16-III-2020.

Extraordinary state in the country, because of covid-19 virus. We're at 55 who caught it, two seriously ill, one recovered, none dead. But AV and his ficus and everybody there seem to think this is the best chance they have to delay elections, to invent more fake opposition because the real opposition, what's left of it, are boycotting the elections.

burundi is abuzz with it.

The apricots are mostly in blossom - not all branches, but the ones that are, are wide open now. Which is a tad early, perhaps a week, but as long as there's no frost and the temperature goes over 9 long enough for bees to do their job, we may have another good year.

Borče called on friday, to say that he's "replacing the old furniture with new, slightly less old furniture", and that he can't possibly finish until saturday evening. So we're adjourned.

Talked with Kees yesterday - it seems the Toronto office is reduced to half, most of the new guys (whose names I never heard) have quit. In other news, the dutch government is closing almost everything.

clinis are still open

But all schools are closing, day care will only be open for kids of parents with important jobs (healthcare)

all restaurants, coffee shops, bars and sex clubs (they mentioned that specifically) will be closed

largest queues today were in front of the cofee shop

Talked with Jan too, as now that whole of Firriver is working from home, the clinics are mostly not working at all, so it's time to resolve some backlog. He actually asked something about the hl7 sender builder. About the Toronto office, he disagreed with the way it was going from day one (so did I, much help) - they were taking kids fresh from college, paying them a little, and they stayed until they learned enough, gained some real life experience and reference, to get hired by the Gugao etc. So Firriver has become a training center. As he said "you pay peanuts, you get monkeys".

Kristin wrote an article about "working from home 101"... so I added a chapter today on UA

>I know many here have worked from their homes for a long time, but others may be just starting to do so, thanks to the pandemic. I wrote up some advice, based on my 30+ years of experience. If you think it's helpful, feel free to share widely: [link was here]

I worked at home 2002-2019. The main reason I never worked at the beach is that I can't reconcile sand with laptop and I can't stand the glare. Seeing myself instead of command window is not working. Also never worked from a cafe or other public place, can't concentrate.

Now regarding concentration, I play my music at all times - not radio, the ads are always louder than the music and they all play wrong music and talk too much, all distracting. I don't play it loud, just so that I can notice it or not, depending on how I feel at the moment.

Good chair. I was getting regular headaches until Berix told me to buy a proper chair. Then I realized that it wasn't that I needed glasses, I needed proper sitting posture, and the chairs I used until then made me hold my neck in wrong position, less blood to brain, ergo headache.

In the US, it was the postmen and I who were allowed to smoke on the job. Them, because their vehicles don't even have a door, and me, because I was at home. Ashtray to the left, mouse to the right, coffee next to mouse. Didn't change the layout, it just worked.

Source control. Most of the time I was working in medium sized teams, between two and dozen people, and source control saved our butts too many times to count. It's not only that you can find who screwed up (did that a few times but didn't publish, knowing that it would backfire the next day), it's that you can go back to the last good version, or diff against it. You see what was done, how did it get here from there, and how to fix it.

Taking naps. Ever since my wife did some acupuncture on me (I did lose 6kg then), I learned to relax quickly. Ten or fifteen minute naps were crucial to my day. Did that a few times in the office (at least when David was my boss and I had to visit main office sometimes), didn't work quite well but it helped.

Coffee limit. Two, max three coffees a day. Except my coffee is two coffee spoons (about 2/3 of american tea spoon) of instant, in 0,5 liters of water/milk. No sugar. Boots me in the morning, keeps me up.

Chat. While I had very little contact with end users (there's still some justice in this life), I had a lot of contact with other programmers. Email takes too long, call is too intrusive. I'd rather fire off a chat message (and I've been through at least four chat clients over the years, skype being the longest in use, sound was good enough for conferences), chat message will be noticed soon enough. If it becomes urgent, call, but then be prepared to explain the problem in simple terms and as short as possible, do your homework. The skill you need is to quickly come to the part your co-speaker (why doesn't english have this word?) doesn't understand. Of course, you need to find that part...

Servers. It's good when the team has a couple of servers, to host the databases and various virtual machines. The VMs are necessary when you can't tell your clients which VPN and/or remoting software to use, they had an IT department before you met and they already picked their preferred tools. Most of them will lock down the machine they're on, for security reasons, and you don't want to give them your whole server or home box to lock. So you give them a tiny VM, that's what it's for.

Home box. Yes the team has servers, but you're a database guru and you need to be alone with the database sometimes, without overloading the server until everyone screams that it's crawling. So you invest in your box and make it big enough to host your own SQL (Express will do - for what it can't, there's still the team server). There you can torture your databases at local speeds, and nobody will (hear them) scream.

Ditto for fox. You get to keep your preferences and keep them that way, without anyone else setting them otherwise.

And there's no dress code, thank you very much. I actually haven't seen more than half of the people on the last team - except on their official photos, if any, and even that was only in the last year or two. Once, only once, I didn't quite wake up after the nap, and clicked the wrong button... so the camera was on, and shirt was off. So OK, they knew how I looked and I didn't know how they look, big deal. I just turned camera off.

Btw, I looked up Berix recently on the web, and there were no links in the programming world. Her website is now overtaken by some "tv" channel (probably just some show on the web), and googling her by name is swamped by some realtor way down south, of the same name. Any programming stuff is 2004 or older. Her old dot com address is so old that it doesn't recognize Firefox's regular privacy settings and considers its ad blocking as "javascript is off". The adsense bullshit. The only article found with something personally recognizable as her is how she's now active in some catholic outreach programme. Too bad, she was one hell of a foxer.

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Mentions: burundi, Cecilia Roxbury (Berix), David Krakovski, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), fox, Gugao, HL7, Jan Brenkelen, Kees de Cock, Kristin Peiser, Mališa Borkovski (Borče), training center, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian

16-III-2020 - 25-III-2026