Advantages to working smarter…
Now I know that this may not even apply universally to everyone in the Information Technology field but I felt that I needed to share anyway.
One of the greatest things about my current job is the ability to work from just about anywhere using just about any computer as long as I have an Internet connection and a SSH client. I frequently find myself working from home on my personal laptop, or from friend’s houses using their own computers and I am as effective as I would be at the office. Today really cemented that fact with me when I made the Monday morning blunder of arriving to work without my laptop. Instead of driving all the way back home (and wasting even more of the morning) I just grabbed a spare laptop that is laying around the office and using that today.
I remember a number of nights earlier in the year when I was on-call and out somewhere either without my laptop or without an Internet connection. Though it was slightly slower than I would have been on a laptop I managed to resolve a number of production critical emergencies using nothing more than my BlackBerry and MidpSSH.
I leverage a few tools to make this happen but the most important one I think of them all is GNU screen. The usefulness of this to anyone who wants to be able to use any computer in the world to be productive cannot be over-stressed. I recall one evening while I was on vacation in Australia last month where I noticed (via our internal IRC channel) that people were trying to troubleshoot a problem with our network storage infrastructure and was able to connect in to my work computer 12,000 miles away and fix the issues with nothing more than a terminal application on my laptop.
For IM and IRC I have as much connected to Irssi as I can reasonably manage. Irssi is a really great compliment to screen and there are a number of sites advocating that particular use case. I never miss anything with this configuration as I am always online and Irssi is kind enough to log everything and provide a pretty lengthy scroll-back buffer. What I end up with is essentially one screen session that contains my e-mail (using mutt) for both home and work, IRC, IM, and many of our internal web-based tools (thanks to w3m). Thanks to work being almost exclusively a Linux shop all of this can sit running all the time on a system sitting in one of our data centres with what essentially amounts to a Gigabit Ethernet connection to the Internet. From there all I ever really need is ssh(1) to connect to any of several hundred servers scattered across the United States and I can manage to be just as productive as if I was sitting in the office.
I honestly can’t imagine considering a job where I’m tied down to an office, or at the very least one where I was tied down to an office and then expected to work non-normal business hours. With pretty simple tools it is extremely easy to allow IT people to work from anywhere happily and securely. The ability for employees to continue to do their job from anywhere on the planet should the need arise is not only great for morale and general quality of life (you mean I can work from the beach?!) but makes sense when business critical applications and services require specific expertise that may not be replicated anywhere else in the company (what do you mean Bob is on vacation in Fiji?!).
The heady dreams of youth revisited… flight!
Earlier this year I had the good fortune to visit some friends in California and take my first ride in a light airplane. In spite of the 29,000+ miles I have flown this year the smallest plane I had been on prior was a twin-turboprop Delta Connection flight out of IAD to ROC so this was a really unique experience for me.
We flew from AUN out over the San Francisco Bay, out to the Golden Gate Bridge and then down the Pacific coast to HAF where we went and had dinner. After dinner we flew over San Francisco back up to AUN after dark which was a truly beautiful view and if I am honest was almost magical.
I think it jarred something loose in my head. For as long as I can remember I have always been fascinated with aviation and have always wanted to learn to fly. For years though that dream sat idle in the pile of things that would be nice to do someday when I made ‘real money’ and could afford such extravagances (like air conditioning or food). I’m not really sure how much I was smiling after that first flight but I imagine you probably could have seen it from at least 10,000ft. I think I was hooked at that very moment. It really doesn’t help that my friend is a very persuasive individual when he is passionate about something, and flying is something he is exceptionally passionate about. It took me a few months, and a few more trips to convince me that it was truly something within my grasp but last week I finally got down to the local airport SDC, and took an intro flight with the resident CFII.
We flew out of SDC and then down towards my house in Fairport, circled around and came back. It was only a half-hour of flying time but it was easily the most memorable half hour of my life in the last few years. And to be clear in the last few years I have been to Edinburgh and London, Australia… twice as well as California three times. So that is a statement that I do not take lightly.
There are some logistics still up in the air but never before have I been quite as excited about anything as I am about the prospect of being able to take to the sky and explore the world of General Aviation.
While my wallet will never be quite the same again I can’t thank everyone who finally kicked me off this cliff enough. I can’t promise I will take malicious notes here chronicling my experience as I seem to have an aversion to updating this damnable thing but I am sure I will update more often than I have recently.