Category: Daily Life

Today needs to be a fast and furious day of highly focused coding. First monkey wrench, Knox County Schools are opening 2 hours late. Second monkey wrench, I have a couple of hours of phone calls and paperwork to do. Effectively my day is cut in half which means that I’ll be programming into the wee hours of the night. I wonder if I shouldn’t outsource my life. Tim Ferriss has outsourced everything including dating.

After too much deliberation and mediating a temper tantrum, the 2nd sales call is done. Now onto productive work!

My projects cry out to me like hungry babies but sales calls have to be handled first. One down. One to go.

I am a strong advocate of telecommuting. I think we should rapidly transition our workforce to their houses. The results would be less fuel burned, less infrastructure for companies to maintain, less coal burned, less hydrocarbons released into the air, reduced traffic on the roads, reduced pollution, better relations within families, etc. Many types of jobs such as customer service (over the phone), accounting, technical support, quality assurance, … most office jobs, could be done from the house. Maybe once a week they staff comes into the corporate office for a few hours of face to face. Everything else can be Skype, instant messengers, webex, and other online tools.

All that said, working from home is hard! It is a huge exercise in self-discipline. You have to fight the urge to just lay in bed, or play with kids, or fix that hole in the roof. Finding your work groove can talk a long time. For me, my best performance is when I wake at 4am and get a couple of hours of work done before the kids rise for school. Those hours allow me a few distractions in morning or afternoon without hurting my productivity. My most stressful times are when I have not given myself a buffer for distraction. Fortunately, 4 out of the 5 children are in school so school acts as a natural buffer. School holidays are tough!

When the schools take breaks, the children are wild. A holiday messes with their OCD, their karma, their routine and they get a little charged up. Of course, they also assume that since they are on break, so is the rest of the world which makes it difficult for the work-at-home parent. Of course, when that parent works around the globe and we have a US holiday like Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday and only some of the US celebrates and none of the world recognizes it then the schools tack on an in-service day to make it a 4 day weekend, my stress sky rockets since I feel I’m being torn multiple directions. Many times I have thought about declaring my work scheduled to be the same as the Knox County School’s calendar.

Yesterday was actually a productive day. It did not get quantity checked off my list but killed off a technical hurdle that was driving me nuts. A CSS issue was causing a webpage to render far differently in Internet Explorer 7 than in Firefox. The goal was to have a box of text with a large green border be partially underneath a photograph that had a large yellow border. Naturally the green border underneath the picture should not show. The text could not slide under the picture instead it had to wrap along th edge of the picture. Got it to work for any size photo and any length of text!

All that said, its back to work for me!

Being sick last week has totally knocked me out of whack. Schedules have slipped, my head is unclear (clouded with stress and a headache that never left from the sickness), and the room is so blasted cold it is difficult to move. Incense is lit and the music is on. Attempting to focus on a single subject and move forward!

Friday night, Rich of Shots Across the Bow pulled together another blogfest. It was at Bailey’s which unfortunately has turned 21 and older only to circumvent Tennessee’s smoking ban. I had planned on spending 20 minutes at Bailey’s then getting Noah from karate practice and bringing him to the party. Barry, of Inn of the Last Home, brought the whole family only to leave them in the car at the same time I was running Noah back to the house. La Fonero had sent me a second wireless router to give to a friend. I was considering either using it to extend the range of the first router they sent me or hacking it. After getting a Seesmic invite to pass along to someone, I thought I’d give the router away too (which went to Barry). Rich and Eric got the Seesmic invites. And for grins I grabbed some Allaire swag and gave away some tshirts and a mouse pad. The Allaire swag is leftovers from when I was supposed to be putting together the Knoxville ColdFusion User’s Group. Others are planning on cleaning out their basements during the next Blogfest.

In attendance, Johnny-Oh of Closet Extremist, Eric of Straight White Guy (who has the coolest calling cards! that is, poker chips for his blog), Cathy of Domestic Psychology, myself, Lissa Kay of Oh Really, Rich of Shots Across the Bow, Craig Thomas of The Roundtable, Tam of View from the Porch and friend, Les Jones, and Barry of Inn of the Last Home (with family in car)!

I had a blast but fear I monopolized Eric. Certainly was nice seeing some new faces!

So, I don’t get to see the movie until 8:20pm so I’ve set my router up to not let any website showing the word "cloverfield" or "clover field" into the house. Don’t tell me about it! I don’t want to know.

I like to talk about the greener grass. Every now and then I see how much greener the grass is over at Corporate World. Now is not one of those times. I’m enjoying working for myself very much right now. Of course, it is not without its stresses. Last night my workday ended around 11:30pm (and that’s only because my eyes wouldn’t stay open and my forehead proved inept at hitting the correct keys on the keyboard). I arose at 3:00am and got right back into coding. Freelancing means doing anything to get the job done! Now, that’s not to say the corporate world is dissimilar. I’m no foreigner to sleeping under a desk in a cubicle. Which I guess brings me back around to that greener grass. When corporate folk start thinking, "I should quit and go work for myself because …" and when freelancers start thinking, "I need to go back to the corporate world because…", they both really need to remember that each path has its perks and drawbacks. Just pick and stick to it.

Time to get back to my other job…herding children toward the bus stop.