Adventures in home working

A few years ago when I started working a 4 hour day I was in a global role, working mainly with the US.  That meant I had my mornings free and I established a pattern of spending them walking, cycling and swimming with rest break at Cafe’s spent reading.  I worked great, I gradually worked myself back to a full time role. 

It didn’t take long though for that full time role to take a toll on my health and I was quickly relying on pain killers to get me through the day and I was taking ever more time off.  After about a year thanks to the advise and support of my managers and my occupational therapist I was put back on 4 hour days (actually 5 hour days with an extra rest day) but it hasn’t worked as well.  I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve been lazy. 

Instead of keeping moving during my morning’s I’ve settled into the habit of sitting and reading and whilst this is low stress, movement seems to be one of the keys to keeping my migraines and body pain down and my infections low.  Every holiday proves this too me and yet I still slip back into bad habits.

Even worse though, over the last 3 months I’ve had a wonderful Macbook Air, so light that I had no trouble taking it with me to the Cafe and so not only did I spend my time sitting, but I spent it sitting and working on my laptop.  It wasn’t long before I was on Sametime and full engaged in work during my mornings.  It was only a small step from there to deciding to stay home some mornings to go on conference calls, or catch up with backlog.  Next I was leaving earlier to head into the office and staying later!

So if I look back over the last 3 months as I slipped into bad habits, I had one good month, 1 month off sick and one month very slowly recovering from my month off sick.  During that last month I’ve been gradually drawn into longer and longer working hours, more time sitting and a lot less time moving. 

This last week’s holiday has allowed me the space to reflect and decide to get back to my previous good habits, basically walking, swimming and cycling while listening to loosely work related podcasts with regular cafe stops for reading on the kindle.  Working in the afternoon and hopefully an evening walk or cycle with the family.  I’m also trying to figure out how to establish a meditation session as well and do a little strength exercise at the excellent Fairhaven Lake Fitness trail.

I’ve suffered from migraines for most of my life, but 8 years ago they got much more frequent, up from 2 a month to 10-15 a month.  There was a clear link between this increase and developing Adult Onset Still Disease and I often discussed this with my GP and Rheumatology specialist but no improvement has been forthcoming despite many attempts at lifestyle change and new treatments.  In desperation my GP finally referred me to a specialist migraine clinic who just prescribed more meds.

So frustrated by what I considered to be a “less than comprehensive” assessment and treatment plan from the specialist I decided to do some more research myself (I’ve read several books over the years that have never had much actionable advice) and I settled on Coping with Headaches and Migraine by Alison Frith.

Imagine my surprise as I read this book, a summary of the best advise from the London Migraine clinic, and what unfolded was an exact description of my plight, what had caused it and a series of clear actionable steps to address it.  Not only was the advice actionable, but it contradicted most of what I thought I had already known and was so clear and simple that I was amazed that in dozens of meetings with doctors almost none of it had been mentioned.

Here’s a summary of the key points with enough context to allow readers to see if the advise is applicable to them and to understand why I was so shocked.

Key points:

