year I had an idea to write some web pages linking to a database so that we could store client information, contacts, which clients have what software, what platform they are using etc. Just, more or less, everything that we need to know, all in one place. I felt that this was a good idea so I started writing it. I set-up the database and the tables in SQL Server and started to code the pages having copied chunks of code from our web application. Of course it has never been finished.

Let me warn you that if you work for a software company and one of the managers, who we’ll call Scouse Boy No. 1, buys a Rolodex to store contact information then leave immediately. Just run as far and as fast as you can and don’t look back.

This year I've had to convert our ASP.NET application so that it works with the new version of our main software. Even after having ASP training last year it was a slow and tortuous task. The fact that one of the pages doesn’t render correctly in Firefox, that it’s all tied into Microshites® web server and probably doesn’t validate to any W3 standard makes me think that it’s not going to be a possible career path. Maybe if we had spent £500 on Visual Studio things may have been less painful.

So, Ruby on Rails, is just the kind of thing that I've been looking for. A development environment written by programmers to make life easier so that more time can be spent writing clean, well structured, code. I ordered the Agile Web Development with Rails book, downloaded the necessary software for Tiger and started to work through a great little Ruby tutorial by Chris Pine. When that was done I started on the book proper, reading through the first section before promptly coming to a grinding halt on page 57. This is when I had a MySQL database and tables created and was about to see the power of Rails for the first time. I must have spent at least 2 days, on and off, trying to figure out why the views of the table weren’t being created. I even un-installed the latest version of Xcode and and re-installed the old version from the Tiger DVD, all to no avail. It just wasn’t seeing the database for some reason. Last Saturday afternoon I found the solution. In the config/database.yml file specify the username, in the book ‘dave’, that you granted database access for. Then re-run the ruby script/generate scaffold Product admin and you should see app/views/admin pages being created. Since then I've been working through the Book Store application. Everything is so easy, well not exactly easy, but just a joy to use. The scaffold that is generated by Rails knows what the database table looks like so you don’t have to key in lines of HTML with the different types of input code embedded in it. You don’t have to give each field a name, as this is already done for you from the field names. Links for edit/list/show/delete are already created and all the pages behind them. With one Rails command I generated a set of table maintenance pages. This is something that would have taken me at least a few hours using ASP.NET. And all without writing SQL statements.

I think to get the most out of the book you do need to have your own application to work on yourself. It would be really easy to just blindly get the demonstration application working without understanding how the principles can be put into practice. It hasn’t all been plain sailing. Just last night none of the controllers for my application would display in Safari. I found that emptying the cache and deleting any localhost cookies did the trick.

You've been with the same people for eight hours during the day, then you have to suffer a little longer in the name of team bonding.

We sold some of our unused office furniture at work and decided to have a night out at the Rawhide Comedy Club in Liverpool. A meal was booked at La Tasca for 6:30pm then it was on to The Royal Court Theatre where a table had been pre-booked by our Party Organiser. The comedy club used to reside in the Central Hall, so this was it’s first night in the new, larger, venue.

I've always been a fan of stand-up comedians since my grandmother introduced me to an album of Billy Connolly’s many many years ago. I went to see Billy back in the eighties at the Apollo in Manchester. Then I saw Phil Coole and Jasper Carrott in Stoke, Lee Evans in Stockport and Henry Rollins a couple of times in Manchester. I don’t think that Rollins really counts as a comedian as such, he isn’t going to start saying, “Is there anyone in from Bolton?”, “Take my wife… please.”, “My mother-in-law is so fat…” etc etc. Since I do like a chuckle or three I started buying stand-up comedy videos. In fact I think that one of the very first videos that I did buy was a Jasper Carrott video. This was back in the days when people would say, “Oh! Have you got a video?” and when Woolworths only had about fifteen videos on the one rack: snooker, improve your golf, championship fishing, a comedian and about three films, all on The Video Collection label. This was back in the days when video recorders were so expensive that I actually heard of some people who wouldn’t rent videos. Their thinking was that all someone at the video store needed to do was wait until you were out so they could break in and steal the video. At the time video recorders were the size of a suitcase and weighed the same as a mini metro.

So, yes over the years I've accumulated many videos, and now of course DVD’s of stand-up comedians. I was quite looking forward to the evening ahead.

The Rawhide Comedy Club also serves food. If you book a table with food you get to sit near the back. The place isn’t that vast that you would need opera glasses, so this is no bad thing. If you book just a table you get to sit at tables nearer the stage. If you've travelled from Manchester, on a works ‘do’, and there are six of you in your party you get to sit right at the front just underneath the microphone. I knew what was coming.

Mick Ferry was the compere for the evening. It was his job to warm the audience up, not physically you understand and to introduce the acts for the evenings entertainment. This involved asking people their names, where they’re from and what they do for a living. And generally taking the mickey. Of course we were sitting targets, but thankfully two people out of our party survived unscathed.

The acts generally improved as the night went on: Simon Clayton was good, Alex Horne was better and Phil Nichol was the best of the bunch. He is quite manic to say the least and I thought Canadians were cultured and reserved. There are only two seasons in Canada: winter and six months of poor snow-mobiling. He ended his set by singing “The Only Gay Eskimo”, a song which I had heard of before, only because I had downloaded it thinking that the artist was Tenacious D. It wasn’t and isn’t. It was apparently written and sung by Corky and the Juice Pigs of which Phil was a member. Thinking about it now it seems right that a Canadian should sing about Eskimos. For the last couple of verses he dragged “Steve”, from our group, onto the stage to sing along. “Steve” was giggling so much he could barely speak. To his credit he did manage to sing the last chorus in nearly a pitch perfect falsetto. I think that he'd been practising at home.

Mona Switcher

I was at work uploading ASP files to the website, connecting to our server in Dublin, downloading, extracting and making changes to files when the connection dropped and the terminal window disappeared. I wasn’t in the best of moods anyway so I decided to test the bouncing capability of my Microshite® mouse by throwing at my screen. Unfortunately I made my long-suffering colleague jump out of her skin. She obviously saw the air-bourne projectile heading in her general direction without realising that I was aiming it at the screen and that it was securely tethered to my laptop by the mouse cable. Of course I had to apologise for startling her so early in the working week. Luckily Microshite® do seem to make very sturdy mice. I remember slamming one of the old white ones repeatedly into a mouse mat from a height of about 2 foot above the desk with no ill affects at all. Maybe they should stick to just making mice instead of… I guess you could see that remark coming.

Back to the thing that cheered me up… the Steve Jobs Dress-up Contest. I didn’t really spend too much of the working day seeing how Uncle Steve would look in the various outfits, basically because I was too busy laughing.

I'd never really looked at the Geek Culture web-site before but after seeing the Mona Switcher I think it is safe to say that I'm hooked. As soon as I arrived home I ordered a copy of the Mona Switcher painting to put on the wall above my iMac. Here’s the Joy of Tech comic that the original Mona Switcher came from.