Author: drew

hmm.

Is an office more productive because it’s an environment tailored to (or mentally associated with) working, or is it more productive simply because it’s not home?

Well, judging by the fact that it’s been a month since my last post, combined with the fact that I’m only blogging when I’m working outside the home, it would seem that my quest is not going quite as well as I’d have liked. Turns out it’s actually very difficult to get motivated to leave the house in the morning when you don’t technically have to…

Well – I guess I can’t really count it as a full month, seeing as eight (of a possible 20) working days were spent travelling to, partying in and returning from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Burning Man was amazing, as expected – really it was far, far more than that, but as our travelling crew decided on the way home, trying to describe the experience to someone who hasn’t been there is pretty much futile – you come off sounding like a cross between a religious zealot and a Pigeon Park loony. The closest I could come up with was “the universe constantly astounding me with how spectacularly beautiful it can be“. See? Loony.

Returning from my epic adventures, I seem to have slipped into a routine that isn’t at all what I was trying to achieve – in fact, I’m a lot less productive than I was in New Brunswick. This is serving to reinforce my belief that working in an office is better than working at home simply because it’s a different environment. Lately I’ve been getting up in the morning, making breakfast and coffee, and sitting at my desk for the next eight to ten hours, getting perhaps four to six hours of work done. This is wasting both my time and what remains of the beautiful Vancouver summer weather we’ve been having. There’ll be plenty of time to slack at home once the rains set in. So why can’t I seem to get motivated to get out and ride my bike to a coffee shop somewhere?

I guess the question becomes – is an office more productive because it’s an environment tailored to (or mentally associated with) working, or is it more productive simply because it’s not home? I find myself constantly distracted in my home “office”, due in no small part to my being surrounded by my favourite things.

The most productive working environment so far was working in an unused meeting room in my father’s law office in New Brunswick – basically a featureless white room. I mean, there were a few unremarkable paintings on the wall, but apart from that it was a table, a few chairs, and that’s it.

Anyhow – today I’m splitting tasks – I spent a few hours this morning working from my desk in my apartment, then showered, shaved, and responded to an emergency tech support housecall from a girl I’ve been seeing. Sweet! An actual excuse to get off my ass and get out of the house – and you know what? It’s not so bad. I’m writing this from a Blendz coffee shop (note to self: Blendz has free wireless) on Robson Street. Robson isn’t exactly the most calm, quiet street in the city, so it’s been somewhat difficult to maintain focus – but at least I’m out of the house. 🙂

East Coast

Well, now that I’ve been in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for a week, I figure I should update the blog with my experiences so far.

Strangely, the most productive I’ve been to date was a set of two eight-hour stints in a quiet side room at my father’s office in Sussex. Today, however, I am in a bustling food court in the Halifax Shopping Center. Oh my…

So the big question with this whole ‘work from anywhere’ project is whether or not I can be productive even when the office is a massive set of distractions. Admittedly, today is a strong test.

It’s interesting, really – as someone who has spent their entire life struggling to overcome attention deficit disorder, the idea of trying to get work done in an environment full of shiny distractions seems like a plan destined to fail. Still, I’m pretty sure that with a bit of self-discipline, combined with careful self-medication with coffee and prescription ADD drugs, that I might just be able to pull this off.

On the prescription drugs tip – just as a back story, as a young child I was lucky enough to have a mother who was an elementary school vice principal, studying for her masters in education. She attended a lot of educator conferences, and at one in particular the speaker spent a half-hour describing an interaction between a mother and her son – it went a bit like this:

“…so the mother and son went to visit the grandparents. Now, the son is hyperactive and can’t seem to sit still for more than a few seconds, and is constantly distracted by new ‘projects’, which drives his grandfather absolutely nuts. The kid knows this, and knows that every time they interact he makes the grandfather angry, so he’s trying to be on his best behavior.

“So they’re at the grandparents place for a few hours, and there hasn’t been a peep from the kid. It’s been snowing, and when the mother goes to leave, there’s the kid, and he’s shoveled pretty much the entire front walk. He’s beaming, he’s done a good job, and even the grandfather gruffly says he’s done well. The mother and son pack up and go home.

