Adventures in home working

being a Pocket PC user, the first things I did when I got my tablet was to move the Start Menu/Task bar to the top of the screen.  I then changed it to display small Icons, made the task bar two rows deep and locked it.  This seems far and away the easiest configuration if you work in portrait mode as a slate. 

I noticed that a few apps for example Zinio don't position themselves correctly, when maximised, ie they lay under the taskbar but I can live with that. 

I was looking at how a few people used their tablets the other day and noticed people don't seem to position their Office Toolbars vertically.  This seems a real shame to me as they seem to take up no space that way and are so easy to reach with the stylus. 

I have 2 pocket PC's, a Blackberry and a Tablet, all of them play music but I also have a Creative Nomad 20G.  How did I get in this mess.

Well it started with one of the original IPAQ's which a few years ago I thought was a marval.  I carried it everywhere and loaded it with loads of useless software and tried to squeeze a CD's worth of muisic onto it.  After about 3 months I hardly ever used it because the battery life was too short and the synchronisation too much of a chore.  My 11 year old daughter has it now, and after a month of enthusiasm hardly ever uses it either.

Then I got the Nomad, I copied all my CD's onto it and hardly made a dent in its 20GB, I converted all of the Tech-ED conference DVDs into WMA files so I could listen to them in the gym and out walking.  It got used a lot for a few months, and still gets used perhaps once or twice a week.  But if I lost it tomorrow it would not have much of an impact on my life, in fact I probably wouldn't even notice.

Then I got my first Blackberry, a dual band mono model with integrated phone, (headset only).  I loved it, in my view almost perfect form and function for its purpose, Wireless Email and Calendar.  I never did get tasks to synchronise with Notes properly.  In fact after about a week the only time it ever went into its crade was to charge its batteries.  I never synch it with my PC all synch was wireless.  However the gadgeter in me wanted more so I got a colour 7210, triband model, with a bit more memory and a real phone.  Its great, has fantastic battery life and the colour makes it look a bit livelier.  its true that its adictive though.  I use it every day, even though I work at home because it allows me to appear to be working when I am in a cafe or walking, or sitting on the beach.  The fact that I never need to synch it, that its always on, always up to date, incredibly slick to use means I am never without it.

But then I was given a shiny new Pocket PC, from HP.  It's tiny, has a fab display, bluetooth, 64MB, SD and CF cards.  it syncs with my Tablet just great.  But its not got a phone,  I still have to take an action to synch it and it's just not as slick as the Blackberry.  However I do still use it, but more as a complement to my Blackberry, one I can do without but is nice to have.

Finally I have my tablet, my only truely indispenable gadget.  Its a perfect complement to the Blackberry though neither depends on the other they both keep in synch via a corporate Notes server wirelessly.  One is there for real work, the other for instant on communication.

I have another phone, a Nokia 6210i in addition to my Blackberry because Blackberrys don't have a car kit and using them as a phone does eat into that fantastic battery life. 

I had my first visit from an occupational therapist today.  I have been referred to her to assess the type of work I do and how that can best be adjusted to make it easier for me to cope.  She arrived 2 hours late and stayed for 4 hours.  The visit itself tired me out but it was very useful.  She helped me to see my condition in terms of its affect on my work, and the affect my work has on the condition.  The process she went through was enlightening, and should be useful.  Not suprisingly she has not worked with anyone with AOSD before but she says that the symptoms and affect on work are simillar to those that people suffering from chronic fatigue go through.

She wants me to start an 8 week controlled trial, where I will work from home on well bounded tasks and keep lots of records.  For the first 4 weeks she wants me to increase from 20 hours a week to 37.5, my normal hours in gradual steps.

All in all 4 hours well spent.

I have played around with pretty much all of the software, but not much of it has survived the several rebuilds I have done for various purposes, eg HD upgrades, beta tests etc.  This is what's left.

• Zinio
• Top desk
• MyIE2
• Ultramon
• Onenote
• Virtual CD Control tool
• Mind manager
• Office 2003
• Journal

So why did these survive:

Zinio survives because in my enthusiasm I went and subscribed to a couple of magazines.  My feeling is that its not quite there.  Its a bit slow, the TC1100 screen size is a bit too small, and the 1024*768 resolution a bit too low.  In addition it does not maximise correctly, if you have your task bar at the top of the screen as I do. 

Top Desk is a real find.  Its a bit of freeware, that sits in your tray and when you click it it shows you all of the shortcuts on your desktop.  if you are anything like me you have far to many applications to fit on the Start menu, so this provides much more room.  If you are ultra-tidy it also lets you hide everything from your desktop, which makes you look very organised.  Its particular good in my view because on a low resolution screen I have no room for all of the additional toolbars that I used to display when I had a laptop with a 1400*1050 screen.

