Workin' from home

I've been hosting a cold virus for a few days, so I've been working from home since Wednesday. The only real problem with this is, I don't really stop working until bedtime. At work, at some point I pack up and come home, and then it's generally a bother to start up the VPN and remote desktop, so I don't usually bother unless I get an alert.

Upside, this is the season where things need my attention at work more, and there's much less to do at home with no outside stuff to speak of. And OT pay is nice. Downside, the dishes and vacuuming and such isn't getting much attention.

I'll probably go in on Monday; I'm still snerfling a bit, but I'm feeling pretty good and I'm probably past contagious. It was a pretty lightweight cold and I wouldn't have paid it any mind except that for my job, working from home does not detract from my ability to do my job in the least. It's too bad the prez doesn't like people working from home. Luckily in my case he didn't have much of a choice; several times a year I need to monitor things until midnight or later.

Ahh.

Spent two hours shoveling, breaking compacted snow off so the driveway is bare over a good part of it. I feel MUCH better. Sitting around inside all day for 4 days in a row doesn't leave me feeling very well.

Bike light reincarnation

I did some playing around with it yesterday, and it turns out that the problem with my old HID bike light was just that the switch was broken, so it actually works OK. But in any case, I am still happy with the change to the new one. I tried powering them both up in a dark room this morning, and the results are basically that in the area where I want the light thrown, they're both pretty comparable, in fact the new LED is a bit brighter. The difference is that the HID splashes a lot of light all over the place. With the LED covered, the whole room is pretty well lit; with the HID covered, just that spot is lit, with a little spill (and also my hand is getting hot quickly; the HID is tossing out a lot of IR apparently).

Also, the HID takes 60 seconds to come up to full power, and has no flash modes or power levels, it's on or off. In all I'll stick with the LED. If nothing else, it weighs a fraction of what the other one does, takes up less room and I don't spend any time messing with it to keep it going.