Making our house a home

Over a year ago, my wife and I decided to sell our house and move closer to the water. We expected to be in a rental for maybe 6 months before finding a house. We were fully prepared to wait and wanted a fixer. Unfortunately, the real estate market here in San Diego started heating up again and finding a house was not an easy task. We had a few requirements for a house, but looking back, we were actually flexible on some of those requirements.

11 months and offers on 6 houses later, we finally found the house that we'll eventually call home. I say eventually because we have a very large remodeling project. While a lot of the remodeling is interior and cosmetic, we are filling in a pool (yes, people think we're crazy, but having had a pool for 8 years where it was warmer than where are are now and not using it much, we've decided that it isn't worth keeping), removing a fireplace (switching to a gas appliance fireplace), rearranging some rooms a little, adding some closets, and fixing up the kitchen. This project is going to take awhile and while we're very anxious to get moved in, I'm sure the time will start flying by as the process gets underway. Of course we want it done right the first time, so we're not going to rush it.

I'm not quite sure how most people go about remodeling a house as there seem to be lots of hurdles and pitfalls. Luckily, I have a construction expert (my father), who has offered to oversee the work and guide me.

Let the fun begin!

Review: Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500

As many people who read my blog know, I've been working with consumer scanners for over 6 years and have had more scanners than I care to count. Six years ago I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-5110eoxm scanner. It was quite expensive for a consumer scanner, but it was one of the best investments I've made in computer hardware. The scanner served me well, and I've been recommending that scanner and its successors for years. Everyone that I've recommended the scanner to has been pleased with it.

Yesterday, the FedEx guy dropped off a package for me, and I quickly opened it. Inside was a Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500. I was given the heads up that a "black and shiny" object would be showing up at my door, so it wasn't a complete surprise.

The first thing I did with the scanner is take a stack of loan documents (105 pages), split it into 3 and scanned it in. The stack had some letter sized pages and some legal sized pages. The scanner cranked through the pile pretty quickly without a single misfeed. In fact, I scanned the stack 3 times, the first time, it scanned to my iPhone (it has WiFi and an iPhone app), the second I didn't turn on OCR, and the 3rd time was a charm. It was significantly faster than my old ScanSnap and didn't misfeed (my old ScanSnap misfed all the time).

The feeder on the scanner works better than the old version, as well. The software is typical hardware manufacturer software in that it works, but is, in general, pretty poor. I have, however, gotten used to the software over the years and try to interact with it as little as possible. In fact, I use Mariner Software's Paperless which integrates directly with the ScanSnap so that I can just click the Scan button in Paperless and it kicks off the scan.

The cost of the scanner may deter some people, but for anyone that wants to go paperless, a good scanner is an absolute necessity. Once you use a ScanSnap, you will think that multi function devices are toys.

Pros

• Very fast scanning.
• Excellent ability to prevent misfeeds.
• Scanning quality is good and automatic setting works well.
• Abbyy Integrated OCR is fast and produces good results.

Cons

• Expensive.
• Software is usable, but not pretty.

Summary

This scanner reaffirms my recommendation of ScanSnap scanners. It improves on my 6 year old scanner, but I don't think it would be worth spending the money if you already have a ScanSnap scanner. The scanning to WiFi seems more like a bullet item than a useful feature, but time will tell.

While people try to eliminate paper, it is amazing how much still comes into our house. A scanner is absolutely necessary to reach the goal of going completely paperless. I've been scanning in documents and going paperless for the last 6 and a half years. If you don't already have a ScanSnap scanner, this is an excellent choice.

Why all the fuss over working from home?

With the recent announcement/leak that Yahoo! is requiring all its employees to work from an office, I've been thinking a lot about my own experience working from home. I've been working from home for over 13 years; my first experience working from home was forced upon me with the closure of my office, but this second stint was my own choice. For my work style and ethic, I could never work in an office again. I do put in a full workday every day as well as work extra hours when needed. However, I'm also not chained to a desk and can get things done during the day, if needed. While I'm not alone in never wanting to work in an office again, working from home isn't for everyone. In fact, I'd argue that most people should never work from home.

Working from home takes a certain dedication, motivation, and work ethic. In most cases, I believe that this should be reserved for the cream of the crop employees and be decided on a case by case basis. I've seen working from home abused by many employees and what Yahoo! is doing may make sense for it. However, they have the possibility of losing their best employees over the new policy.

Several years ago when my business was down significantly, I interviewed for a position with a local company. Like Yahoo!, their policy was that all employees had to be in the office. As someone who had worked from home for many years prior to this, I was quite torn about the position. In the end, I determined that my quality of life would suffer if I had to work in an office and commute up to an hour and a half round trip each day. Not everyone has this luxury, but a policy that is supposed to foster collaboration could backfire if it reduces overall employee satisfaction.

Even though I work in a large company, my entire team (except for one project manager) works from home (we're all in different cities). We've actually never worked in an office for this company, but were hired as remote employees because great employees are hard to find and dictating where someone must live and come into an office drastically reduces the potential talent pool. If my company were to enact a blanket policy where no one could work from home with no exceptions on a case by case basis, I'm almost sure we'd all leave. My team is extremely talented and forcing us into the mold of an average employee is fraught with disaster.

Hopefully Yahoo! doesn't lose too many good people (if you're a mobile developer at Yahoo! and are looking to leave, please drop me a note) with this move. In addition, maybe the policy can be revisited on a case by case basis so that the top people have a lot more flexibility. In our highly mobile workforce, lumping everyone together is a recipe for losing people.

Developers going indie

Over the last few years, I've read about a number of developers that have "gone indie" in that they left their jobs and are now independent developers. Maybe make it sound glamorous that they no longer have a boss. While this technically may be true, they still have to answer to someone, be it their clients or their customers. There is nothing inherently wrong with being independent, but thinking that doing this will make all of someone's work problems go away is misleading.

People that are self employed swap one set of problems (e.g. working for a large company) with another. Being self employed means doing accounting, marketing, sales, support, etc. (or hiring someone for these positions and having to be a people manager). In addition, income is not guaranteed which could lead to stress and many people have a hard time separating work from home and thus put in more hours at their "job". I'm not saying that working for someone else is better or that being self employed is better (I've done both), it is just different.

I personally had a good run being self employed (granted my independent software business was only about 20% of my income with the rest coming from contracting), but at this stage in my life, working for someone else brings stability and has actually reduced my stress over my job (I have other stresses, but work isn't one of them). When I was self employed, I used to put in 70+ hours per week between my software and contracting. This was not sustainable for me.

I wish developers going indie the best of luck, but just because I work for someone else (a large company in my case), I'm not a sellout and have no regrets.