1. People who suffer from chronic pain, like people with Rheumatoid Arthritis, who also suffer from Migraines and take pain killers for their Arthritis will often develop chronic migraines as well.  Often going from 2-3 times a month to 10-15.   That’s exactly my situation, the risk was never mentioned by my GP or Rheumatologist
2. The worst pain killers for someone to take for Arthritis if they suffer from Migraines are mixed Paracetamol and Codeine, even though they are often the most effective. I was prescribed CoCodamol 30/500’s and had them on repeat prescription.
3. This problem is well documented in the book “Medication Overuse Headache develops in headache-prone people. People who do not have tension-type headaches or migraine do not tend to develop MOH if they use painkillers for other conditions such as arthritis or back pain. People with these conditions who also have migraine should take particular care”.  So it’s amazing that a phenomenon that’s considered “Overuse” that’s documented throughout my medical history and my repeat prescriptions was never spotted. 
4. About a year ago I found out about rebound headaches and Codeine I discussed this with my GP and agreed a strategy of reducing the CoCodamol to 3-4 times a week and the rest of the time using either soluble paracetamol and caffeine or Ibuprofen.  
5. Both my GP and Specialist also prescribed Triptans (not pain killers but brain chemistry modifiers)  I took them for a couple of months but noticed my headaches were just as frequent but now more severe.  Not very good advice
6. This is why this wasn’t very good advice, (more quotes from the book):
   1. The longer that MOH continues, the more difficult it is to treat, don’t delay seeking help – the specialist just gave me more meds, no exploration of my concerns over rebound headaches
   2. Avoid changing one drug for another. This is just as risky for developing MOH – contradicts completely the advice I was given.  In fact the specialist didn’t even ask me what pain killers I took for Arthritis
   3. If you have MOH, all painkillers and Triptans must be stopped completely – otherwise supportive strategies will not help.  contradicts completely the advice I was given
   4. Clinical studies suggest that oral aspirin (600–900 milligrams [mg]) has the best effectiveness.  For 40 years all of my prescriptions have been for Paracetamol + other stuff, never had aspirin been mentioned
   5. Tips for avoiding caffeine-related headache Minimize caffeine in your diet if you can – never mentioned
   6. Combination drugs with caffeine and Aspirin or Paracetamol can lead to medication over-use more quickly – over 50% of the over the counter remedies now seem to also contain caffeine
7. Finally the specialist prescribed Topamax a migraine prevention drug also used to treat epilepsy -  after 2 days though it was seriously messing with my brain,  I couldn’t focus, couldn’t recall common words, sense of taste changed and body felt “out of alignment” with my brain, as if my sense of where my body should be and where it actually was was 30 degrees out of sync – so I stopped those very quickly!!

Ok so where am I now:

1. Stopped the regular CoCodamol for 2 weeks while I was working, but still took other pain killers to keep me going during headaches or joint/muscle pain
2. After 2 weeks stopped all pain killers, and took a weeks holiday, kept healthy and exercised every day, reduced caffeine.  I had headaches every day and loads of shoulder and arm pain – I’m currently 6 days into this and the headaches are still getting worse

Where do I hope to get to, again quotes from the book:

1. Limit triptan use for migraine to a maximum of ten days per month. Limit painkillers to a maximum of 15 days per month. Remember that it is the number of days that you treat that is important – not the number of doses in a day. Avoid any drugs containing caffeine, codeine or other combination painkillers – this is going to be quite a challenge as when my Arthritis is bad I depend on pain killers to work and sleep
2. Naproxen can be used to aid recovery from MOH and replace your usual method of pain control, This non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug is prescribed in a six-week reducing regimen – should be able to use this in about another 10 days time when I am back at work the the bad days, it works for body and head pain
3. Clinical studies suggest that oral aspirin (600–900 milligrams [mg]) has the best effectiveness and take it soluble with an anti-sickness medications to help nausea and – importantly – to prevent your gut from shutting down – this is what I hope to use on the 10 days a week when I’m allowed to be in pain
4. Studies show a relapse rate of up to 40 per cent within five years, so you must be on your guard

In summary “MOH is common in those who seek help for their headaches. It is reported in at least ten per cent of those attending headache centres in Europe and up to 70 per cent in the USA”

A few tips on how I use my Kindle

Case

I started out thinking I didn’t need a case for my Kindle, but over the months I realised that this was a mistake:

1. A case means you worry less
2. A case makes it easier to hold the Kindle, even though it’s slightly heavier
3. A case lets you prop up your Kindle on a table for easier – hands free – reading
4. This is the one I went for

Content

Getting content onto your Kindle is key and there’s no better solution than Calibre:

1. I have a huge library of eBooks built up over the years in all manner of formats.  Many of these are public domain books from Project Gutenberg, some of them PDF documents and many more are electronic equivalents of the many thousands of paper books that I’ve purchased.  Calibre lets me convert these books to suit whichever eReader I happen to have at the time starting with Sony, then iPad, now Kindle.
2. Amazon has a good collection of free eBooks, note that if you get them from Amazon then your reading position will sync across your devices (assuming you have Kindle apps on them).  If you load them from Calibre then you only get them on your physical Kindle
3. Amazon has listed other free book collections
4. Although I like to read magazines on the iPad, Calibre auto-downloads content off magazine web sites and formats and packages it up for reading on the kindle for free.  The results are generally excellent.  Even better it will email the books direct to the Kindle (I use my gmail account to go this).  I leave Calibre running on my Home Server and so each week the magazines all just arrive on the Kindle like magic.
5. Instapaper is a web service that allows me to capture web content that I want to read from many sources including Google Reader, Twitter and arbitrary web sites.  Gathering web sites is as simple as clicking a bookmarklet, or using the Firefox addin Send to Instapaper.  The Instapaper web service stores all of the URL’s and then on a daily basis will email a neatly packaged up “book” to your Kindle for offline reading.  It’s not as good as the iPad experience which is fully synchronised with the web service, but it’s still useful.  I’m hoping that when the Kindle Appstore gets going one of the first apps in it will be Instapaper!

Getting content to the Kindle

I use several methods:

1. Calibre will transfer content directly to the Kindle via USB, perfect for bulk loading a large collection of books
2. I generally use email to get ad-hoc content to the Kindle.  I have a 3G Kindle, but I don’t generally want to use 3G for delivery of content, because then I have to pay for it, so I set my threshold to Zero (see pic) and then everything gets delivered via WIFI at no cost, regardless of which email address it’s sent to.
3. Every week Calibre sends me a bunch of magazines via email, over WIFI
4. Every night Instapaper send me a bunch of web pages via email over WIFI.  Although Instapaper says it doesn’t use the free kindle email service, you won’t get charged if you set your “personal document charge limit” as I have it above.
5. I buy — way too many — books as well via the Kindle store and they all get delivered over WIFI or 3G depending on where I am

I have a Kindle and an iPad, but its the Kindle that’s had the biggest impact on my life – so what’s so great about the Kindle?

The Kindle is for reading, whilst the iPad is optimised for distraction.  Yes it’s possible to do almost everything the Kindle does on the iPad, but not for long.  My brain has been trained by modern life to look for distractions every 5 minutes and if I’m reading on the iPad then it readily supplies those distractions and it does it incredibly well.

In contrast the kindle does only one thing well, it’s a superb text reading machine, yes it has an experimental browser, can read magazines and PDF’s, even play games, but it does all those things badly and slowly.  It’s sufficiently painful to browse the web on a kindle that I never bother, it’s never a distraction.

Why is this single mindedness an advantage over the iPad – because I want to read.  Reading is a real joy, something that I hardly ever get to do enough of and the Kindle is superb at it:

1. The screen is fantastic, wonderful contrast in all light conditions including full sun
2. Very light weight, meaning less stress on arthritic wrists
3. Very long battery life, meaning I never have to worry
4. Excellent page turning buttons
5. Small enough to take almost anywhere
6. Great Kindle apps on all of my devices, including the Blackberry for those very few times when the Kindle’s too big to take somewhere

I never regret an hour or two spent reading, but I often wonder what I achieved after an hour on the iPad.

What does the iPad do best?  Almost everything, but in my “busy” life the one thing it really does that the blackberry and the laptop struggles with is reading rich documents, magazines, manuals, text books.  Goodreader is a revelation in terms of PDF reading and Instapaper is fantastic for reading web pages that I’ve captured on the PC to read later.

I’m hopeful that there will be a dedicated Instapaper app for the Kindle sometime soon that will auto synch with the web service, but for now when it comes to work reading the iPad is king.

This is my first post from the iPad using the word press applications, no wysiwyg formatting unfortunately, so I’m not sure what it will look like. Anyway here goes.

The good

– the hardware is wonderful, an excellent screen, very responsive
Touch, amazing battery life, easy to clean (using a micro fibre cloth) which should have been provided!

– the apps show great promise, although they are almost all at version 1, ie functional but not feature rich. They could all do with a few extra features to iron out their niggles in use.

– the performance is excellent, I’ve not experiences any significant lag so far that wasn’t a network constraint

– PDF reading is excellent, I’m using the paid app – GoodReader – and the scanned magazines and PDF manuals and work documents that I have to read a lot are first rate provided you can manage the small text. Executive book summaries and Gartner reports are even better, as they are not quite a4. I downloaded other PDF readers but none are a patch on GoodReader. However getting a large collection of books onto the iPad proved a bit of a pain, I longed to just copy files over to the file system.