MyIE2 survives because of the tabs.  It allows me launch say 20 different IE windows as I am browing through my blog entries, and then just click through them later.  Its also great when I am doing research.  I find the tabs so much better on the tablet than trying to navigate so many windows in the taskbar or a taskbar group.

Ultramon is essential if you use your tablet with two displays

I started being really organised with OneNote, with a very complex folder hierarchy.  I am just not that organised.  Now I just have a daily log and a few research areas.  I find it has lots of limitatoins that have been discussed already.  But used simply and regularly I have found it very useful.  I would not have paid for OneNote but I get it free.

Virtual CD Control tool.  Well I don't have a CD drive when I am mobile, but I can use this tool to mount an ISO image whenever I need one.  Another good freeware find.

I already had Mind Manager,  I tried the tablet PC version, and thought it was great, but the upgrade costs were just too high.

Office 2003.  I use it extensively for reviewing and don't have too many problems, except that inking at the edge of the screen is a bit hit and miss when using comments.  I have just started looking at the Image printer and Image viewer, the ink support in the viewer seems really good at first glance.

Journal, because its installed by default.  I do find it useful though for marking up stuff that I printed to it.

of course I use loads of other SW, but this is the main stuff thats Tablet related.

In my home office I already have a desktop PC and Printer/Scanner, and I have a wireless keyboard and mouse.  When I started to work from home I wanted to add the Tablet into this mix as easily as possible.  Heres what I did first.

First off I only wanted one keyoard and mouse, and I wanted to use my Desktop PC screen.  The easy solution to that was to use Microsoft's Remote Desktop, which allows me to effectively Terminal Serve my Tablet Screen to my Desktop. This was good but it had the disadvantage that my Tablet screen was not being used at all and that when I needed to make a VPN connection to work, I had to use the tiny tablet screen and keyboard.

So I put my tablet in its docking station, and used a KVM switch so that I could use one keyborad and mouse.  Because of the dual monitor support in XP, I am able to extend my Tablet Display onto my desktop monitor as well so I can use both screens.  To make the dual screen experience really slick I installed Ultramon which makes moving applications between displays really easy.

I put the Tablet and Desktop in the same workgroup, and that makes sharing hard drives, DVD players and printers easier as well.

When docked I use a 100MB wired network.  When undocked I use my home wireless network.

Via the docking station I have USB connections to all of my gadgets, but I have also got a bluetooth connection with my Pocket PC, which works between my Living room and my Office.

The only other trick was to get a USB to PS2 keyboard and mouse connector so that I could connect the KVM swicth, PS2 only, to the tablet, USB only.

I have a TC1100 from Compaq which is a slate format with a detachable format.  Because I work mostly from home I almost never have the keyboard attached, and just use it as a slate for reading or document reviews or dock it for everything else.

The Tablet itself has a 60GB hard drive and 1GB of memory and its a Pentium M 1.0GHz processor.  I previously had a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB, and I don't know how but this seems just as fast.

I have the standard docking station with an additional 40GB disk in it for image backups and stuff and an external DVD drive, which sits on top.

The Tablet has bluetooth and wireless

It really is a great hardware design, perfect if your main requirement when mobile is to use a slate.  the keyboard is not ideal for extended typing.

I recently managed to get a Tablet PC.  After the first day I thought this is the way to go,  I was amazed at how natural it felt to use, especially as I have a TC1100 slate from Compaq.

I do a lot of reviewing and reading, and I like to do that outside my Office environment because its a lot more relaxing.

However I have toyed with it a lot, used lots of different software, tried out the 2004 beta, integrated it into my home office and gadgets.  I have worked out a lot of things that work for me and they might be useful for others, so I thought I would blog on these a bit.  Things I think will be useful are:

1. What HW configuration do I use
2. How have I integrated it with my gadgets
3. How have I integrated it with my home PC, home network and company network
4. What Software have I tried, what have I kept and wat have I given up on
5. Great web sites

I am sure that other stuff will spring to mind.

I work in Infrastructure Architecture, and used to be a Chief Architect for a BIG account for a BIG SI company.  It was a great job, but my condition - AOSD - has meant I can not take the strain anymore.  However that does not stop me thinking, so I thought I would blog about some of my ideas and concerns over whats happening with IT infrastructure, especially in big businesses. 

Some of the topics I would like to talk a bit about are:

1. The whole, Thick, Thin, Smart client debate
2. The information worker, Longhorn, Portals, Office etc
3. The tradeoff between flexibility, productivity and cost

 

I realised as I was thinking about things to blog about that I have a lot of gadgets.  Some of them are useful and some are toys.  Often I find I am wildly enthusiastic about one of them for a few weeks, telling everyone they need one too and then it sits in a corner for months without being touched.  So I thought I might help others not to make the same mistake and also pick out some real gems, for me at least.

