Week #3 of working remotely – Build your workspace

We're at the start of week 3 for working remotely and I think just about everyone has found their rhythm. But, it has taken awhile, and one thing I heard from multiple people, they weren't prepared to work remotely for an extended period. The main problem? Nowhere to work. We have people who work remotely and that's no issue. But, that's for a day. They can handle calls, or attend meetings, or put together a client proposal, but not everyone has a dedicated work machine or a dedicated work area. Working from the couch or kitchen table is fine for a few hours, but it's not going to do for several weeks. Many people spent the weekend getting themselves set up for the long haul. Some just had to clear off a desk, while others had to race out and actually get a desk. Several people had to get full sized monitors. Some retrieved equipment from the office, others ended […]

Week #2 of working remotely

So here we are at the tail end of two weeks of working remotely. I had to make a dash into the office late Wednesday as our building would be closed until further notice due to the stay at home order. I figured it was better for me to have the machine here than it collecting dust in an empty building. Oddly, there were far more people on the road than I expected. Maybe they were out and about doing the same thing, grabbing machines and necessities from their place of work, which could be confused with looting. Rest assured, I totally had permission to get my own machine from work. Other than the laughable toilet paper situation, I find things to be going quite well. We are communicating regularly through Slack and use Zoom to have team meetings. This was already the norm since we've had people working remotely for various reasons for a couple of years. I have […]

Wells Fargo is run by F-ING IDIOTS

Please allow me to go on a rant for a moment. Not only am I customer of Wells Fargo, but not for much longer, but I know several people who work for the banks, Wells Fargo included. Despite an order for non-essential professionals to stay home, Wells Fargo has stated all their employees are essentials and requires them to come into work as scheduled. This is utterly ridiculous and they should be ashamed of themselves for treating employees like this and putting them in danger. This is totally unacceptable. I haven't been in my office since March 13th and we were told last night to get anything we needed out of the office and steer clear of the building. There was no reason for us to enter before and now we can't. We are a company that makes $40-50 million per year in revenue, and we have figured out a way to work from home and isolate ourselves from danger. […]

Let the quarantine begin!

Like a slew of other people, I am now working from home and most likely will be for a few months. It's really not that big of a disruption, since I have almost the same set up at home as I do at work. If anything, I have more machines at home. Since we do deployments at off hours, sometimes on the weekend, I've been in the habit of synching my work machine so I can pick up where I left off when I get home. This has included putting files on Dropbox, iCloud and GitHub. For example, all my DevonThink notes get pushed to Dropbox once a week so I have the same info in both places. Other items like test plans, templates, and testing data are dropped into iCloud since those will be used on the Mac at home. Github of course keeps all the automation code. If you haven't already done so, get synching set up. When […]

CopyLess and PopClip Jump Aboard the Party Barge

Since I’m building up a host of efficiency tools, I’ve added CopyLess 2 and PopClip to my arsenal. At first glance having CopyLess might seem contradictory since Alfred already has a clipboard manager. Under normal circumstances that would be correct, but I want to use a clipboard manager in a slightly different, but very specific way. Since I have multiple monitors (4), I want the clipboard manager to float on a second monitor and be visible at all times. It needs to be on top of other apps and not disappear when it loses focus. When filling out forms and working on certain test scenarios, I want to move back and forth as quickly as possible to copy and paste data. I don’t want to repeatedly press key combinations or go to the menu bar to make my list appear. There are a lot of really good clipboard managers out there, including the one built in to Alfred, but CopyLess […]