Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Beach Days

Editorials aren’t usually two or three parts, so let’s just call this a continuing saga. When I left you last month, I had just finished describing how Don, my alarm system professional, had succeeded in totally destroying all concept of home automation in the Circuit Cellar. In the process of installing a new commercial alarm system, he succeeded in ripping out all the alarm-to-HCS connections throughout my house (from motion detectors and sensors).

The bad news was that for the first time in 24 years I had manual lighting again. That isn’t a problem for most people, but around my house it means you bump into lots of things in the dark. It has been so long since I’ve had to use the light switches that I don’t even know where most of them are, and my unconventional floor plan doesn’t give any hints about where to look. Worse yet, in the course of 20-plus years of renovations and additions, I implemented a few lights with no manual switches at all. (They’re X10 or SSR-controlled from the HCS only.) Basically, there is no such thing as "manual" in my house. I haven’t solved this problem. And dreadfully, Don hasn’t finished yet either.

The day I wrote last month’s editorial, I was preparing to leave on a trip at 4 a.m. the following morning. At 10 p.m. that evening, while Don was still doing his thing, I demanded a ceasefire. Six hours later I entered a four-digit activation code and started on an 1100-mile drive down the coast. The motivation to take the trip was that I could combine business and pleasure. A magazine run by professional people doesn’t require supervision. I spend most of my day e-mailing people down the hall or from home as it is. I figured I could manage contests, review editorial stuff, and do virtually everything else I normally do while sitting on a beach far away from snowbound Connecticut.

My fantasy was prompted by thoughts that I could telecommute. At one time people actually went to an office, but these days everyone in Silicon Valley stays home and meets in cyberspace, right? If it’s nothing more than using a laptop on the road and sending e-mails back and forth, then I should be able to pull that off for a month, right? Well, after trying it for the last four weeks, I have concluded that that concept is still worthwhile, but the execution has a few bugs. In my experience, successful telecommuting is entirely dependent upon your Internet connection and the intelligence of the IT guy back at the office.

My first rude awakening was that vacation islands in Florida are definitely not Internet communication hubs. After being confronted by one of the neighbors, I explained that I wasn’t some weirdo stalking the neighborhood. I was just out sniffing Wi-Fi (which sounded just as bad, I’m sure). It was a nice beach but it was a black hole for communications. There were no cable modems and no DSL service, and the nearest Starbucks was 10 miles away. Telecommuting meant using a 56K dial-up to a single available local AOL line. If that line was out or busy, the only alternative was 28K at $8 per hour on an 800 line. Given my current experience, I was lucky even having 56K.

Reality struck the second day after my arrival. The Atmel AVR contest had just started and I received over 1000 sample requests in just three days. Worse yet, they were all e-mailed to me! I couldn’t use the automatic e-mail-to-Excel program on my office PC that would have filtered and sorted them in 2 minutes. Instead, I had to spend six days downloading all the messages and individually pasting them into the spreadsheet. After that, it seemed like every business correspondence for the rest of the month involved downloading 20-meg files. It was never a case of quickly reading e-mail and switching offline. It was always a question of how many hours before I could do anything else but send or receive correspondence.

Probably the greatest revelation was the importance of something that many of us take for granted: e-mail archives. When I use Outlook at the office, everything ends up in folders and I don’t have to worry about losing what I’ve sent or received. When I’m outside and not using Outlook, it can be a very different story. I thank heavens that John Gorsky had the foresight to switch our e-mail system from a POP server to an IMAP server recently. While I’m not entirely clear on the details, all I know is that I was able to keep all of the correspondence for the whole month and then easily synchronize everything on my office PC when I returned. The older system would have been a nightmare.

Certainly, companies that handle a lot of telecommuting have elaborate systems with many more features. My experience was merely a toe in the water. With the exception of the connection bandwidth, I think it has potential. Before I plant myself on another pile of sand in Florida, I definitely need to solve the bandwidth issue. I installed XM Radio so I wouldn’t have to surf radio stations while driving. I know there are satellite connections for the laptop too. If you have any firsthand experience using this, I’d appreciate hearing the good, the bad, and the ugly about doing it. Forewarned is forearmed.