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Working in the Blind
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: When companies behave like monarchies where staff has no role at all in decision-making and decisions are made in violation of those companies’ tenets (or mission statements) it is inevitable that staff will issue concerns, first internally and — failing that — in other channels

THE company Sirius fancies the word “Open”, but it does not engage in open debate. Staff is left in the dark about the company’s own affairs, never mind clients and the general public. Everything is decided secretly by an inner cabal; it wasn’t always like that!

In the more recent past, bad decisions were made like abandoning Open stuff in favour of proprietary spyware such as Slack, Skype, Google, and Zoom. A decision regarding mobile phones came much later, without any consultations at all with those actually impacted by the decision. They say there were concerns about the staff pushing back, but if staff isn’t being listened to, then key staff will leave the company. This already happened before. Managers, for instance, were making our infrastructure obsolete and driving out people who can maintain it, leaving rotting foundations and massive bills for “Clown Computing” (the same could be hosted for like 10 times less and be controlled directly).

The video above mentions taxes, addresses, and a pattern of misleading clients while taking great risk. This is no way to run a company, except into the ground. Its long-earned reputation (almost 25 years) cannot compensate for recent bad karma.

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Summary: The old workspace mode had one screen on top of another, which was sub-optimal (one screen was too distant to see properly). So I spent a few hours reshuffling the layout again, on a desk with limited width. My screens now stay in portrait mode permanency. It will not rotate into landscape mode on the right, as I have scripts that rely on that particular screen layout. This is so much better. I see a lot more without having to move the head, only the eyes.

Resisting temptations is a lot easier when they never show up

roductivity is — and has long been — a habit or hobby of mine; my blog has a whole section dedicated to it (since 2004). Some people wrongly accuse me of being a “bot” even though everything I post I always post manually (I use 3 computers in tandem, but that’s about workspace, not automation). The culprit which needs to be eliminated is obtrusive “push” as opposed to “pull”; push is when someone tells you what to pay attention to, whereas pull is when you’re totally in control of your workflow and you habitually ‘pull’ updates when time is available or the mind is blank (end of some mental backlog).

15 years ago I wrote down some “Efficiency Tips” and years later I wrote some blog posts about how I manage mail, filtering etc. I have hardly written anything on the subject since then. Over the past decade (or more) a new creeping threat to people’s sanity has emerged; it was further popularised by social (control) media and then spread to other platforms that imitate it (with the notion of notifications, not just in a designated area/page but also persistent somewhere on the screen, urging to be clicked). For people who crave constant attention there’s an element of addiction right there. I too was vulnerable to it.

I read E-mail about once a day (and for those who might send urgent messages I made it clear, reducing the expectation of a fast response; they can pick up the phone in case of urgency). To avoid temptation to open messages in the queue do not download E-mail and keep the E-mail client shut.

But E-mail is to many people “yesterday’s technology”… now there’s a small number of companies — often foreign ones that mine data — controlling people’s communications.

Suppress notifications and read them (and reply) once a day, sometimes even less often depending on the nature of replies and importance of their promptness (some platforms ‘move’ faster than others).

Notification bars can also be hidden, if not in site settings then by moving windows out of view (outside the screen). It’s not always simple to achieve and it depends on the site. It’s almost always possible… somehow.

Reading one notification at a time (not clustering related ones) is just about the worst one can do and the most distracting thing. There’s no way to keep one’s train of thought, concentration suffers, and multitasking results in mental clutter. I’ve seen people who have fallen into the trap of renting (‘owning’) a survrveillance device (they call it ‘phone’) and it constantly bugs them with updates that they attend to. Not good. They don’t even focus on their workout at the gym; so what’s the point even going there?

eonie Brinkema, appointed by Bill Clinton, works in a kangaroo court; it’s widely notorious for a rubberstamping-like behaviour in a variety of deeply political cases. “No one should have to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information,” said a letter to the editor yesterday, highlighting the nature of what some whistleblowers had done and got punished for. In exchange for them exposing crimes they got treated like criminals and this is more or less the job of Leonie Brinkema, protecting criminals by putting in prison those who spoke about these crimes. I don’t know Leonie Brinkema personally and it’s not even simply to find a simple photo of her face (drawings are out there and she looks a lot more furious in them).

It is expected that if (or when) Julian Assange gets ‘kidnapped’ and ‘shipped’ to the US Leonie Brinkema will be the sociopath who sentences him to death (or prison until death) for merely exposing the crimes of people like those who appointed her. What a crazy world we live in. They call it “justice”, but to those who set this court up it’s “just us”.

