Oooh, received all of your message, and had no new comments, except on this
one.

You hit one of my pet peeves.  When my company can't seem to afford to keep
my desktop/laptop/whatever machine at LEAST as fast as my 3 year old home
PC, I get grumpy.

Never once have I had as big a monitor (or dual-monitors, or more) at the
office.  It helps me tremendously at home.  (Ticket system up on one
monitor, maximized, e-mail and any pending replies I'm working on for
customers,  on the other.  Terminal window or troubleshooting documentation
up over the top of those.  Very little clicking to switch focus from looking
at the customer's system to typing the response, or updating the ticket.)
Far too many companies don't "get it" here.  (The Joel on Software guy's
insistence that everyone have at least one 30" monitor with very high
resolutions would also cover it...)

When I worked less directly with customers in a sysadmin role, from home --
one monitor always had the system monitoring tool up on it, and the VPN was
always connected.  It saved countless minutes when the pager went off, to
just pop downstairs and look for the thing highlighted in Red, pop another
window, fix it, and go back to whatever I was doing.  A note to self to
script or otherwise automate that recovery process, or add a monitor if it
was something unmonitored, meant that the system always got better over
time.  At the office, I had a dinky 17" CRT, and everything was just
slower... still the same applications running, but all piled on top of one
another.  Eventually we put some of the monitoring stuff up on a wall and I
built some "what's going on?" scripts that would go out and query critical
processes from 18 different sites in a single window for myself, but
still... 

Pet peeve.  Not having enough monitor real-estate these days, is stupid.
Not having dual monitors, is like having a teeny tiny cramped student-sized
desk to work from with real papers.  Not adequate anymore.

Right now, I have an medium-oldish IBM T43 laptop, docking station, and a
Dell 19" non-widescreen LCD hooked to it.  It does "dual monitor" between
the Dell and the laptop LCD.  I'd prefer bigger on both and higher
resolution, but this kinda works... home is far better.

I run computers for a long time before upgrading them, and when I'm a few
years behind "state of the art" at home, and the work machine is lagging
behind that in significant ways, I get pretty grumpy.  Basically, I want the
system to be responsive when doing at least two tasks back and forth at a
time and enough screen real-estate to watch both things. 

In the past, we had to do this with multiple machines at one's desk, and
I've done that... but the fan noise and constantly kicking things under the
desk because you've got three "beige boxes" under there, gets old.  The
"interrupt" to switch mice and keyboards isn't very productive either, but
could be made a LITTLE better with a keyboard activated KVM switch.

A co-worker bought himself a foot-switch activated KVM once, but I haven't
seen those ever again on the market.  Another co-worker is happy with those
tiny Logitech trackballs, but leaves a USB mouse simultaneously plugged in
for whenever one of us has to get on his PC to see a particular customer's
system, etc... thank goodness for USB pointing devices!  I like big
trackballs, but use a mouse most of the time.  But I can never get the hang
of his little "thumb-ball".  I'm also a fan of the pointing "sticks" on the
IBM laptops, but I know that many people hate them.  I disable my touchpad
altogether on the T43 and use the stick... 

Nate 

-----Original Message-----
From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu] On Behalf Of
Vitaliy
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 8:11 AM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [TECH] Agile programming

I find that I'm most productive alone, at night. It doesn't matter whether
I'm home or at work, except for the fact that at work I have access to all
necessary equipment, and a much better computer. :)


-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist