Category: General

I’m lucky enough to have a flexible employer. For the last few months I have been able to work from home. I really like this setup but I have noticed a few changes in the way I work.

The benefits are pretty obvious – no commute means I have extra time for both work and for family. It’s great to be around when my kids come home from school. When I commuted by bus, I tried to read up on things, if I was lucky enough to get a seat. The biggest problem when I did get a seat was that my late night Ant coding would catch up with me and I would fall asleep. Luckily that didn’t seem to happen when I drove to work. However I got there, getting to and from work was mostly a large waste of valuable time.

What I have found now, however, is that the removal of that transition between work to home causes me to just keep working. I now use just one system, rather than having a separate systems at work and home. When I come back to that system after a break, it is easier to resume working on the current problem than to transition to working on my personal stuff.

This is one of the reasons I have not been very active in Ant lately. I’m not upset at working on work stuff, since it’s all good fun for me but I do weant to keep in touch with external projects, such as Ant. Let’s see how I go ….

The BBC daily email, a tame creature that used to come knocking once a day with the news of the world, went crazy a few days ago and began hammering at my door repeatedly. I waited a while, hoping it would calm down, but its behaviour remains as bad as that oaf, SoBig.F. Alas, I had to put it out of its misery …

There’s a funny Ant bug report being thrashed out at the moment

In general I find these little differences in how we use English pretty funny. I lived for a while in North Carolina and once, at someone’s house, asked “where’s the bin?”. She looked at me oddly for a moment, until I indicated that I had something to throw out, at which she exclaimed “Oh, you mean the trashcan!” Even funnier was asking at a supermarket, at Christmas time, whether they had any plum pudding – the reply was “Are you from up North?”. Not quite. I also remember the Virginia police officer who was not impressed with my international driver’s licence with its multitude of foreign languages, but that’s another story.

Of course, it cuts both ways. To an Australian, the term yank refers to all Americans. I was to find out in North Carolina that is not strictly accurate.

Perhaps my future contributions to Ant will be documented in Strine. For example, when a task is not found, it would respond:

“Mate, that task name is not fair dinkum”

“‘kin ‘ell, I couldn’t find that task”

Just kidding. Personally, I enjoy our differences and hope we don’t require homogenous documentation that won’t offend.

Oh, and if you ever get the chance to live in another country, as opposed to just visiting, take it. If they don’t speak your language, all the better.

Let’s keep ball in hand …

I came across this article today. about a finger-based mobile phone where you stick your finger in your ear. Hmmm, that’s going to look pretty funny.