The stigma of working from home
I live in Kansas, and a I have a 45-minute each-way commute (pretty rare around here) because I live in "the big city" and work in a small town. Gas is costing me up to $12 a day to drive to work, and because of that, I work from home two days a week. I'm a software developer and systems administrator, so I can do 99% of my job from home.
But folks at the office don't seem to understand that. Our controller likes to talk face-to-face, so he holds on to stuff until I'm in the office so he can talk to me about it. Now that I get... he comes downstairs with his printouts and notes, and just doesn't like to use email or the phone. But when he was asking me to make some changes to some data, he asked me to do that on a day I was in the office. He didn't want me doing it from home, even though I could do so just as easily. He's just not comfortable with my doing work from home, even though he's ultimately the person who approved the arrangement.
But it gets worse. "Not in the office" generally means "not working today." So I get that there's some confusion in terminology. But very often I get, "You're here today!" in a tone that implies that somehow I wasn't "here" in terms of doing my job yesterday, even though I worked from home for eight hours. And this is reinforced by the fact that they had something they wanted to talk to me about, but they couldn't do so while I was working from home.
There are six of us in IS, divided evenly between Operations and Development. We have two working managers, both of which are out of town all week, leaving four of us. One tech (Operations) was out sick yesterday, and I (Development) was working from home. So the one tech support guy physically in the office yesterday told someone (documented in a trouble-ticket) that they were short-handed because, "[other developer] and I were the only ones here yesterday."
But I was working. Even though tech support isn't my job, they know they can push tickets my way, especially when half the staff is out of the office. (And by "out of the office" I mean "not available for work.") And... the ticket load was not high yesterday. If it really had been, he'd have pushed work my way. So he's implying to our users that I wasn't "at work" even though I was, further reinforcing the idea that if you don't see me, I'm not working.
I've been trying to figure out how to deal with this general problem. I'm the only one in our group that works from home, so I'm a bit the outsider. I already have to deal with the "oh, yeah, you weren't here when we talked about that" stuff. But it's the continued implication that if I'm not in the office, I'm not really working that's giving me trouble.
And I don't think it's because they think I'm goofing off all day... I think it's because I'm out of sight and therefore out of mind and therefore I must not have been "at work". I'm not sure how to combat that.
Neflix set-top box, part 2
So I sat down before dinner to watch a TV show with my son on our new Roku Netflix player. There was some network activity going on, so quality came in at one "dot" out of four. That was noticeable, but not terrible. I was thinking it improved while I was watching it the night before, and it seemed to today as well. But about half-an-hour in, the screen blanked and I got a "loading" bar, indicating that the buffer was empty and it was rebuffering... quality was two dots.
So the question is, did it decide my connection had improved, but couldn't switch quality on the fly, so it dumped the buffer and started buffering again at a higher quality? Or had it already switched quality on the fly and something happened to cause my network buffer to completely empty, but then fill up fairly smoothly.
I find the former unlikely. I'm thinking network connectivity may have been flaky.
Later in the show, the screen froze and a few seconds later, the Roku rebooted. That was unexpected. It picked up exactly where I had been when it froze, but it does take awhile for the box to reboot, load my queue so I can select my show again, and then rebuffer the first few minutes. That may have been the Roku reacting badly to a network problem. Time will tell, I suppose.
Netflix on my TV
I received the Roku Netflix on-demand set-top box right before lunch today on Tuesday.
Setup took less than ten minutes, including entering the wireless MAC address into my wireless hub. It was dead simple... choose wired or wireless, pick my access point (or my neighbor's open access point with a higher strength signal), key in my wireless passkey with the remote on an on-screen keyboard... and bam, it's talking to Netflix. It gave me a five-character code I had to take to the Netflix website to identify my player, and when I got back to the living room it had already switched to a confirmation screen. From there, it's simply scroll through my "Instant" queue and select a movie to watch. It takes twenty seconds or so to buffer up the beginning of the video, but it's still a lot faster than waiting for a DVD to boot, show intros you're not allowed to skip, five second-animations between menu levels, etc.
The menus are simple and intuitive... it's almost disappointing that there isn't a lot to it. There are a few simple settings, but since you manage you entire selection of movies from a web browser (on your computer), navigation is simply limited to scrolling through your already-defined "Instant" queue.
During buffering it shows two "dots" out of four for quality, but if I pause in the middle and fast forward, it shows three dots. I watched an episode of Heroes tonight, and the quality was pretty darn good. Not DVD quality, but very acceptable on my inexpensive television.
It remembers where I am at in multiple shows, and what episode I'm ready to watch next on television series. The latter is very nice. Navigation within the show includes choppy fast-forward/reverse (fast-forwarding is limited by having to jump forward in the stream), and navigation by a selection of frames from intervals within the show. Not logical "scenes" like on a (well-designed) DVD, but apparently just every few minutes. Better than trying to fast-forward through the stream, though.
The selection on instant viewing is goofy... I get that only a fraction of Netflix' catalog is currently available for online viewing, but if you look at the first season of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, (don't laugh) the first five episodes are not available. Hmmm... the disc isn't available either. What's going on here? Has Netflix ripped this content themselves, and since they don't own a good copy of the first disc, that content isn't available? There's some agreement with this particular studio that says if you don't own the physical disc, you can't rent out digital copies? I dunno. As you progress through the series, there are three other seasons missing episodes online, though they have the disc available for rent.
(UPDATE: Okay, those first five "episodes" in Season 1 aren't episodes, they're movies that preceded the series as part of Universal Television's "Action Pack". That's probably a rights issue.)
I bought this box based on the fact that, even though the selection is limited, there's plenty of content currently available that I want to watch. This'll let me downgrade from a 4-out plan to a 3-out plan, and the box pays for itself in 15 months. But what I'm really counting on is Netflix getting more studios on board and getting a much more significant catalog for streaming.
Overall, I think it's a good deal. The box is only $100, the service is free with my regular Netflix subscription, the visual quality is very acceptable (I'm no Hi Def addict... I have a cheap TV and the box is hooked up by S-Video so it works with my input switch), and it lets me lower the cost of my monthly plan. I figure it can only get better as Netflix adds more downloadable content.