Volcanic Eruption

The last vacation I took was to Iceland which is one of the most interesting geological places on earth. I friended a couple of guides we meet there on Facebook and enjoy their posts as they help me remember all the cool things we saw there. If you have watched the news over the past couple of days you might have seen that there is a new volcanic eruption in Iceland. Luckily the eruption is not near any populated area and is a mild one. I have never seen a volcanic eruption live but one of the guides posted a link to a webcam of the current eruption. It is mesmerizing to watch and I spent 10-15mins watching it today in between the other things I had to do today. It is fun watching slowly change throughout the day and I'm sure will be keeping track of it over the next few weeks.

Here is the link in case you want to check it out. 

https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/03/20/beint-vefstreymi-fra-eldstodvunum?fbclid=IwAR3tFxOScFN5Ecy5xCCNCGtUC_RC19j27m9VKGKpjlxdERNPWqYy_K_yw5E
 

One Year Later

Its been one year since the COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic. This past Saturday I lead a ride out of Mercer County Park with most of the Insane bike posse. It was a similar ride to the on I led about a year ago. The pandemic turned out differently than I expected both in a good and bad way. One of the good things was that nobody I care about was directly affected by it which is one of the main things I feared. The bad was that it has lasted a lot longer than expected and killed over half a million people in the US at this point. 

Back when it started there was a hope that shutting things down and using some common sense measures like wearing masks, washing your hands and social distancing would bring it under control. Those measures did help at the start when people started to understand how bad this disease was. However not everybody followed the guidelines and not everybody believed that the disease was as deadly as it was. This lead to a number of surges that make the suffering and death toll worst than it had to be. 

Even though I call the people I ride with the Insane Bike Posse we were very rational about how we handled this threat. For a few weeks we road apart but then eventually as the understanding of the disease improved and how it was transmitted we found ways to ride together safely. This mostly meant riding further apart, carrying all the food and drink we needed instead of going into stores and wearing masks if we did go into somewhere. 

We were all a little anxious when this all started but eventually got use to the new way of things. One other thing that we did was to start doing Zoom meetings like most of the rest of the world. In the beginning it was to talk about how to ride safely but then it became just a way for us socialize. These meetings became a part of my Friday night and helped me stay connected with my friends. These Zoom sessions were somewhat therapeutic and fun and I think helped us stay a little more sane. I know this last year was much easier because I could keep riding and share my fears and anxiety with the posse. 

In this year we have learned that we can ride together and do if safely. Now fear has been replaced by hope. There is now three vaccines that are effective against this disease. Half of the posse have gotten at lease the first shot of the vaccine and I expect the rest of us will be vaccinated by the end of May. Although I think there will be lingering affects from this pandemic both medical and sociological I am more certain of what the coming year will be like and it should be a place where it will much safer to get together. 

 We may never be 100% back to the normal we use to have but I see a possible bike vacation in my future. So it has been a long year but the future is looking better.  

Working from Home

 

I have been working from home in some fashion for about 15 years. Sometimes it was just a day a week at home other times is was three or four days. About five years ago I went to mostly working from home and would go into the office about once a month. That was of course until Covid hit and since then like most people, who are able to, I have been working from home 100% of the time. 

For me, as a software developer, it's easy to work from home and I prefer it. My team is literally spread around the world so its really not practical to meet at an office. There are also plenty of tools like Zoom and Slack that make it easy to communicate without having to actually be in the same location. One of the skills that any software developer needs today is the ability to work remotely and still stay connected to the team. 

If you work from home a lot then you want to have some kind of dedicated work space to work at. Some where that is quiet and comfortable that you don't mind spending 8 to 10 hours at. When I first starting working from home I had an old metal desk which was large and sturdy and served me well but it was really showing its age. I wanted something that not only looked better but also was more functional.

My old desk was large but was covered by a rack that held all my computers for home and work and a large screen. There wasn't actually a lot of open desk space when I wanted work on something. 

The main idea of the new desk was to have a very clean workspace that would still hold all the computer paraphernalia that I need for work and home.  If you look at the picture at the top of the blog you will see the finished desk. It has two file draws on the left and an open cabinet on the right. The top of the desk is mostly empty. The monitor is mounted on an nifty adjustable swivel mount. This makes it easy to put the monitor in the perfect position to work at while also allowing me to move it out of the way to make more space on the desk. 

The only think on the top of the desk is my charging station and my mouse and keyboard which are wireless and can be more off the desk easily when not in use.

The charging station allows me to have an organized place to charge my phone, headset, tablet, etc without have a mess of wires around a plug.

All my computers and the wires associated with them are on shelves in the open cabinet on the right. 

 

This way they are out of sight. You might think that this make it hard to get to them but I found a cool solution to that. The shelf in the right cabinet is on a TV lift mechanism so when I need full access to the computer and all its ports I just raise the shelf out of the cabinet. 

The shelves are on slides so I can pull out any of the computers and get full access to all ports on the computer.

Being able to get full access to a computer and then hide it away when I don't need it is a big improvement to what I had before. My different computers are better organized and now can be easily hidden away when not needed. I also have much more desks space than before. 

I know this is a set up that is not something everyone needs but I have three different computers that I work on at various times so having them in the shelves connected to a single mouse and keyboard that I can switch between them makes using them easier. If you look below you can see it the set up. On the top shelf I have my KVM switch (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) and my Mac mini I use for all my pictures and music. The next shelf down is my current Windows PC that I use for all my personal stuff. Lastly on the bottom shelf is the Mac book  Pro that I use for work.

I have been using the desk for a little over a mouth now and it is working out well. It's a big improvement over my old desk. It not only looks a lot better but will let me get rid of another table in my office that I was using for doing repairs on. I actually have another three draw cabinet I made that will let me create add another top to this desk to create an L shaped desk. That project will have to wait as we plan to sell our house and move in the next couple of months But at least for now I have a much better place to work at at home.