That Work Life Split Under Covid

With the lockdown and working from home I'm finally doing something I always thought I wanted to do, work from home.  I'd always had the niggling thought I could be more efficient and it would be really good to be able to work from home.  Oh my... Oh Me Oh My How wrong was I?!

The first elephant in the room, work-life-balance, I work in my home office, my home office where I write this blog and make silly videos and play and read... And... so when I've been in it 8+ hours a day, I don't want to look at it any more... I don't sit at my office desk craving to be home chomping on some private project, because I'm already at that home desk and the lines have been blurred.

Second, the family... Specifically (sorry love) the wife... She's no concept of being in the zone, as a programmer, when you're in the zone and been doing something niggly all day and everything is finally falling into place, no matter the time, you stick at it to get done... No, my wife can't comprehend this, she doesn't understand everytime she shouts "Come on now"... It's another 20 minutes because you just mentally ravaged my trail of thought... Put headphones on?... Yeah you don't know how loud my Mrs is.

Third, hours... I touched on it a little above, but there's no quantitative way to express what you're up to.  I feel, quite strongly, that if you're not producing something (like code) and being seen to, you're looking absent from the work place... You're at home, not right there doing your thing.  Recall, I'm quite used to sitting typing for hours on end with folks wondering quite why my keyboard is so loud.  I get a lot of feedback from that presence in the moment in the office.  Without that feedback, I'm feeling more than a little fraudulent, especially as when software engineering tends to do, things go awry and you're then asking for more time... I've literally had 2 weeks on a project, then a week off (yes, I had a week off at home) and then I returned and asked for another 2 weeks... and I'm pretty much about to ask for yet another... based on the original 2 week estimate I over egged this pudding... But I have been working frenetically, except I feel on the other side... they might not see it that way.

Fourth, being somewhere else, this might sound obvious, but I'd never appreciated it, rolling out of bed stretching, getting a coffee and walking a few steps into my chair always felt like bliss, when I did it of a weekend and got on with some project it always felt so right and clean.  Now, it's sullied, it's forced upon me, it's the norm... and to be honest, it's doing my head in.  I miss the commute, the hour to decompress either way.... I miss that moment where I get to just be in my own head, in my own space in the car on the tram or just walking.

Whether that last part of the pre-virus world ever returns, I could not say.

Corvid 19: Chronovirus Bemusing Me

I'm a bit bemused by this whole Chronovirus affair, the amount of news time it's receiving and the amount of public awareness is brilliant; if not itself curtailing the inevitable spread of the virus itself.

For people to be aware is great.

In Nottingham it's not stopped my observing at least five people randomly spitting in the street today... but hey ho.

What bemuses me though is the news worthiness of this Corvid 19 virus, there are far more common and more deadly diseases and disorders out there, that are not receiving their due attention.

Lets assume the numbers given today on the BBC are correct, 78159 cases, of which 2717 deaths arose.  That's what 3.47% fatality rate....

Malaria can be up to 20% fatality rate, but we don't kick off about that do we?

Maybe it's something new, something about the modern works, Malaria is old it's no consequence, it's been killing us for millennia... Corvid 19 has only had a couple of months and that's alien not familiar.

I don't know, I'm just bemused by the whole thing....

Where have I been?... Well, I've been very busy with work and so I've not had chance to come to these pages at all this month, my apologies for that.  I've also been busy with the new land we've purchased, fitting gates, laying a road and helping in part to refurbish the stable block... More about that soon, I promise.

Windows Reinstall Progress - Bowser Device?

Yeah, last night I started my windows reinstall, of course it started with a back up of lots of data.... Nearly 6,000,000 files later, I have moved a lot of stuff, I usually don't have this amount of files, but I had a server failure in 2011 and recovered the files to a folder creatively called "DesparateRecoveryNight"...

So, having spent hours copying these from the mail hard drive onto the two secondary drives I set about checking out why the system might be playing up, and I found a rogue piece of hardware, or at least a driver for something which I can neither say I own, nor identify...

This device was say in "Other Devices", listed as installed correctly and called "Bowser"...

No, not that Bowser - least I hope not, could he be after my 'shrooms? - but I don't have a device anywhere I remember coming in as Bowser... And of course searching the internet about it simply gives you references to the above dinosaur boss, or it gives you people whom have miss-spelt "browser", about which this was neither...

I disabled this device listing however, and a few (but not all) of the network problems I had been having stopped... And despite Windows all along reporting no use of network bandwidth, my router showed a 95% drop in out-going packets, I can only assume I've got a nasty at this point.

So I fire up a virus scanner - 1 result - but this was part of DirectX which always comes up as a false positive...

My plan going a heads is to scan all the other additional drives, reboot into my linux partition and back up that data, then reinstall Windows 7.

I'm on Vista 64bit so its time to retire it.  My laptop was the test for my new Windows 7 license, but its since been wiped over with Linux Mint... so my Windows 7 license is free for my mail gaming PC :)