“About an hour after they get home, there’s a phonecall – it’s the grandmother. She says that the grandfather isn’t angry, but that he’d just like to know where the son left the screwdriver.

“The story expands a little bit from there. Apparently the son wanted to surprise the grandfather with something nice, so he went to shovel the walk. The door to the shed with the shovel was padlocked however, and if he’d asked for the key he’d spoil the surprise, so he tracked down a screwdriver, taken the hinges off the shed door, put them aside, gotten the shovel, and done the walk. In the process, the screwdriver was set down somewhere. They never did find the screwdriver.”

Well, after this story, apparently my mother stood up in the seminar and shouted THATS! MY! SON!

Anyway, I was about eight or nine at the time, and they shunted me around to various child psychologists and ADHD specialists (which were very rare, they had only just ‘discovered’ it), and finally I was diagnosed and prescribed Ritalin. Suddenly I was able to focus and my grades went from mid-60’s to mid-90’s!

Say what you will, but I know for a fact that I would not be where I am today if it weren’t for my mother being conscientious and willing to try an experiment. I count Ritalin/Dexedrine as being critical in my education, and I would likely be either in a trailer park or in jail if I hadn’t had that extra benefit.

The downside of ritalin/dexedrine is that they’re amphetamines, and for every up there is an equal and opposite down. The “crash” makes it difficult to focus, makes me crabby, and takes away most of my will to do anything but sit on the couch. Worse, if I take it too many days in a row, I start to lose the ability to feel emotions – I turn slowly but surely into a robot. This is the really insidious part – I see so many kids being prescribed dosages of Ritalin that must be just slamming their brains. I knew an eleven-year-old who was prescribed fully four times my dosage! Admittedly he was really, really, really hyperactive, but still…

Man. Did you know that Halifax mall cops wear bulletproof vests? Honestly, who thinks that’s a good idea? When was the last time there was a shooting at the Halifax Shopping Center? Google says never.

Anyway – it would seem that instead of actual “work”, I’m doing blog posts. Today I have to research alternative DNS hosting – I’m partial to EasyDNS, but the Evil Masters seem to want to go with UltraDNS. I don’t think they realize that UltraDNS has per-query billing, which will mean huge bills with our round-robin “load balancing” system.

Whirlwind!

Uh oh. Fifteen new messages from work.

Well, it’s day… four? Five? Technically five, I guess – of my new job. So far I’ve definitely done the majority of my productive work in my home office, aka “the desk in my bedroom”. The few days that I’ve actually been out on the road with my bike, I had errands to run – each day it seemed like those errands led me back to my office, though in retrospect I think that was artificial, and there was no real reason I couldn’t have stopped in a park.

Today I embark on the first “real” away mission of my quest – I am writing this sitting in an uncomfortable chair at the Vancouver airport, heading off on a two-week visit to New Brunswick centered around my grandmother’s birthday.

The job so far has been interesting, to say the least. The first day I logged in and started pestering the current admins for documentation and guidance, but the main admin was crazy busy, so told me to just poke around on my own and we’d have a conference call on Monday. The downside to this was that Monday was a holiday in British Columbia. I brought this point to light, but it didn’t seem to be a problem – and since I’m taking off to NB today and won’t be able to do any real work from the airplane, I figured a tradeoff would be acceptable.

Sunday night I went out drinking with some friends – hey, it was a long weekend. Monday I got up around 10am, took a leisurely shower, made some breakfast, cracked my knuckles, and cracked my laptop.

Uh oh. Fifteen new messages from work.

Turns out the gossip site posted some paparazzi photos of Miley Cyrus in her underwear. Cute, I guess, if you’re into that way-too-young thing – the problem came when Fox News linked to the site, causing it to drop to its knees in protest. The older admin rebuilt the page as static HTML, which took a lot of the load off of the database, and made the site somewhat responsive again. We pushed over 500 gigs of data per *hour* for the next four hours.