So these are some of the Gadgets I will talk about soon:

1. My two IPAQ Pocket PC's
2. My Blackberry
3. My Tablet PC
4. My KVM switch
5. My Amstrad Emailer
6. My HP OfficeJet d125i
7. My Wireless network
8. My Creative Nomad Jukebox
9. My Minolta Dimage Z1 camera
10. My Nokia 6310i phone

and just in cae you think I am too rich for my own good, lots of these were provided by work, or by friendly suppliers.

I am now working at home.  It has taken quite a while to adjust to the radically different environment, so I thought I wuld start a weblog about my experiences.  A few things that I would like to cover are:

• Good information sources on the web
• How to get an agreement with you employer
• How I setup my Office
• How I setup my IT
• My normal working day
• How I manage with 4 children, especially during the holidays
• Isolation

Thats the stuff I kno about right now, but I will add things as I learn more.

One of the things that has really helped me with AOSD s keeping my own records.  Its a very difficult thing to diagnose, so the doctors need all of the help they can get.

First lets consider the major symptoms:

1. A rash.  Take photo's, normally the rash doesn't itch and its clearer after a hot bath.
2. A spiking temperature.  Keep a log of your temperature, if you have Still's it will alternate between well above normal and a little below, at least once a day and sometimes twice.  I found that this pattern was not too evident when I was in in hospital because they gave me asprin all through the day which masked the effect.  In my case its only when I left hospital and stopped the asprin that all became clear.
3. It involves joints and muscules and it moves around.  Keep a pain chart, I had a daily chart that recorded which joints and muscles hurt and how much.  I colour coded it and produced graphs.  When my doctor looked at the pain chart and the temperature chart he said "Ah Ha AOSD".  In my case the chart is a wild pattern, with different muscles and joints showing up in different colours most days.  However I can see that when I am getting close to a flare, its my fingers that are the early warning!
4. It maybe induced by Stress,  Keep a stress chart,  I did this as soon as I went back to work.  When I comparsed the stress and pain chart they were almost the same.  When I showed it to HR at work it was much easier to have a discussion about working from home and changing the type of work I do.

So in summary I have no majic cure for AOSD, but if you want a better deal from your doctors and from your employer, I think it pasy to keep your own records!

Approximately 4 years ago I was working in London, and had a sore throat and was noticing some annoying muscle stiffness and pain, I boarded the train to return to Preston and on arrival found I could no longer stand.  By the next morning I was unable to get out of bed due to extreme muscle and joint pain.  The condition was not diagnosed at this time and no treatments were effective, although home care was possible.  After about 6 weeks I was able to return to work.  Very minor reoccurrence of symptoms were noticed occasionally, but they had no affect on my lifecycle or ability to work. 

 

After about 18 months I had another flare-up, resulting in approximately 4 weeks off work, again with home care being given.  I returned to work however this time I did notice some muscle pain every week or so, however this was never correlated with stress or workload, and had no affect on my lifecycle or ability to work. 

 

Last year I had a major flare-up, causing almost complete disability, i.e. unable to move unaided, feed myself etc.  I was admitted to hospital for care and whilst there had extensive tests for 2 weeks, no diagnosis was made but my condition stabilised sufficiently to allow me to return home.  Within days the condition flared again and I was re-admitted to hospital for further care.  During this period as a result of records I had kept of his pattern of pain and temperature the diagnosis of Still’s was made with confidence.

 

A treatment plan was created and within a week I was able to leave hospital and 4 weeks later was able to return to work.

Following my return to work around April last year I have never been free of pain.  I kept daily records of pain and stress levels.  Even whilst continuing to take regular Steroids to suppress the symptoms I had one flare, and since coming off steroids two flares, the last one in January requiring re-establishment of the treatment and two weeks off work.

 

I approached my company about changing to a less stressful job and working from home, they have agreed in principle, so I am at home right now and decided to start this log.

The link takes you to the AOSD web site.  Its a rare disease thats a bit like Arthritis, I started with it about 4 years ago and its been getting worse since then.  Here's a little bit of background:

AOSD is an inflammatory condition that attacks internal organs, joints and other parts of the body. It can appear and disappear suddenly. In very severe cases, AOSD becomes chronic and extremely debilitating, causing terrible pain and stiffness. After many years, the disease cripples vital organs such as the heart and lungs.

Thats the bad news, I will tell you a bit about my experiences with AOSD soon, and then things will get a lot more positive!

I started this weblog, because I have AOSD.  Most people won't know what it is because less than 1 in 100,000 people have it.  But its important because its this disease thats resulted in me working from home, using a Tablet PC and changing my life in many ways.  So I thought I would write about the experience, for other people who like me may be going through a life change, or suffering, working from home, or in fact using a Tablet.  Finally as I am involved quite heavily in the IT industry I might have the odd useful observation about that as well.