Remote remote working
(Warning: Contains unnecessary and miserable ranting. Reading at your own risk )
I usually work from home and go to the office only once of twice a week. This saves time, energy and the environment. With a broadband connection and a mobile phone, it's easy, productive and fun. While on a conference call, I can load the washing machine, feed the dog and do all kinds of useful things around the house. Equally often the house is quiet and I sink into the work so that I don't move from the computer for 5-6 hours at all. That never happens in the office. During the dark winter days I also utilize the daylight by walking the dog during lunch time, and then continue working again in the evening when it's dark.
This Friday I was working from the summer house, some 60 km northeast from Tampere. It was a very busy day, I had several important emails that needed to receive and send, and a few long conference calls. This house has electricity unlike my family's summer cottage, so that's all good. However, there's no 3G coverage and its driving me nuts. I have the laptop connected to internet using my mobile phone as the modem. The connection is 150 kbps, and it works well when downloading well designed light web pages.
The nerve wrecking part comes when trying to read a newspaper, or work on this blog for instance. So many service providers still stuff their pages so full of flash, ads and other bling bling that it either takes forever to download, or the browser gets jammed altogether.
So, if you are a service provider, please remember that there are people in the world who do not have optical fiber cables installed. And hey, some people are even browsing your website using their mobile phone.
Another complaint is for phone manufacturers: Why can't I use both data connection and voice connection at the same time? When I'm on the phone I can't receive emails or participate in a net meeting. If there's a document discussed in the conference call, I need to drop off, load the email, get the document and then dial back to the conference call. Every time you re-enter the conference line the discussion is interrupted by a nice female voice saying "Petra has entered the conference".... Aagh...
I usually work from home and go to the office only once of twice a week. This saves time, energy and the environment. With a broadband connection and a mobile phone, it's easy, productive and fun. While on a conference call, I can load the washing machine, feed the dog and do all kinds of useful things around the house. Equally often the house is quiet and I sink into the work so that I don't move from the computer for 5-6 hours at all. That never happens in the office. During the dark winter days I also utilize the daylight by walking the dog during lunch time, and then continue working again in the evening when it's dark.
This Friday I was working from the summer house, some 60 km northeast from Tampere. It was a very busy day, I had several important emails that needed to receive and send, and a few long conference calls. This house has electricity unlike my family's summer cottage, so that's all good. However, there's no 3G coverage and its driving me nuts. I have the laptop connected to internet using my mobile phone as the modem. The connection is 150 kbps, and it works well when downloading well designed light web pages.
The nerve wrecking part comes when trying to read a newspaper, or work on this blog for instance. So many service providers still stuff their pages so full of flash, ads and other bling bling that it either takes forever to download, or the browser gets jammed altogether.
So, if you are a service provider, please remember that there are people in the world who do not have optical fiber cables installed. And hey, some people are even browsing your website using their mobile phone.
Another complaint is for phone manufacturers: Why can't I use both data connection and voice connection at the same time? When I'm on the phone I can't receive emails or participate in a net meeting. If there's a document discussed in the conference call, I need to drop off, load the email, get the document and then dial back to the conference call. Every time you re-enter the conference line the discussion is interrupted by a nice female voice saying "Petra has entered the conference".... Aagh...
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