10 weeks ago, my $JOB told me it was time to work from home full time until further notice. And, that is not the only change since then. The kids switched to distance education, the wife started teaching her students online, and we stopped going, well, anywhere.
Since I already worked from home twice a week, it has not been too major of a shift for me. The only real downside is that I am now getting invited to more earlier meetings.
The kids have mainly settled in to the routine of getting up and then doing their school work. Since it is mainly asynchronous, they have been getting up later. With school ending for the year shortly, they will have to get a new schedule.
My main outing each week is to get food. I have noticed that some of the oddest things are out of stock. This week, it was fast pancake mix (just add water) and .5L bottles of Mt. Dew. Odd things for people to horde. The other things people had horded (toilette paper and paper-towels) are back, but not at old levels.
The good thing is where we live, we are mainly isolated from the main madness. No one we know has gotten sick yet, so we are doing good there.
Two things I have been working on in my spare time. My home LAN (full of containers now) and my photo workflow. I need to write up some lessons learned from the first, and some photos from the last.
As we wander into another week of restrictions, I am taking a quick look at what I have been doing with my time not spent commuting to the office, and having to stay up late with the kids whilst they do their homework.
So, I have gotten my home hosting sorted and tied up. I now have two systems up running docker. The first is running the services I would want on the outside. Things like my calendar, music, files, photos, and movies. The other is running internal monitoring services.
My next project is to finish setting up a decent VPN solution (probably wireguard) and drop the external access. Since I am not going anywhere currently, I have already dropped inbound connections to the house. This web site is not served from the house.
My two other, um, obsessions? right now are cleaning up my MP3 collection (23K+ songs taking up 142 GB before cleanup). and getting back into photo editing with Corel’s AfterShot Pro.
The music collection has been not really managed, and it turns out that when I ran some tool over the years to clean it up, those tools actually created many duplicate songs. Now, the files are not direct copies, so I cannot easily use a tool to clean them up, but I have been working through by hand to clean things up and set up a naming convention I like.
As for AfterShot Pro, I used to use it a lot, but for some reason I really do not remember, I stopped using it, and did not really set it up on the ’new’ laptop. I was watching some random YouTube photog talking about their editing flow and I liked it. I was never able to figure out how to easily moving through a collection of photos in DarkTable with just the keyboard, so I was never as fast with it. AfterShot Pro, however is a competitor to the Adobe suite, and as such, has among other things, great keyboard navigation.
In playing with it, I found some short videos to refresh myself, and to pick up a few new things, and went to town. Here are four photos from the last week which I was able to quickly edit:
As we enter week 4 of me working from home full time, things are different.
For me, the only hardship about working from home full time is having the kids and the wife also working from home (going to or teaching, depending) which makes work calls for all of us interesting.
On the plus sides, last time I was in the grocery store (last week sometime), I noticed that most things were back in stock. Some things are still a little low or no choice, but you can get it.
I do have more time for random things, and one of the things I did tonight was to use a tool call muffet to check for broken links on this site. As of this writing, there are no more broken links!
