Category: Personal

I’ve been working from home for a year and a half now, and I’ve had enough. It’s time for an office.

Yeah, I know, I used to brag about how cool it was, and how nice it was to work in pajamas. The conveniences are still there mind you. I can always be available for FedEx, phone guys and plumbers, and accepting various other deliveries. I spend 2 minutes making coffee, and that is the gist of my “getting ready” in the morning. I don’t have to drive to work, and suffer the 3 hours a day sitting in a hot car, wasting money on gas, and robbing myself of 3 weeks of my life a year. All that stress during the commute is never accumilated. I’m in my home environment, in my personal office, with copious amounts of food (sometimes) in comfortable surroundings. My puppy dogs are asleep at my feet. What setting could be better to code in?

And that’s the problem. It’s my home, not my work.

A friend of ours once diagnosed her majesty and I with a problem. She noticed my gaming systems in the bedroom, with the bed aimed at the TV, and all of her majesty’s toys next to the bed. This wasn’t a bedroom, but where her majesty and I relaxed. You are supposed to do that in the living room if you have one. It was just nice to be relaxed while I played games and could spend time with her majesty while she knit or blogged or whatever. However, it cost us sleep. I already have mild insomnia, and she can’t sleep if I’m not sleeping. We were bluntly told to only sleep in the bedroom; if I wanted to play games, if she wanted to knit or blog, or if either of us wanted to watch a movie or TV, we’d have to do so in the living room.

So, I moved all of our shiz, and we re-arranged, the bed to not face the TV. We moved the TV out, too. Within 2 weeks, I was finding it easier to sleep, and other positive things came from the living room situation as well. In short, it was an appropriate use of rooms.

I think I’m not using my office appropriately. Although it’s my “man cave”, it harbors a lot of negativity. All the pain, frustration, and anger of my day stays there. I’m not very good at dropping things either. That attitude is what helps me spend hours solving a simple problem. It’s also a curse, though, when working from home. You can’t “leave it at work”. It’s one thing to discuss your day to get it off your chest; it’s another to return to the room to finishing working. I’ve even found myself some days dreading going into the room. This is the same room that inspires me to create, the same room that has Flex 2 & Flash 8 installed on my gaming box… and I even hesitate? Do you see the horror of the situation?

When her majesty comes home from work, the home becomes a different place. She “lives here” while I’m working. It’s hard to switch modes. I’ve done it, but it robs me of distraction sometimes. If she catches me at a stopping point, or when I’m merely merging & checking code in, it’s really not a big deal at all. But if I’m in the middle of debugging, or on the phone, conversing with co-workers, or talking to clients… it’s rough. I want to be the house husband, but I need to be working. Taking a break is hard because so near to the end of the day, it’s hard to keep the momentum going if you haven’t started something cool at like 3:00.

I always thought working from home would be awesome. I remember reading Sean Voisen’s experience about he was lonely, and wanted to be on a team in person. Hah! Dude, I so was not going to be lonely, and I can still work with a team I thought. Yeah, but you can never leave the tribulations elsewhere, you never have a sanctuary, and work is always a click away. Without a proper balance, you end up like me, blogging when you should be passed out exhausted. Don’t get the wrong idea; the good and great days I have at work do propagate into the house hold, but they don’t belong there. They belong at work.

I had her majesty do reacon last week, and I did some searching today. A wide vareity of places are available, but I’m taking my boss’ advice, and only getting what I’m excited about. I was planning on getting the cheapest place I could find, but he said I’d hate it, and I believe him after playing it out in my mind.

One thing that won’t change is telecommuting. I’ll still telecommute to work. We have consultants all over the place, and my team and I can still collaborate, kick arse, and take numbers regardless of where we are. If a client needs me on site, I can do that too. For the day to day operations, I’ll need a new base of operations, and it’s not my home.

I think in the meantime, I’ll fix the regenerated Alienware laptop, and head to the local mom and pop donut & sandwhich shop to work at a few times a week. They have the fastest wireless I’ve ever seen, and overpriced sandwhiches. Being forced to get dressed daily will be weird, but something’s gotta give.

Any office buying advice?

I just got an email from a recruiter of sorts. They want me to do phone Flex / Flash consultation for a 20 – 40 minute paid phone call. Apparently, Ether could make money if they employed some sales teams. It seems all of California is reaching out worldwide, looking for people to come to live and work there. The reason? To be tech-lead in their startup and manage contractors and outsourced individuals to make bling and fame in Web Deux Point OMG. If my hunch on what this call is about is correct, this’ll be the 3rd startup this month looking for Flexcoder meat.

While I’m glad the resurgence in tech is creating a plethora of new companies & re-energizing budgets of old ones, one thing is abundantly clear: Google is the only company who inadvertently got Identity 2.0 remotely correct.

Case in point, the recruiter wants me to fill out a form on their website with my personal information. Usually, I’m all for this. As long as my address and phone number isn’t required, I don’t care what you have documented about me. The address you can easily get on the internet, but when I put my digits out on the net a few years back, I got some whack phone calls.

The phone number being a required field made me panic, and I gave up. I merely replied to her email with my digits. Four years ago, the paragraphs from a multitude of job websites, and the advice of being professional from a variety of role models would resound loudly in my head. I would have read the email 3 times, followed the instructions in my head, then followed them for real, and hand craft a response. Now that I’m not starving? Totally different. Granted, I’m still professional as can be, but I’m so sick of filling out my information on websites. In 2002, I polluted the internet like the pollen of Georgia does the atmosphere, and inputted my info on every job website I could find. Only Monster.com came through in the end (3 times in a row, w00t!).

