A day's work, no commuting

I worked from home today. Half my co-workers (at least) were taking yesterday and today off, either because they had more vacation time than they could carry over or because, given our holiday schedule, that produced 12 consecutive days off for the cost of two vacation days.

I figured it was worth trying, and that if I didn't focus well, I'd get to see how much I could get done on an Amtrak train with an eee and Open Office. It transpires I can concentrate moderately well here, even with cattitude as well as julian_tiger in the apartment. Cattitude was quietly doing his own thing, mostly, which included a nap. We did take a Scrabble break in the middle of the day, since I figured that which hours I work is less important than how many, and that in turn less important than getting things done.

There are lots of reasons I won't be doing this often, but it's nice to know that it is workable sometimes. And sometimes not: for example, I spent much of yesterday flipping through twenty different books, checking the sizes of the illustrations we're reusing for this project. Some of those are in our database, but checking pixels-to-inches is slow, and the database is not as well organized as I would like.

Also, the upshot of this is that we're going to have to cut useful content from this book, because we have hard limits on pagecount and this book would, if complete with everything we normally include—or even the almost-everything we agreed on last week—exceed them by about 40 pages.

A day's work, no commuting

I worked from home today. Half my co-workers (at least) were taking yesterday and today off, either because they had more vacation time than they could carry over or because, given our holiday schedule, that produced 12 consecutive days off for the cost of two vacation days.

I figured it was worth trying, and that if I didn't focus well, I'd get to see how much I could get done on an Amtrak train with an eee and Open Office. It transpires I can concentrate moderately well here, even with cattitude as well as julian_tiger in the apartment. Cattitude was quietly doing his own thing, mostly, which included a nap. We did take a Scrabble break in the middle of the day, since I figured that which hours I work is less important than how many, and that in turn less important than getting things done.

There are lots of reasons I won't be doing this often, but it's nice to know that it is workable sometimes. And sometimes not: for example, I spent much of yesterday flipping through twenty different books, checking the sizes of the illustrations we're reusing for this project. Some of those are in our database, but checking pixels-to-inches is slow, and the database is not as well organized as I would like.

Also, the upshot of this is that we're going to have to cut useful content from this book, because we have hard limits on pagecount and this book would, if complete with everything we normally include—or even the almost-everything we agreed on last week—exceed them by about 40 pages.