Reading and work

June 13th, 2007 • chatter, reading, work

So, this week begins my third week working from home and I’ve now gotten accustomed to the boringness and blandness of only leaving the house after 7PM EDT. I have my little routine of working and taking a lot more breaks in order to stretch and go outside to see if it’s daylight or not or to do chores around the house. At least now our apartment stays rather clean since I end up having a bit of free time during my work day.

This week also marks me getting a raise at work which is definitely going to help in the long run. While I may not like everything about my job — especially just about everything I have to deal with concerning spam — this bump in pay will help me forget about the horror of filling out the same Yahoo email deferment form 10 times a day. A coworker of mine is also finally helping me, and the rest of my department, embrace automation by getting tools and scripts in place that I’ve been asking to have for months. In the past, the abuse department of my company only had two or three real employees however, now we’ve got almost 10 to replace those same two or three people. While it amazes me that we need 2 to 3 times more people to do the same amount of work, things are getting done more quickly and slightly more efficiently since we do have people working around the clock versus 9AM till around 2AM. With more people working graveyard, it definitely helps us communicate effectively with providers many timezones ahead of us. My coworker and myself are the only two people in the department that want to do things quickly and efficiently versus everyone else who just wants to drag their feet and do everything by hand. We’re writing scripts and form letters so people can easily automate the dull task of emailing people because they’re sending 20,000 emails to Hotmail when they shouldn’t be.

Which brings me to my next point: reading. I’ve been doing a lot of it lately. More online than off and I’m getting tired of staring at my monitor all day, I just want to dive into my books. I’ve put off reading Satan by Jeffrey Burton Russell in favor of Learning Python

Does anyone know of any good plugins/widgets for WordPress for listing what books you’re reading? There’s only two listed at wordpress.org that I’m able to find. One has not been updated since mid 2006 (and according to the author’s site, was never released) and the other is even older than that.

First week of working at home

June 1st, 2007 • work

Well, today will conclude my first week of working at home and frankly, it’s not a lot different than my office. Now I get to listen to music as loud as I please and I just hooked up my Wii to my widescreen monitor last night for another outlet to keep me entertained. I’ve spent a few hours ripping a whole bunch of CDs into iTunes and I played Super Paper Mario for about 30 minutes on my “lunch break” yesterday.

After all, it’s my first week and I’m still working out things around the house I should do to keep busy and that might just keep the place cleaner as well. I’ve managed to do far more laundry this week and keep the kitchen rather spotless, a feat in this household. But sometimes, I get just as mind-numbingly bored here as I did at the office and unfortunately, I have no one to talk to here. My cats don’t really help in that department!

Overall, it’s been nice to wake up and roll out of bed into the office where I can sit all day and toil away with my luxurious triple monitor set up.

Working from home

May 28th, 2007 • chatter, work

Well, today is my first day working from home for my company and so far, it’s really quiet. I don’t have to deal with noisy people in the office and I can turn up my music as loud as I want to. I woke up the same time as usual and made a smoothie but that was a bit of a failed experiment since I used too many slices of banana and not enough oranges.

Aside from working, I’ve spent my whole morning ripping CDs into iTunes and enjoying my new set of speakers. I hope everyday is like this.