dale lane

It’s been a few weeks since I started working-from-home on a regular basis, so I thought tonight would be a good time to stop and think about how it is going.

When my daughter was born, my wife took a year off work to stay at home with her. For the second year, she started working part-time, so we started Grace at a local nursery Monday to Wednesday while my wife worked. After Grace turned two last month, my wife went back to work full-time. We didn’t feel the time was right for Grace to be in full-time childcare, so as an intermediate step I started working from home on Thursday and Fridays.

I was nervous about whether I’d get any work done with a two-year old in the house, and whether Grace would be able to cope without the level of attention that she gets in full-time childcare. But so far, it’s working.

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The IBM Education Assistant now has some WebSphere MQ content.

If you’ve not seen the ‘Education Assistant’ before…

IBM Education Assistant integrates narrated presentations, Show Me Demonstrations, tutorials, and resource links to help you successfully use IBM products.

The range of topics that are covered by the new WebSphere MQ materials is a little narrow (some XA stuff, security topics, and a bit on the new accounting and statistics features we added in version 6), but they’re a nice start. It’s great to see WMQ included, and I hope to see us add more soon.

Went in one of the new break-out rooms at work today. These have been popping up across the site over the last week or two, but I’d not got round to going to have a look before.

They’ve got comfy chairs and sofas, coffee tables with newspapers and computing magazines, plasma screen TVs, and a small kitchen with fridge, microwave, hot water, and posh coffee machines. I like the idea of these rooms – more than just a useful alternative to the cafeteria as a space to make our own food. They’re a place to get away from our desk and take time out to bounce ideas off each other. More importantly, they reinforce that our job is about more than sitting at our desk, keeping our heads down and quietly churning out code.

Lifehacker had a link a couple of weeks ago to an interesting webpage about “cool workplaces”, which talks about some more innovative approaches to making your work place an exciting place. One of these was (as they admit, a little predictably!) the very cool Google offices.

Okay, so our new rooms aren’t quite in the same league as the Googleplex (how cool would that be?!), but add them to the stuff we’ve already got on site like foosball, tennis courts, sports hall, gym, and so on, and we’re pretty lucky.

Just heard that we’ve (finally!) released refresh pack 6.0.2.0 for WebSphere MQ V6.

As a service engineer for WMQ, this is something that I’d be interested in anyway. But 6.0.2.0 isn’t just any old bunch of fixes. Refresh Pack is the new-ish term that we use when referring to maintenance which is not only bug fixes, but also some new functionality. And one of the biggest bits of functionality in 6.0.2.0 is the inclusion of my WMQ Healthcheck (now called ‘Tests’, I think) – into the product for everyone!

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I listened to a new IBM podcast on the drive home this evening – an interview with IBM vice president of technology strategy and innovation Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

In it, he discusses IBM’s views on patents and the patent system – highlighting “…the importance of patent quality…” and “…how the ability to share ideas stimulates innovation”.

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