– multiple-media is wonderful, I like to consume video podcasts while cooking, washing up etc and the iPad is perfect for this. I’ve also converted a whole load of tv programmes for when I’m travelling and these are excellent too

– I’m not a huge gamer, but even I’ve been immersed in the few that I downloaded, but that’s one more distration in life that I don’t have time for very often

– the on screen keyboard is excellent for typing. I’m currently using two fingers but it’s quick and easy and responds very naturally, the autocorrect is useful as well

– evernote is an absolute dream on the iPad, better than the pc and having my whole notebook offline with me is a real boon.

– the last pass tabbed browser is a very useful app, i use last pass on the PC so it’s great to have all my passwords with me and the ability to open multiple tabs slightly mitigates the lack of multitasking

The not so good

– Im currently in a GPRS coverage area, my Blackberry and iPad are both on o2, the iPad via my mifi. However it’s very noticeable how much more tolerant the bb is to the slow network working 100% reliably. Whereas the iPad frequently times out for example. This may be an issue that I rarely face, hopefully!

– the screen definitely suffers from reflection, it’s been fairly easy to workaround this so far though. Fortunately I had a loose weave micro fibre cloth with me and this is perfect. It’s possible to clear an active screen as well without any touch event being detected

– the iPad is very very distracting. I have a Sony ebook reader as well, when I use that I read! When I pickup the iPad to read I have a dozen other things to draw my attention away and so I’m going to have to learn to be disciplined all over again. This need for discipline makes me doubly pleased that I didn’t invest in a 3G iPad, the miff was MUCH cheaper and requires that extra step to connect, hopefully that will save me from living on line and allow me to retreat into books and magazines some of the time at least

– spoilt by the Blackberry I’ve grown up with multitasking. It’s a real shock to have to go back to a serial workflow, and especially annoying to have to explicitly open applications and then wait for them to update, which ideally would have happened before I needed them in the background

– not having a filesystem visible to all applications seems a real shame, it would be great to be able to backup at filesystem level and to easily copy files to and from the pc. Every application having it’s own synching support is a real loss

– I wish I never had to use iTunes ever again, unfortunately some synching has to be done via that route and I cringe every time it’s necessary

Tags: gadgets, iPad

What made it the best? I pretty much ignored the scheduled talks and spent
most of the time in one to one discussions. Some of them scheduled in
advance by our great Citrix and Appsense teams, especially Chris and
Alister. Some of them opportunistic scheduled with twitter followers and
some with staff managing the conference. The relatively low attendance made
discussions at the stands viable this time in a way I’ve not experienced at
many conferences. When I did attend sessions, a couple of times it was the
post session chats that added most value.
 
Prior to this conference I had talked myself out of the value of live
conference attendance, but now with this new strategy I’m back on board. It
takes more prep, but it pays off.

Posted via email from Steve’s posterous

when I got a big screen for my home office I thought I would make most use
of it sat at my desk, luxuriating in all that screen real estate. Whilst I
do use it that way, what’s made most difference is that I can sit on my
sofa with my laptop and use the big screen for remote attendance of web
conferences, watching conference videos, vidcasts etc.
 
Now with Windows 7 I can put all these various video sources in my Video
Library and they are available in media center, which means I can control
the whole experience using the remote control.
 
While I watch I can be taking notes or following up leads on the laptop.
 
When work ends of course, it’s also great for movies and TV.

Posted via email from Steve’s posterous

On recovery days like today, the sofa in the office is my favourite place
to work. 
 
 
Posted via email from Steve’s posterous

Steve over on the Reflexions blog try’s to answer the question

Does Corporate Failure = PKM? posed by Nick Milton and I must admit I find myself agreeing with Steve, who has a few points of agreement with Nick.  That is up until the point where Nick is quoted as saying:

If the company is doing Knowledge Management properly, and making communal knowledge transparently available at the point of need, then you would not need PKM.

and Steve responds:

Here’s where I think Nick is spot on

At this point we diverge and here’s why:

1. The personal knowledge that I need to manage is not and never will be the same as any pool of knowledge held by my company, although there will be overlaps and gaps in both
2. My personal knowledge spans several different companies, and with 60%+ of the content of my knowledge repository being publicly available information, I don’t want it locked up in some company specific silo
3. In the last 10 years of working for my current company if I’d put my trust in the companies well funded knowledge management infrastructure, it would now be fragmented across dozens of different systems. Some of these different generations of the enterprise system and some functional or project specific repositories that all existed with sound justification
4. A significant proportion of my personal knowledge management system is meaningful only to me based on a context that only I understand, with a subtlety that I’ve never seen in the meta-data support of any enterprise KM system
5. Locating the specific “thing I want” in my personal system relies on many clues that don’t exist in enterprise systems and a narrow search scope “just the stuff I’ve tagged, linked, saved or created or modified”.  I don’t see an easy way to create this search scope in another way
6. I’ve been an avid contributor to enterprise KM at the same time as I’ve built my personal knowledge, but I’ve contributed a small subset to the enterprise, because much of my personal stuff would be clutter to the enterprise, lacking the connections and context that make it knowledge to me
7. I’d never consider my personal knowledge as a substitute for enterprise PKM or Google, but I find many people who use google or enterprise search confuse being able to find “something” on any topic, with being able to find the “specific assets” I want in the way that I do in my PKM system
8. One final point is that some of my best work and best external knowledge has been dropped from issued versions of work at the enterprise level, because it didn’t survive a scope cut or a change in customer requirements or didn’t convince some approver.  I still have that stuff. Unissued stuff still has huge value to me, but would quite rightly confuse the enterprise in a big way

In summary I’m all for enterprise KM, but PKM is a complement to it.  A good KM strategy should see itself in this capacity too.  Take a look at the “my life bits” research to see the direction that PKM is going, taken to this extreme I don’t see anyone suggesting that all “my life bits” belong in the enterprise KM system.  Rather it see’s PKM as an extension of the brain.

PKM is one of the most neglected areas within the enterprise, no surprise that there’s such a rich eco system of tools being created directly targeted at the individual, with many now starting to integrate with the individuals network of contacts, to create a personal knowledge network.

Tags: km, pkm, productvity

Graham writes an interesting post where he compares the impact of slow login and slow applications.  It’s a good analysis and leads Graham to conclude that forced to choose he would go for slow login, because it’s predictable and infrequent and so can be proactively managed (ie do something else why you wait.

I’ve been mulling over the same issue – but without the nice graphics -when it comes to desktop and application virtualization, and I’m very keen to dig a bit deeper into the user experience impact of a collection of new technologies:

1. Virtualised applications add a small performance overhead
2. Streaming virtualised applications adds a significant overhead to launch time, especially in a VDI environment where caching is of limited value (although pre-caching in the image would be better)
3. Virtualization of the applications configuration and the users personalised settings adds a further overhead to launch times
4. WAN access to data adds a further overhead to application launch times
5. We’ve yet to quantify for many niche applications whether non-persistent VDI images (where only the roaming profile is persisted at logoff) are going to be slower, maybe because they cache for performance in the local profile and assume that the users local profile is going to be there tomorrow 99% of the time
6. Sharing server resources across many users, is likely to work out great on average, but I’m not 100% sure that it will be faster for peak CPU periods which often occur at application start-up
7. Most VDI deployments encourage users to logoff frequently and that’s likely to increase as the logon/logoff cycle is required in order to update the master image, not only does this affect a few of the points above, but it also makes detailed user state preservation very important – ie saving which applications, files, scroll locations, browser tabs, window positions etc the user has open and restoring them when the user logs back in. 
8. I dread to think how regular logoffs would impact my productivity, right now I logoff once ever couple of weeks, and it takes me at least 20 minutes to close everything down and open everything up again, if I had to do this every day – the least of my worries would be the time it takes for the OS to boot.

So one things for sure, in the new word of desktop, end user experience performance monitoring is going to be pretty important.

Tags: applications, VDI, virtualization