Tag: work

Places I have worked from in the last two weeks

I have worked from Mountain View, Lake Tahoe, Monterey, two kinds of buses, and a rental car in the last two weeks. I guess that might explain why I am so behind on email. I’m also doing page layout reviews for the MythTV book, which is exciting, but takes a lot of time.

The reality? If you’re email is important, I will probably get back to you as soon as I can. Sorry.

Walking to work

I’ve been wondering how long it would take to walk to work for a while, so I thought I would give it a go this morning. The answer is 45 minutes at a leisurely pace. Some factoids:

  • It’s 3,500 steps from my house to Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus
  • Another 1,000 steps an you’re at the computer history museum
  • Another 1,000 steps gets you to a Google cafe
  • It’s 5,800 steps total to my desk

First commute to work

This morning was my first bike commute to work ever. Not just to my new American job, but ever (I’ve always lived too far from work until now — being a bike ride away from work was one of the criteria for the apartment in the US). The ride was rather pleasant, and involved very little on the road stuff (just getting onto the bike path near the apartment) — 27 minutes, 7.7km, maximum speed of 33 km per hour.

There is a lot of room for improvement here — we didn’t go the most efficient way, I am relatively unfit at the moment not having ridden for a month, and Andrew is learning how to use cleats which made for a bit of laughter.

A nice ride though, and I’m pretty happy with how it went. I’ll be riding more in the future.

Two weeks of being sick

And 31km travelled. Not too shabby given I couldn’t breathe and had goo coming out of my head. I feel quite unfit riding now though, so I need to put some work into getting back into things.

James talks about commuting to Google, which is currently of interest to me so I’d like to hear more about the practicalities of commuting in Mountain View if possible. For instance, are their off road bike paths, do American drivers try to kill you, and how far is Jame’s commute on the bike each way?

I’m not sure I really care if commuting to work by bike is cheaper, I only want to own one car in the US if I can (I have two here), and I like the idea of living close enough to work to be able to ride there.

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Addiction?

I’ve been feeling agitated all week, and really quite stressed out. This could be because of:

  • The three conference papers i give next week in Perth
  • Including the opening keynote
  • The impending release of the product I work on
  • The two book chapters I am meant to be writing this week
  • The PhD work I am meant to be doing
  • Not spending enough time with the kids
  • or Grant and Lindsay‘s departure from TOWER HQ yesterday

But I’ve put it down to being because I hadn’t been for a bike ride since Saturday, so I just went for a 12.14km, 41 minute, ride around ANU and the edge of the lake. Now I feel better, if more sweaty.

[icbm: work]

Hackathons

Let your development team spend a day hacking on a feature they care about. Sounds like a great idea to me. I look around at a lot of the developers I know and they’re running at 50% efficiency because they feel bored doing what the managers say they should the whole time, and the product suffers as a result. Is your company having trouble with staff churn? It’s probably because you don’t let your employees become passionate any more.

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