Rob's Space

Enjoying the significant benefit of working from home (for about 7 years now). Here's an interesting video from Luis Suarez from IBM-NL on the future of work and telecommuting. He expounds on corporate communications without e-mail, which I find compelling.

 
The Future of Work by Luis Suarez from Luis Suarez on Vimeo.

This makes a lot of sense to me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQa-ibNOKM

I picked up the iPhone 2.0 update this morning and have already found it useful. I installed the Mobile Flickr app from the iPhone App Store. My real estate agent needed some quick external photos of the house, so I zipped over, took the shots with my iPhone and quickly uploaded them to Flickr for her to retrieve. No need to return home and sync. No e-mail attachments. Color me impressed already. Now to play some Super Monkey Ball!

There's lots of hoopla this week as we approach availability of the iPhone 3G on July 11th. While I'm a big iPhone fan, I've decided to hold off an let the dust settle on the 3G iPhone for a bit. I'll enjoy the 2.0 software update on my original iPhone for now.

I've been a Twitter user for quite some time. Based the service's recent availability issues and the fact that many folks are migrating over to FriendFeed, I decided to give FriendFeed a try. So I just downloaded AlertThingy (which runs on Adobe Air) and am giving it a go. My FriendFeed ID is RWITTE if you'd like to follow me.

Just got back from a cooking class at the new apartment complex. We don't move in until Saturday, but they invited us to attend the monthly class they hold for their residents. It was so cool! We had a chef from Big City Chefs who took us through the whole process of making grilled salmon fajitas with a fresh pico de gallo. The food was great. We met some other residents, including another die-hard jeep fan. He and I are going to get together for some off-roading in the future. Sometimes the universe lets you know you're on the right path. I think tonight was one of those signals.

I just ran across a cool article on Lifehacker that lines up nicely with the changes I'm making to our family's diet (more plants, less meat). Some good tips here for those who want to move in this direction. http://lifehacker.com/396169/change-your-cooking-style-to-cut-back-on-meat Could this be an evolving trend in America? I think it would make sense from both economic and health perspectives, but I'm not yet sure if Joe Six-Pack is ready to give up his meat and potatoes. Time will tell.

There's been lots of buzz about the new Firefox 3 release and its associated "download day". Today there seem to be a lot of articles in my newsfeed about how to tweak Firefox to make it cleaner, more Mac-like, etc. I decided to skip the whole Firefox event. I've settled on Safari on OSX (and my iPhone) and I'm quite happy with it. No, it doesn't have lots of plug-ins and may lack some of the cool features of Firefox. But the beauty is in its simplicity. I consider it a core function of the OS (as Microsoft argued with IE years ago). I don't want to think about it ... I don't want to manage plug-ins ... I don't want to download updates. I just want it to be there and work when I need it (which it does beautifully). I'm willing to simplify my web usage in trade for this "out of mind" benefit. I've been using it exclusively since February and it seems to be working out just fine so far.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20080616/tc_usatoday/someemployeesbuyownlaptopsphonesforwork A recent study showed that a growing number of employees buy their own gear ... ranging from cell phones and GPS units to laptops for some. I must say, I find it hard to disagree as I sit here and type on my personally-owned Macbook and 22" monitor while glancing down at my iPhone. My company-issued Thinkpad sits on the shelf as an emergency backup. In general, I would be happier if the company would just give me an annual allowance to offset my technology spending and let me buy what I need and want to do my job.

Just signed the lease for my new apartment today. Woo-hoo! The girls and I move in this weekend. We couldn't be more excited at this first step to our new lives.