It seems a lot of people have already written a lot on the etiquette of video meetings, so in this little post, I’ll try to contribute with some of the technical tips which doesn’t seem to be covered as much.
While wifi seem to work fine mostly, it can cause issues. If you have the option to use a wired connection for you device used for videomeetings, do so. It will have less latency then any wifi-connection and improve the experience.
No, your servers should (probably) not have a facebook profile, nor should your servicebus have a twitter profile, but as the work tools change and evolve, you should probably consider updating the stream of status mails to more modern “social media” used at work.
When you’re in DevOps you probably get a steady stream of emails from various systems checking in. It may be alert emails, health checks or backup completed emails. It’s been more “fun” getting these mails with the rise of unlimited mail storage and powerful email-search tools should you ever need to find something in the endless stream of server-generated mails.
As mails bounch around some email programs (I’m looking at you, Microsoft), seems to encrypt package forwarded mails in attachments with the extension .eml.
While Mozilla Thunderbird should be able to read them (as should Evolution), it requires you have the mail application available on your machine, but I haven’t - I’m doing just fine with GMail in the browser. So far the best solution I’ve find - assuming it’s trivial non-sensitive, personal files - that an Online viewer seems to work pretty well. My preferred solution is the free one from encryptomatic. It handles the mails quite nicely, it restores the formatting to something quite readable and even handles embedded images and attachments within the eml-file.
I’ve been exploring todo lists for a while, but so far not found the ideal solution. I did however get a mighty step closer after Schack told me about a firefox plugin called Quickfox Notes.
Before introducing Quickfox notes, let me spend a second on my daily workflow in broad terms. I usually have Firefox running 8+ hours a day. Either browsing the web, doing web development or just by habit. I work on several machines - A few Linux laptops and an iMac at home. As I use several machines, I’ve been a huge fan of bookmark synchronization. I tried Mozilla Weave for a while, but their lack of PowerPC support (on an other Mac), eventually made me switch to FoxMarks - which is now called Xmarks. Xmarks has worked flawless since day one, and it’s one of the very first plugins I always install along with firefox on any machine I use.
Suppose you got an important mail, but by accident deleted the message – and to make matters worse, you also decided that emptying the mailbox was a pretty neat idea. Is then time to Panic?
Well it might, but there is a chance you might be able to undelete the message – and quite easily if you’re on a Mac or a Linux machine. Here are the few steps, which has helped recover a lost mail or two… First close Thunderbird. Then located the mail directory (on Linux it’s located in the subdirectory .mozilla-thunderbird in you home directory – on windows most likely somewhere in C:\Documents and Settings*\Application Data\Thunderbird – In there you’re looking for the “Local Folders” directory.
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Placing your documents online, does require trust in the online service you choose to use. I usually have a pretty solid trust in google. They do however from time to time have some glitches. After getting the message in the screenshot for an hour, I did start to get the chills, as the document as long and didn’t exist anywhere else. After an hour or so, it did however reappear. phew.
I’ve been moving a fairly large part of my private mail to my Gmail account. Gmail do have some amazing features for searching, labeling and handling mail and the virtually unlimited storage is also pretty cool - Much cooler than keeping a huge mail-archive on an IMAP-server or having it on a local fragile hard disk.
One of the more recent things I’ve started using GMail for is backups of this site. With the wp-db-backup plugin for Wordpress a backup of the entired database is mail to my gmail account every 24 hours and using filters I’m applying a ”backup”-label and auto-archiving it (and avoiding noise in inbox).
It’s that time of the week again, and since my list for the weekly review was pretty slim, I thought I’d share one of my productivity gems. As the name suggest it’s a weekly process where the activities of the past week as well as the coming week is reviewed and processed.
Like a few of my other habits this one is an adoption of the Getting Things Done. It’s probably not following the recipe from the official GTD methodology, but it works for me. It’s a way to try to gain some control of the daily life and have a little stress-less workday.
In March 2003 I barked about a Meeting clock. It must be a great idea, when MAKE reference it and sort make it a reality almost 4 years after, right? – If you liked the Meeting clock, there probably are a few other inspirational toughts in the Project Management category, enjoy.
It took just over a year, but I’ve finally done it. My inbox contains zero messages. It is a little bit scary, since it hasn’t been empty for the past… well since it was created over a decade ago. I’m not sure it’ll stay there on a daily basis, but I’m quite sure it’ll never reach the thousands of messages ever again. I’ve have been toying with GTD, and while it would probably be more efficient to dive in and go completely native (in GTD), I’m taking the slow adoption curve and try to adopt practices one step at a time and letting them prove to me, that they actually work.