Tuesday was running a bunch of errands and I barely got two hours of actual work done. Wednesday I got a good solid six hours in, and it was my most productive to date. I made a lot of good discoveries about the systems; the most encouraging was that all of the machines are pretty much completely identical hardware-wise, and all have the same revision of CentOS. The less encouraging was that all of the machines have custom builds of Apache, each build is somewhat different from the rest, and none of the machines are up-to-date with OS patches.

The nice part about all the machines being nearly identical is that with a little bit of configuration I can treat the cluster as a single machine – I can build a single complex command on my Macbook and have it execute on each of the machines in sequence. I added my system accounts, along with ssh keys and a custom ‘sudo’ configuration, and poof – suddenly running an update on all 30-odd machines is 30 times less work than it used to be!

Today I fly to New Brunswick for a visit with my folks, and hopefully this weekend I’ll get a chance to visit with some old friends. I’ll still have to work, which could be interesting – the first few days I’ll be spending at my father’s house in Sussex, where I don’t think he has internet access.

I found out my Burning Man plans are a go! I return from New Brunswick on the 21st of August in the evening, get a chance to sleep, then have almost a day to pick up the last few bits I need for the epic week in the desert. On the 22nd I take the ferry to Victoria, where I meet up with friends who are driving a 15-passenger van down to Nevada – we leave Saturday morning, and aim to arrive on Monday. It looks like I’ll be camping with the Deep End!

More later, it’s time to board the plane.

The Quest Begins!

Today is my last day of work. I have Wednesday and Thursday to get my affairs in order, and I begin my new job – and officially begin my technomadic experiment – this Friday.

So the laptop buyout went… poorly. I was really hoping that they’d bite – my original negotiated deal was to work for the ISP for one year, and at that point I’d be entitled to buy out my laptop for $1000. Well, technically, the deal I tried to negotiate was that after six months the ownership of the laptop would just transfer to me, but they played hardball and would only go for the full transfer after eighteen months. I was kind of stretched financially at the time, so I accepted.

The problem is that I’m leaving the company after only just shy of nine months. I made them an offer of $1000 plus an extra $100 for each of the three months shy of a year, so $1300. The big boss agreed, but with the caveat “…as long as Joe doesn’t need the machine for his tech guys”, putting the decision in the hands of the manager of the technical support team. He was supposed to let me know Friday, but Friday afternoon told me he’d need the weekend to think it over.

That left me at a bit of a disadvantage, as my last day is today, Tuesday, and I would have to leave my machine there – but I was pretty confident that he’d make the right choice and let me buy the machine out. Unfortunately, early Monday morning he emailed me saying “Sorry dude, we’re getting more mac clients lately and so it’d be better to have it in the tech office for testing and client solutions stuff”.

Now, that’s a pretty flimsy premise. You’ve gotta understand, there’s a lot of office politics at play here – for one, I had the only Macbook Pro in the office, and frankly that chapped a lot of cabooses, and for two the Macbook Pro is a phenomenally well-designed machine and I’m in an office full of geeks. There were at least four people in the office with designs on my laptop, and from my vantage point (aka “shitty cubicle”) I got to watch them circle like vultures as the word spread. Deals were quietly made – my coworker made his case “I should get the laptop because I’m second to Drew in the admin team and I only have a regular Macbook, which could go to the tech team…”, and went from office to office gathering support for his cause. Another coworker, of much higher ranking, thought he should get it on rank alone. And even the big boss said something like “Just leave it on my desk when you go – oh, and make sure the applications and such are still installed, I’ve been meaning to pick up a mac for my own use…”.

Regardless, I’m getting a signing bonus with the new company, with which to purchase a new laptop. I was really hoping that purchase could be my macbook pro, with money left over for a fancy new iPhone too – but with that hope dashed, I was left with one day to evaluate my options and purchase a new machine.

Fortunately, I’m a geek, so I’d kept up with the tech pretty well – I’d already narrowed the field down to two options. In the left corner the slightly more pedestrian Macbook, and in the right corner the sleek, sexy Macbook Air.

I’ll save you the suspense: I bought the Air.