Nowadays? My website. Jessewarden.com has everything I need: contact information, blog entries in great supply to showcase code aptitude as well as a structure that gets me into search engines. While I still occasionally get an email from a recruiter who found me on Monster, most nowadays find me via email lists, referrals, or Google, typically the latter for the ones I only hear from once in my life.

The time invested my personal website now provides more of a return on investment than time spent putting my information into OTHER websites years ago. My content equals more context. More context is more food for Google (and other engines, but who cares about them?) to parse. More relevant context means higher placement for relevant keywords. Those looking for things I want to be found for will find me and I don’t have to pay for Google AdWords either. I already get more potential opportunity than I can handle from just spouting my mouth off about technology and other things I think are cool.

So, while the email from her, the recruiter, stated I should follow the link to fill out my information on their website to “register for our network of industry professionals”, I unprofessionally replied with just my phone number. I mean, if a company that on it’s about page states:

[the company]…differentiates itself by its adeptness at finding the ‘tough-to-find’ industry specialist[s]…

Then isn’t it logical to assume that if they are capable enough to type in “flex consultant” in a text field and pressing the enter key on Google.com, then they are more than capable of inputting the rest of my information into their database as well? Maybe it is quite a skill set jump from 1 text field to 12 for their web form, but I mean… seriously? Let’s define legwork here. You give the impression you are doing “hard work” by using Google when THEY are the ones who found me with MY help… they least you can do is transpose what is on my website into your database. If some info is missing, just call me or send me an email with the understanding I’ll part with it if it’s for a business transaction. Suddenly, there is no panic at me giving my information to yet another database out of my control and long term memory. I don’t even have to remember yet another password!

You gotta give her credit though; I AM the unlucky #13 for those search results AND the description for the link goes something like:

…still, f’me this is frustrating. Flex? You my bitch. Consulting? :: WHAP! :: Thank you… can I have another?

Anyone willing to put faith in me after that rant certainly has perseverance.

Heck, just re-read the email… apparently unless I fill out the form, I can’t get the consulting job. Give and take I guess.

I just a obtained new bank debit card this week. My old one was getting pounded by a few services I don’t use and are hard to cancel. One in particular, eFax and I took no faith in their automated chat saying that “this chat is your confirmation of cancellation”. Words are cheap, bro, especially ones written for you as you click a button to automate everything you’ve said to me. You can’t block their monthly charges because they raise their price a few cents every month, thus dodging the flags the bank imposes.

This was done because the banker I talked to was young, pragmatic, and already cynical to identify theft and other unblockable internet charges. Most bankers older than the woman I’ve spoken too tell me to contact the company in question; they don’t understand internet businesses don’t usually have brick and mortar locations I can waltz to in order to throttle idiots. Updating those services that matter isn’t so hard; most let me know they need to be updated when they try to charge and they can’t. For example, my Flashcom hosting was totally cool with giving me more time and not charging a late fee, but if history is any indication, someday soon my blog will stop working and my email will stop working in the middle of the day because Mediatemple takes no crap. To the point; these various companies inadvertently ask for my permission to do so. That’s cool; I’m in control and in this case, I’m the epicenter.

When my email or website changes, however, that contact only information isn’t updated. All the countless sites I put contact info on is now inaccurate. Again, Google solves this problem. I just wait a week for it to re-index my site.

While I think it’d be neat for some website run by a private company that exposed controlled access to your information globally to those who wanted it per your permission, right now Google already does that. I put on my website what information I want people to have access to, in this case, my email address, age, geographical location, date of birth, and profession. Google then exposes that information as relevant to those who usually need to know. When I update it, so does Google. Again, when that information changes (which isn’t often), so too does Google within a week or so.

My website combined with Google’s ability to index it is my Identity 2.0 …I guess (haven’t watched the presentation Tony told me too, who has time for such things?).

Why do recruiters then scour Google only to take out contact information of individuals to put into their database which in turn is usually not ever updated? Why not just leave it where it’s fresh, up to date (at least for me), and always accessible? You don’t need an on or off-site IT staff to manage your data; Google does it for you. Furthermore, this allows the individual to control what information is exposed, and if more is needed, you can email the person, in this case me.

As I glance at another un-read email from LinkedIn.com, I ask the same question I ask myself every time, “What’s the point?” For those who don’t have an online presence (personal / professional website, LiveJournal, Blogger, MySpace profile, etc.) I can understand the need to “get yourself into” these places to increase your exposure, accessibility, and chance of positive opportunity. Not for me, though.

I guess I’ll follow instructions and do what she asked. I’m probably a faster typist anyway, and I love to talk about Flex with people so what the heck. If my cell number gets hijacked, it’s all good, I didn’t like the look of it anyway; a stylish phone needs a stylish set of digits to go with it.

I was shopping at the mall for some new diggs, and while in Hot Topic purchasing the Charlie & The Chocolate Factory sunglasses, I spotted a shirt that said, “I Blogged Your Mom”. WTF?

I can understand if I were 16 again, and I spotted my friend’s mom nekkid or something and I blogged the experience… but… there has to be some other meaning there. I know I’m over-analyzing it, but I can usually port reason to some of the insane, teenage angst shirts I see, just not this one.

One really cool one was of the dog from Family Guy dressed up in a banana costume with maracas and it said It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time. Not sure how Family Guy fits in, but hey, it’s a phat tune so who cares.

Speaking of shirts, I got wasd, insert coin, and Hadouken v2 for my birthday.

Celebrating my 27th birthday this Saturday at Eleven50 with my favorite DJ, JunkieXL. Tickets are $15. Hope to see you there!

JunkieXL via Liquified.