N PREVIOUS posts I wrote about my work desktop, one of 12 workspaces/desktops that include desktop 2 for mail and collaboration, excepting a third screen mounted on a separate machines and connected nicely with Synergy for a seamless experience. In order to shed light on how I communicate online in real-term, here is desktop 4 on my main machine. What’s out of sight here is the weather widget; the wallpapers on the left changes based on the weather. In the other two screens — centre and right — it cycles at random (slideshow). In future posts I will show my other desktops and how I arranged them for improved productivity.

N a daily basis I must produce logs for 4 IRC channels. Over time I found more efficient ways for doing so and this post summarises some of the shortcuts and tools. It doesn’t go into specifics where these are not generalisable.

The first stage is opening a template for the post/article linking to the log/s. The post has X’s where the data goes, so that part must be completed by hand and then copied and pasted into the right fields. The way this is done depends on the site and its layout, but the important thing is, use templates. If this gets done daily, then a lot of work and many errors can be prevented.

Then comes the point where the logs themselves get produced. Logging is typically done by IRC clients, but only XChat works well for me with the script that I use since 2008, irclog2html. The first thing to do is open all the files containing the relevant logs. In my case it goes like this:

roy@roy:~$ cat ./irc-files.sh 
kate .xchat2/xchatlogs/FreeNode-#boycottnovell.log  
.xchat2/xchatlogs/FreeNode-#boycottnovell-social.log 
.xchat2/xchatlogs/FreeNode-#techbytes.log
.xchat2/xchatlogs/FreeNode-#techrights.log

The directory and relative paths may vary and one’s favourite text editor may vary as well (I like Kate). Once all the files are open (about 200 MB in my case), open all the previous logs (if any) and scroll down to the bottom. Then, copy a portion of the last line and search for it in the full log to quickly jump to the latest log line, then extend the selection (highlight with keyboard/mouse) to grab the new log text to be converted into HTML. Once this is done, open a new tab/windows, paste the text, and save the text as a file whose name is corresponding to the channel at hand. In my case, that would be irc-log-social, irc-log-techbytes, irc-log-techrights, and irc-log.

Once all the text to be converted is put in the correctly and consistently named files, batch-run the conversion and open the resultant files in a text editor. For example:

python ./Main/Programs/irclog2html.py irc-log-techrights 
--title='IRC: #techrights @ FreeNode: January 22nd, 2012' ; 
python ./Main/Programs/irclog2html.py irc-log --title='IRC:  
#boycottnovell @ FreeNode: January 22nd, 2012' ; python 
./Main/Programs/irclog2html.py irc-log-social --title='IRC:  
#boycottnovell-social @ FreeNode: January 22nd, 2012' ; python 
./Main/Programs/irclog2html.py irc-log-techbytes --title='IRC: 
#techbytes @ FreeNode: January 22nd, 2012' ; kate irc-log.html 
irc-log-social.html irc-log-techrights.html irc-log-techbytes.html

This is basically a simple command run about 4 times, then 4 files opened. Python is needed to run irclog2html.py and there is room for some parameters like page titles. The opening of the resultant files then makes it possible to save under date-stamped files all the logs separately, then upload them and link to them in the template post. That’s about it. If there are any questions about these very basic efficiency tricks, drop me a line. Having published thousands of logs, it is an area I’m quite familiar with.

S SOMEONE who has worked from home since 2006 I can gladly say that motor vehicles are possible to avoid for those who wish to and whose work is location-independent. Spare office space too can be discarded. Both removals would be beneficial to the environment and reduce the impact of overpopulation.

I used to drive around a lot as a teenager, but when jobs become more sedentary and possible to carry out over broadband, what really is the point of driving to another office — an office like one that can be set up at home? This question is troubling sometimes, especially because of answers that are commonly given

To some people, the idea of going to work is the idea of escaping the confinements of a home, “going out” so to speak. To others it is about separation/buffer between home and work — the illusion of having two places to lodge in. Where interaction with colleagues is not necessary (or bossing over one’s shoulder) the idea of lacking the motivation to work whilst at home might only imply utter disdain for one’s work. Just changing location — putting peer pressure and supervision aside — does not provide any more or any less motivation. One can make one’s workspace more pleasant.

The reality is, many people do not work from home because the boss does not permit this. In that case, the boss needs to reassess the old myth that work should not be done remotely, i.e. not from home. People do not need physical access to paper files, for example. Everything changes, except old habits.