It was pricy, that’s for sure, it used up my entire budget and then an extra $100 on top of that – but I think I’ve made the right decision. This is a machine that I’ll be carrying with me everywhere for the next – oh, let’s call it two years. I’ll be spending anywhere from one to fourteen hours per day on the thing, which means it has to be both functional and comfortable. I look at a laptop as being like a good pair of workboots – if you’re just doing some gardening every few weeks, the $90 pair of workboots will suit you just fine. If you’re out on a construction site every day though, rain or shine, for eight hour stretches, the $340 pair start to make a lot more sense.

There were a few other factors that influenced the decision; for instance, the Air doesn’t have firewire, which is a strike against… but I had firewire on my MBP and never used it once in the nine months I had the machine. Also the Air only has a 1.6Ghz processor. Which is, um, the same one I’ve been using for nine months on my MBP with no complaints.

Functionally speaking, I’ve traded my Macbook Pro for the equivalent machine, only pared down with less extraneous crap, lighter and more mobile. This is exactly what I’m trying to do with the rest of my life, so it makes me think that I’ve made the right choice.

Friday, I get to spend most of the day on Skype with my new coworkers, mapping out the networks that I’ll be taking care of. Of course, since the new company has grown very rapidly and with a small core of employees, there isn’t really any documentation for any of the systems, so that’ll be my first big task. The following Thursday, I fly to New Brunswick for a two-week “vacation”, which will be the first big test of being a fully mobile sysadmin… and after that, it’s off to Burning Man to either celebrate the burgeoning success of my venture, or to do some deep desert soul-searching as to what I’m actually trying to do here.

Is this all a great idea leading to a wonderfully adventurous alternative lifestyle, or a huge mistake stemming from a drive to escape from a life that seems to be leading to stagnancy?

Great Strides Forward!

If it takes ten hours to achieve three hours of actual work, who am I really cheating?

This update is a bit long in coming, because I took off for Salem, Oregon to attend the Emrg-n-See Festival with Trent and a bunch of other amazing people. The vacation was welcome, even though it ventured into the United States, which as of late has made me somewhat wary.

Regardless, I’m back now, and back at my ugly little cubicle desk in North Vancouver. There’s one major difference though…

This is my last week. I am done this coming Tuesday!

So I gave my notice last Tuesday – the big boss was neither surprised nor alarmed. I guess it’s been pretty obvious for a while now that our department has just been sitting here spinning our wheels, waiting for some guidance from the “new management” that never actually arrived. I mean seriously.. I was supposed to be reporting to a guy in the head office downtown, but I didn’t actually hear anything back from him for four solid months?!

The two things I need to sort out currently are my cellphone and a laptop for the new job. The new Evil Masters have provided a nice little budget for a new machine, but frankly after taxes it isn’t enough to cover a brand new Macbook Pro. I’m currently trying to see if I’ll be allowed to purchase my current Macbook Pro from this job – I negotiated a clause in my original contract here where I could buy out my laptop after one year of employment. I’m just a couple of days shy of nine months with the company, so I’ve offered them $100 per month on top of the original buyout fee. $1300 total for a Macbook Pro – albeit a used one – isn’t too shabby.

On the cellphone front however I got some bad news today – the boss here agreed to let me carry my cellphone number with me when I left, but Telus (who are bitches) have a grip on the number with nasty, sharp, pointy teeth. Looks like I’ll have to have a new cellphone number shortly. I’m currently deciding between pay-as-you-go and a regular cellular plan.

The more I think about this whole detach-from-the-office plan (and the more I read ‘The Four Hour Workweek’), the more I am convinced that it is a good idea. The biggest challenge will be to be honest with myself about what does and what does not work; maybe working in a coffeeshop will be fun, but will it be productive? If it takes ten hours to achieve three hours of actual work, who am I really cheating?

My last day here is Tuesday, and then I have Wednesday and Thursday off, and then Friday I begin my new contract. I will be working the following Monday through Wednesday, and then Thursday I pack up and leave for two weeks in New Brunswick! This is going to be the really big test: can I work successfully from the east coast, possibly without my new Evil Masters even noticing that I’m not around?

Another big question: as an independent contractor, how can I best track my hours? I saw a web app on Daring Fireball, but I foolishly neglected to bookmark it…