The working from home thread: tips and advice

3 yr old wee is still pretty pure I reckon. Not like a cup of builders tea with three sugars in.
What sort of computer is it? Laptop? Micro desktop? Tower?
A tower would be the ideal receptacle, lots of empty space. Laptop should be a bit resilient to spills, I had one client who got a new laptop that someone spilt an entire cup of tea on, and once I turned it off, opened it up and dried it off, worked flawlessly.
Micro PC is a bit of an unknown quantity to me, but I imagine it would be less water resistant than a laptop. Same with an all in one

Fucking hell.

i'm going to have to congratulate my son for not pissing on my computer tomorrow

A bit late to this, but I've been unofficially working from home for some time now (maybe a couple of years? I haven't really kept track). My work machine is also my machine, and I keep Teams, Outlook and Zoom open pretty much all the time, which means that what ends up happening is that I ramp down the amount of work that I do at around 18:00, but keep an eye on what comes in and will answer/do quick bursts of work up until I hit the sack at around 22:00.

I have to say I can't recommend doing this, and if I'd thought about it I'd probably have made a point of exiting the work applications at knocking off time, but equally it does help me manage my workload as otherwise (I'm responsible for EMEA+APAC directly, and indirectly the Americas, which covers all timezones) there can be a pile of stuff to deal with in the morning - and I often have to go directly into back to back calls from 8am onward, so it's hard to balance the time against the work.

Still, I've made a rod for my own back, so don't do what I do.

I go to the spare room for calls, and when not on calls divide my time between the sofa, the standing desk pictured below, and staring into the fridge wondering how much cheese one man can eat in a day.

This week I've started trying to get an hour of Zwift in from 07.30, quick shower and then work. This also means that I'm in outside clothes for lunch (as opposed to jogging bottoms and a random T-shirt, which is my before-shower clobber), so going for my government permitted solo walk at lunchtime is more straightforward. It definitely makes a difference being showered and changed for work, instead of just drifting into it, and I support the view that getting up, having breakfast and so forth before cracking on with emails is a good idea.

I kind of drifted into WFH because I'm on calls for much of the day and I couldn't do that in a crowded and noisy shared office, and pre-C19 I travelled a lot, so it was easier to be at home between trips to the airport. I'm still pretty ambivalent about it, very easy to feel isolated, and you miss a big social aspect of the office that I don't find Teams etc makes up for.

On the flip side, once we come out of the worst of the C19 period hopefully we will make better use of the possibilities of remote working mixed with presence in the office.

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How people work on laptops with no keyboard or monitor is beyond me

It's taking some getting used to - usually have a nice big 4k 27" behemoth at work and just stuck with a MacBook now... on a sofa.

On the other hand, if the work was coming in at the same rate as 2 months ago... I would have broken into the office and stolen my setup by now.

How people work on laptops with no keyboard or monitor is beyond me

Depends on what you do I suspect, it's adequate for my email and Zoom dominated day, but likely rather more difficult for people manipulating large amounts of data.

I stole my mouse and keyboard on my last day in the office. Bare minimum to make my life mildly easier.

I’ve just spent a fortnite not only WFH but being on boarded to a new company. I’ve done the WFH on and off for years but joining a company this way has been tough, and really makes it tough to get to know names and faces. Ironically I took the role as I wanted to work in an office full of peeps again instead of on my own.

Only upside is I have a pretty sweet setup and amazing views.

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Wow! Where are you?

Valencia, Spain. So I’ve already been stuck working here for three weeks and they’ve just pushed it out so it’ll be a minimum of three more.

Also, while the setup looks nice, a bug has managed to crawl between the outer layer and the screen on my Ultrafine 5K monitor and then die. About 1/3 in from the top left.

I’m fuming. I keep thinking it’s a bug in Sketch.

a bug has managed to crawl between the outer layer and the screen on my Ultrafine 5K monitor and then die

wtf

I would be so pissed about that. Can you make a warranty claim? Surely it should be bug proof?

Sweet setup anyway, even with the bug.

I'm about to do my first full day in weeks.

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While I am glad to still be in work, sitting in a spare bedroom hunched over a laptop is not ideal and I am mightily pissed off that a neighbour is taking advantage of the sunny weather to sand some old bit of shabby shit furniture in his garden all day long. With a loud electric sander of course. So I have to keep the window shut and I can still hear the bastard thing buzzing away so I am listening to White Denim on headphones which is out of character and not conducive to drafting a deed to enable one charity to hand over responsibility to another charity for a project that the first one no longer has capacity to oversee.

If I ask him to stop, he will start again this evening when I want to sit outside. And he’s basically a nice bloke, just a bit addicted to power tools. And he is out of work because of Coronavirus so...

... do I just carry on and hope he hasn’t got sanding projects to fill up the next few weeks? Do I suggest to him he might want some sort of mask to keep the dust out of his lungs?

ask him to buy you some noise cancelling headphones. they're especially good at basically deleting repetitive humming or buzzing sounds

Nice idea - actually would make sense for me to get some of those

Edit: order placed for some cheap Lindy ones.

White Denim on headphones

Amazing, has @pajamas started a band?

My current set up, works like a charm.

Can’t be said about architecting from home though.

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That Neufert's is good for something!

Underneath that is the metric handbook

I have been Architecting from home for the past 3 weeks.. hard enough at times, but it has quietened down as all our sites are shut.. I will be glad for the Easter break.. How are you getting remote access to servers etc?? any issues