Archive for the 'work' Category

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Working from home: Is it sustainable?

Published on March 1, 2007 in whine and work. 8 Comments

Right now, as I write this, I am theoretically ‘working from home’, even though I’m not at home. I’m in Wonthaggi, telecommuting from the study/lounge of the flat that E’s employers have given her while she serves the term of her indenture completes another educational and fulfilling rotation.

I have been advised by various people that Wonthaggi is not a great place to be if you want to do anything, or at least, anything other than farming or surfing. I am looking forward quite eagerly to the challenge of doing anything other than sit in front of this bloody laptop and attempt to work. The phrase stir crazy covers it nicely: this lounge/study is a nicer place in almost any imaginable respect than my office in the city, yet it is also an unspeakably boring place. There’ something intensely perverse about all of this: I don’t generally enjoy chatting with my workmates. What do we have in common besides work? Very little. I don’t enjoy being surrounded by people typing and and talking on the phone or to each other: they disrupt my work and make me twitchy. But, take them all away, and it is literally a matter of seconds before I start to gibber.

This leads me now to question a fundamental life goal that I have long cherished and held dear: The idea that one day I will be able to only work from home.

It’s like I’ve been saving up all this time to buy a car, only to discover that I hate driving. What do I want to do with my career? I know I’m good at system administry, but that road leads to roughly here and then meanders off into management, a future akin to eternity in hell as I see it.

I could have a go at making Trouble into a company, but I fear that I just don’t have the immense metallic gonads necessary to found a real tech startup in this post-dot-com-boom era, nor the large pile of cash that some lucky buggers carried away at the end of that particular free-for-all.

I had many plans, when I was twenty, for what I would have done by the time I was thirty. It never occurred to me that I might need a plan for what to do after I turned thirty. :)

Dictionary

Published on February 6, 2007 in technical, whine and work. 0 Comments

slow adj. to run a needlessly glitzy X application via two layers of ssh tunneled indirection, via an overloaded metropolitan network link, an elderly desktop box acting as a database server and multi-user ssh gateway, and a very noisy dialup connection from Wonthaggi, while a mandatory windows update tries to download a 20MB patch in the background.

Ultraviolet

Published on January 19, 2007 in review, tv and work. 7 Comments

It would be terribly easy to write a whine this afternoon. Days like this make it terribly hard to think positive thoughts of any kind, let alone write anything cheerful. That would be a terrible watse of time: everyone has bad days at work, it’s not news, and generally nobody needs to hear about anyone else’s day. I will save it up for the after work mutual rant session with E tonight. :)

Instead, I want to write about a nitfy TV series which I mentioned once a long time ago on this blog: Ultraviolet. That’s this TV series, by the way, not this (aparrently mediocre) movie.

uvpeople
I first heard about UV from Polly and Damien. I will attempt to do justice here to the eloquent wind-up that Damien gave it when he described it to me:

There’s this british cop whose friend goes missing just before his wedding. The cop does his best to find his friend, but is hampered by this wierd secret branch of the police who are also lookng fo his friend and won’t say why. They seem to be very odd secret police; they have these weird guns with a mirror on them and they use these odd graphite bullets. The kinds of people they’re interested in are odd too: they only come out at night, and they seem to be very long-lived.

The plot moves quickly, but not clumsily, handled with the deftness and class we’ve come to expect from good BBC dramas. The ‘V’ word is never mentioned, throughout the entire series.

The tone is bleak in the extreme, but the series holds ones hope and interest through depth of characterization and a gritty british-crimefighting motif that somehow resembles The Bill.

It helps that the core cast are mesmerisingly good: The cop is played by the most excellently laconic Jack Davenport who you might know better as Norrington from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. There’s also the icy Susannah Harker, who I knew best as Mattie Storin from the House of Cards series, and the awesome Philip Quast, disconcertingly memorable either as Javert in Les Miserables or as himself in Play School (1981-1996).

There’s a catch though: Only six episodes of this series were ever made. It sems quite likely that this is all that will ever be made. The plot is not abruptly cut short, but it aches for a second season…

Discussing it after watching the sixth episode, E suggested that they might have failed to convince their producers that there was enough material in the, uh, leach-slaying genre. After all, Buffy the … Slayer took a heroic crack at it, but even with the introduction of inumerable demons, witches, cyborg monsters, mad scientists and even a god, the series was dogged by repetition.

BBC worshipping fanboy that I am, I would like to imagine that Joe Ahearne, the series creator might have overcome this kind of thing, but I can’t really make myself believe. In the end I have to suspect that E is right. Ultraviolet ended with the flame of creativity still brilliantly alight. Better that than tiredly exhausting every last drop, ending when the flame guttered out.

The passage of time

Published on January 5, 2007 in ideas, philosophy, whine and work. 0 Comments

Time in an office environment seems to pass in two distinct modes, each of them strangely unlike the manner in which time passes anywhere else:

A) Time screams past in great leaps and bounds. This can be exemplified by the deep-hack-mode effect where one gets so far into a task that the outside world disappears, just after lunch for example, and reappears only when the task is complete, in a dark, silent office at 8:00pm, for example.
This can also happen in an exponential way: the snowballing deadline-crisis, where seemingly brief, simple tasks swell to fill unaccountably large amounts of time, and the working day shrinks incrementally until a very slight lateness becomes a vast and insurmountable slippage.

B) Time opens out like ones sense of space when driving out of a deep canyon into the open desert. The space of time between the present and an hour hence seems like a desolate unending trek to rival Sam and Frodo marching into Mordor. Seemingly solid, satisfying tasks melt like butter on a hot day and slip through ones fingers, either because they are blocked, or because they suddenly become trivial, and are done before you can blink. Tedious, frustrating tasks with no clearly defined goal or conclusion are abundant, but they do not satisfy, nor fulfil. All your favourite time-wasting blogs are mysteriously bereft of new posts for what seems like eternity. RSS feeds trickle to a stop and run dry. Google suddenly only returns places you’ve been before. A feeling of temporal agoraphobia sets in, leaving you feeling stranded and exposed, far from cover and visible to high, wheeling predators. There is nowhere to hide, and 5:00pm is impossibly far away.

It’s times like the latter, much too early on a Friday afternoon, when there’s nothing else left to do but turn to your own blog and blather. :)

Then, just as you’re about to post your blatherings, for all the world to see, the screen goes blue. Not the familiar blue of the blue-screen-of-death, but an unnerving pale sky-blue. Your computer responds to keystrokes, mouse-clicks, and even jabs at the power button with indifferent beeps. Eventually you manage to shut it down, and then to restart it, cursing all the while at the lost work. Time seems narrow again for a little while: your computer is too slow! It takes too damn long to boot! But then it’s booted, and once again there’s nothing to do but finish that blather.

Someone is trying to tell me something. I just wish I knew what it was…