Previous post title got me thinking...

Being a teleworker or a telecommuter is a great thing. I can show up for work in my PJs or I can sit on the porch, in the hammock... There are a number of benefits to working from home, but there are also many drawbacks. Many of them a product of not setting rules to work by.

Many people try to keep our attention on burnout, or to use a friend's label "Volunteer Vertigo", but most of the time a simple set of rules would keep us from being affected. I'd like to share some that I use, and I am interested in what you have to add.

1) Set up a 'workspace'.
For me, this is as simple as the table I use for my laptop in my office.

2) Make the rule that nothing other than work will go on in this 'workspace'
Sounds easy, right? Well, it isn't. Something as simple as reading your snail mail in your 'workspace' can undermine the rule. This is a difficult one for me to follow through on. I've begun going so far as to get up from the workspace and walking away when the phone rings. It gives me the chance to keep my mind focused.

3)Ensure that you set work hours.
Most important rule, and most likely to be seen as flexible. In IT it is easy for us to get blinders when we are working on something we enjoy. We lose track of time. This has the side-effect of causing us to begin to dislike what we once loved. I consider this rule one of the most important, if not THE most important.


There are many other little rules that I have, but I think I will stop there for now. I may continue in a later post and cover things like "recreational surfing must be done somewhere other than your chosen workspace." Also very important, however, I think the ones above are the keystones. If you can achieve those, then the rest are up to you.

Let me know what you do to keep from working all hours. :-)

~JFo

All Work and no Play...

So it has been some time since I had the chance to blog here at all. Not that any of you were waiting with bated breath for some new drops of idiocy from me, just that I wanted to use this to capture my thoughts... mostly for myself.

In the intervening time, I went to Prague for the Platform Rally, was asked to attend and present for the Ubuntu Hardware summit, started doing several songs that I have collectively dubbed 'situational blues', been approached by a friend to do a general topics podcast (details to be posted soon), all while lying amongst tons of bugs and e-mail.

It is true that there are thousands of kernel bugs. At times they get overwhelming, but we are working on policies around all of them that i hope will guide reporters to filing the best bug reports that they possibly can. I'm also excited to have several new folks triaging bugs for us. With any luck the Kernel Triage Summit currently planned for September 11th will be most beneficial. (Why Sept 11th you ask? Unfortunately it is the only weekend I have somewhat free before the end of this cycle. I've squeezed it down to 4 hours on the day so that the most people can benefit. Plus it will be recorded and posted for others to review after. But more on that later)

I hope that Amber and I are able to get some fun topics for the new podcast together. We will be talking about lots of things, not just Ubuntu (and we may not even talk about that :)). The main goal of this podcast is for us to take time out and laugh... at each other if necessary. :-)

So, in review, tons of cool stuff happening. Lots and lots of work to do. Oh, and for those of you not aware, UDS will be in Orlando, Florida in October. Those of you who've always wanted to attend, now is your chance!! :-D

More to come...

~JFo

In the News

As I lay here. Recovering from UbuFlu in the midst of my UDS Hangover, I ran across a news story about Fedora 13 being pushed back due to a Grub bug. The story i saw is: http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2010/05/fedora-13-delay-fixes-linux-gr.html

Some folks have asked me today if I thought this was a failure on the part of Fedora. Of course not. We all want to put out good software, and Fedora is no different. Understanding that this wasn't the only bug that caused them to hold off releasing, I applaud them for explaining the situation a bit and working to put out the best software possible.

Just my thought today.

Being sick really sucks,

~JFo

New Words to use

OK, this made me laugh for a while today.

UDS Hangover

Boy, they weren't kidding. There really is such a thing as a 'UDS Hangover'. I calculate that, from the time I hit the bed Saturday night at 11:30PM until I woke up this morning, I have slept over 24 hours and I still feel as if I have been beaten repeatedly.

The flight back was uninteresting from a volcanic point of view. No Delay, No changed course. Just a long flight and the usual dehydration to deal with. One would think they would consider putting in a humidification system for planes to keep you from feeling as if you'd had sandpaper installed in your nostrils while you weren't looking.

Both flights were staffed by excellent attendants and I continue to have my research reinforced as to dealing with them and ticketing/gate agents. Ever since I began this job and travelling so much, I've taken the approach of always smiling and being cheerful when interacting with them. I've never had a problem. This includes dealings with TSA agents at security checks. I generally find that I have less of a difficult time as long as I am seemingly happy. And just to neutralize the obvious thought that I am always happy or that I never have troublesome items and/or times. I can assure you that I don't always feel like putting up this image of complete happiness, and I have had several situations where I had crazy baggage issues.

It all just seems to work out when you do everything you can to make their jobs a bit easier. :-)

In the words of undacuvabrutha "Peace, Love and Soul" and I'll add to that Rock-nRoll. ;-)

~JFo

Of AllStars and Southern Rock

The All Stars Jam was a night not to be forgotten. The band was in the groove and the crowd was participating.

I tend to think I was up there way too long, but what can you do when influenced by alcohol and the overpowering draw of classic southern music.

I sincerely hope that there was no one recording the whole proceedings, but I am not naive enough to believe that there wasn't. I do know that after we finished up our planned set list we started taking requests, so apparently the crowd was still with us.

Claire Newman asked us to play Waterloo by Abba, and I am sorry to say we failed her. I am, however, hopeful that we can make it up to her by either learning it or finding someone who knows it for the next Jam. :) After all, I promised.

I thoroughly enjoyed singing with Jono on Tuesday's Gone and Turn The Page. I can't wait until next UDS. :-)

Keep on Rockin in the Free World!

~JFo

UDS Day 5

Well, we have finally arrived. The last day of UDS. It seems like we have been here a month. The sessions have been so full of technical detail and collaboration that I feel like I will have to sleep a week to recover. Thankfully I don't think I will actually have to.

My cold has plagued me all week, but I have been able to keep it mostly at bay with the judicious application of throat lozenges, plenty of water and sleep. I slept over 16 hours on 2 days of this week and I think that helped immensely.

Today, like the others began with the kernel roundtable then moved to my session concerning the plans that i have for bug handling improvements in Maverick. Needless to say, there are quite a number of things that I and the team hope to accomplish during this cycle. It is an aggressive plan, but I hope it will provide us with a tremendous amount of success. More on that later.

Next was a session on Colin King's plan to conduct automated BIOS testing for troubleshooting failures on suspend/resume. Much of the plan for his work is to help ODM and OEM to find faults in their BIOS logic before chips and configurations are completed and shipped. This will cause us to spend less time quirking for those bugs and more time on kernel stability and improvement. I had originally planned to use a portion of Colin's talk to discuss the planned daily testing ISO that we want to build for use by LoCo teams during Global Jam days to give us early testing and data to fix the most affected bugs prior to release, but this was not to be. :-) Much as I suspected, Colin's talk was well attended and went the whole time plus. no matter, we have plenty to do in this regard, so we will move ahead with those plans and do an After Action Review next cycle.

Next, I was pulled out to prepare the equipment for the All Stars Jam happening Friday night during the wrap up dinner. We set up and practiced a bit before heading to the evenings session on Miscellaneous topics that weren't covered in the previous days. Thankfully, it didn't take the whole of the allotted time and we got a chance to sit and chat for a bit before the wrap up meeting in the auditorium.

What a week! I am glad I was here. I see now more of how a distribution is planned and I understand now that it takes an army of people working together to bring it all together. What a great team I work with. :-)

Time to sleep now.

~JFo