Category: Teleworking
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Remote Working: the Benefits, Disadvantages, and some Lessons Learned in 15+ years
Continue Reading: Remote Working: the Benefits, Disadvantages, and some Lessons Learned in 15+ yearsWith so many people now having to learn to work remotely due to restrictions related to COVID-19, what information can people share who have been working from home? Back in October 2019, I realized it was 20 years ago when I started working remotely, and so I sent out some tweets asking for opinions about the benefits of working remotely, the challenges / disadvantages, and then the lessons people have learned. I subsequently recorded podcast episodes on each of those three topics.
The links to the Twitter threads and podcasts are below.At some point I may turn them into longer articles themselves, but in the meantime, I hope they will help some of you with ideas for how to get adjusted to this new way of working.
And… I would suspect many of you might just want to jump directly to the lessons learned…
Benefits
- Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/danyork/status/1181883371611406336
- Podcast episode: TDYR 380 – Remote Working, Part 1: What are the BENEFITS of working from home?
Many of the benefits were about no commute, the ability to be present with family, freedom to work and live wherever, flexibility, caring for family, and more. (Note that a good number of the benefits mentioned (such as working…
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Sprint or Verizon? Recommendations for broadband access card for my Mac?
Continue Reading: Sprint or Verizon? Recommendations for broadband access card for my Mac?Who would you recommend for a wireless broadband access service for my laptop? Sprint or Verizon? (Those seem to be my main choices here in Keene, NH.) And would you recommend the USB dongle or the ExpressCard version?In heading out the Communications Developer Conference/ITEXPO next week in L.A., the show organizers have already told me there is no free WiFi access at the LA Convention Center… but I can, of course, pay for the access through the local provider. (And probably deal with the same usual headaches of getting adequate signal strength.)
I am so incredibly sick of show WiFi, both in terms of paying for it and also just in quality, that yes, indeed, even though I am a cheap Yankee… er… “frugal”, I think I need to suck it up and pay the $720/year to have wireless Internet access over the cell networks. This will also be hugely beneficial for all the wonderful times I spend hanging out in airports.
My choice seems to be either Sprint or Verizon. (AT&T and T-Mobile don’t have great coverage in my area.) Both will cover whatever limited roaming I do in my local area… and both have coverage in the…
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Remote VoIP teleworker sets serve as an Internet connectivity warning device…
Continue Reading: Remote VoIP teleworker sets serve as an Internet connectivity warning device…Here’s a great side benefit of having an IP phone in teleworker mode hanging off of a system somewhere out there on the Internet – you have a close-to-instant warning system about Internet connectivity issues.
Take this morning… I walk into my home office and see that one of my phones has come out of its sleep status and the backlight is on and showing "CONNECTION PENDING…" with these black square boxes next to it. I glance at another IP phone: "PLEASE WAIT"
Oh, %#$#?!. It’s going to be that kind of Monday morning!
Yes, indeed, as I woke up the PCs, I did indeed have no connectivity. Couldn’t get to any websites and all the IM clients were cycling waiting to get connected. After doing the usual power-cycling of the cable modem and verifying that I could get an address but couldn’t ping beyond the next hop router, a relatively-quick call to Comcast brought the word that there was a "partial outage" in my area and that connectivity might be going up and down for the next two hours.
Great. Wonderful way for a home office worker to start a Monday.
But it did remind me of one great…
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Telephony disrupted: It’s darn hard to be a remote teleworker without Net access!
Continue Reading: Telephony disrupted: It’s darn hard to be a remote teleworker without Net access!About 1:30pm today, I lost internet connectivity. It was quite comical, really, how I noticed. For some reason, I did something I almost never do and hit the “Music On Hold” button on my teleworker sets hanging off of Mitel’s switch up in Ottawa. So there, in a wonderful use of bandwidth, radio station CHEZ-106 out of Ottawa was streaming into my home office down here in Vermont. (That’s what the trial guys are using as the MOH music source for the trial switch to which I am connected.)
All of a sudden, the phone started playing the same audio packet again and again and again… I felt like I was transported back about 25 years to the era of skipping records! I wondered what was up but then I noticed a browser window on my computer not being able to find a link I had just opened to a popular web site. I quickly looked at my other teleworker phones and they, too, were going into a resiliency mode attempting to failover to their secondary IP-PBX. A glimpse at my laptop showed that Skype, MSN, Jabber were all starting their contortions of trying to reconnect.
Uh-oh.
Being a network geek,…