Working from Melbourne Next Week

I’m working from Melbourne next week. I’ve pretty much been on the road non-stop for the last five to six months with usually only a few days at home during the week. Some weeks I never went home and did two weeks straight on the road and stayed somewhere other than my “home-base”.

I have to say that this is something that I’ve been looking forward to for over a month. It was going to be this week (it’s late Friday night here) but for various reasons I had to push it back a week.

During the coming week I’ll be doing on some internal work for TFS Now around getting even greater automation for our customers. My overall plan of atack is going to be:

• Monday
  • Start the day at a cafe so that I can plan my week from a deliverable perspective.
• Tuesday
  • Work from home for the whole day.
• Wednesday
  • Work from the “office” for the whole day.
• Thursday
  • Find somewhere in the city to work from depending on my bandwidth requirements.
• Friday
  • Probably work from home in the morning and then head into the city for Beer ‘o’ Clock.

Jealous? Well you could always apply for a job at Readify

Operator Please

Whilst I reckon I would stand out like an old shrub in a field full of flowers at an Operator Please concert – I really like their music. Also – check out this song about ping pong

From what I understand the band originates from the Gold Coast.

Readify Developer Network

I feel somewhat sheepish in posting this since I am so late, but I just wanted to point everyone to this post of Greg Low’s where he announces the Readify Developer Network.

Basically we are going to be putting on a number of events where we get members of the Readify team to present on something that they are really passionate about. Hopefully it will grow the pool of people who are willing to attend user groups and other technical community events.

Catching up on some blog reading.

Sometimes life gets too busy to process all the information that is coming into my Inbox or aggregator. Because of this I’m pretty brutal about when I decide to process information. If I receive an e-mail that doesn’t require an action from me then I will often put it into the maybe pile having briefly glanced at its contents.

With blog posts I tend to star them in Google Reader. It is quick (important) and I can come back to it later on. At the moment I’ve got “more than 20 items” in my starred items and I am going through them decide if, now after a week or more has passed I really want to do anything other than un-star it.

MyProgress.com

I picked up this link to MyProgress.com from On10, what I would call a “life dashboard” that shows me how I am tracking on a personal level. I’m not so much interested in how I am tracking against other people, but I did find that financial tools that they have interesting.

Personally, I’d love to see this application launch, but I doubt that we ever will.

Three out of five ain’t bad…

Earlier today I posted my TODO list. I didn’t necessarily need to get it all done today but the more I did today the less I had to do tomorrow (or so they say). Anyway – I managed to scratch off one, four and five.

1. Resolve the issue on TFSNow/D0001 instance.
2. Follow up on rollback implementation for build virtualizer.
3. Talk to Chris about future plans for TFS Integrator/Deployer.
4. Finish off Q2.
5. Added: Figure out how to get VS2008 solution files building with Team Build 2005/MSBuild 1.0.

Tomorrow I should be able to knock over the remaining two tomorrow with Chris’ help. As a side note, I blogged about how I tackled number five over on the TFS Now blog.

Where am I at with things…

1. Twitter offline (sporadically).
2. E-mail appears to be start/stop, but this could be caused by Office Communicator weirdness.
3. Not enough bandwidth to play YouTube music videos (but still just enough for POP3 spam to arrive – does SPAM get a higher QOS or something?).

Anyway – here is what I am trying to achieve for today/tomorrow:

1. Resolve the issue on TFSNow/D0001 instance.
2. Follow up on rollback implementation for build virtualizer.
3. Talk to Chris about future plans for TFS Integrator/Deployer.
4. Finish off Q2.
5. Added: Figure out how to get VS2008 solution files building with Team Build 2005/MSBuild 1.0.

D0001 is the Readify TFS Now instance and we observed an error. We aren’t sure why it started happening but was fixed along with another related issue so I can cross that one off for now (will revisit I am sure).

The build virtualizer is a piece of technology that we use inside TFS Now. It is functioning right now be we are still adding little features to it here and there so I need to follow up with Paul Stovell on that.

Perhaps the most exciting news is that Chris Burrows and I are again looking at features for TFS Integrator and TFS Deployer. Hopefully we can catch up tomorrow to talk about it and lay out a bit of a product road map.

Q2 is one of my pet projects. I have a Team Project inside our TFS Now instance called Q. I’m a bit of a James Bond fan, and in particular I love the role that Q plays. The idea for the Q team project is that it will have a number of numbered sub-projects (Q1, Q2, etc) which solve a specific problem that I’ve identified. Necessity is the mother of invention so everything that is in there should have some underlying need.

Finally, I was talking on the phone with Darren Neimke last night who was lamenting the fact that it isn’t possible to build .NET 3.5 projects from VS2008 under Team Build 2005.

Thanks sysadmin-guy!

So this is going to be one of those rare blog posts where I thank a system administrator. In this case it is our outgoing system administrator Grant Holliday who just gave me more space on Exchange:

Thanks Grant! As it happens I was considering what I should do. The problem is all that space isn’t actually just stuff that I am hoarding (I delete almost all my e-mails), it is my “Sent Items” folder which I find is useful as a replacement for my failing memory.

I could pull it all out and put it into a separate PST file but then I would loose that file. On the other hand having such a big Exchange store means that it creates problems for disaster recovery and also when I rebuild my machine.

What to do…

OHNOOS! Twitter is down!

I can’t twit with my peeps!

Scary Recognition

I came across this on Dominic Cooney’s blog. I found it strange/scary that I instantly recognized where this photo was taken. Also, big shouts outs to Joseph Cooney who I didn’t have time to say hello to as I raced out the door from my QMSDNUG session last night to catch a plane.