A submersive state of mind

Sorry for the low blogging of late. I've hit the opposite of a blog-drain; I'm in a state where there's simply too much to write about, and instead of just exploding with it I retract into myself think I should mull on it a bit before I pop it out. Today is one of those popping days, and I want to talk about something that has been new to me for the last 5 months or so and has proven itself to be a mixed bag of pro's and con's ; working from home.

As of the beginning of this year I started to work for Free Systems Technology Labs, an Indian company bent on doing funky stuff the right way with the right people (I had to say that, didn't I?), and as such I now live in my wife's home-town of Kiama, a couple of hours south of Sydney, Australia. We moved here from Norway at the beginning of the year for a number of reasons, but being closer to (my wife's) family also with little kids and the nice climate were two strong contenders (but we're still talking about moving back to Norway someday... or somewhere else entirely, wherever fate and lust drives us, really).

Working from home can be boring, I know, but we're actually living in a 1880's built old two-storey farmhouse, verandahs all along the house, with some of the best views in town. Here's a pic I took last evening before finishing up work for the day. Yes, it can be hard concentrating on hard-core ontologies and magic Tuple-stores when you can stare at the sea for hours, and it doesn't help either that there's a number of comfy chairs with fluffy pillows right outside my French-doors that leads out to the verandah. Especially on a nice sunny day. Like today.

So, in order to break up my day I've got a schedule of sorts. First, after the kids are out the door for school and breakfast is tidied up, if I still got tea left I bring it upstairs to my office. Now here's a crucial part of my day; do I sit down and get started, or go and get dressed? Ah, the number of times I've written important emails or talked on Skype in my underwear. Well, the sensible thing to do - and, really, what I try to do every morning - is to get dressed. I know it sounds pathetically lame to lament over this, but it's so easy to just get going. I'm not going anywhere, right?

Well, that's the thing. Part of my schedule, which I don't do absolutely everyday, but every so often, is to go to my local coffee-fixer-upper-place. I gives me an excuse to get dressed, and makes for a nice 2 minute (!!) stroll down the picturesque Kiama town-houses, all the way to the bottom of the hill to get my double-strength coffee, double-strength chocolate Mocha. Some days when I do my walk on lunch time, I might even get one of their amazingly yummy salmon on Turkish-bread, and just stroll another minute down to the park, sit in the sun on the grass, and enjoy the serenity.

Of course, too much serenity is kinda boring, especially when your mind is racing with ontologies, event-models, dual-stored Tuples, or worrying if I need to consider using Bessel functions for subject equality in the Topic Maps Reference Model, it can get a bit busy in my head. Thankfully when the day is over I've got a way to kinda deal with all that, but during the day itself it's sometimes hard to focus on just one thing and one thing alone. So I need to schedule even such things.

I do have a schedule, though. 9am - 10am is the time for all things not specifically work tasks related, such as emails, news, blogs, etc. At around 10.30am till about lunch I do the more practical things about my work, such as coding, writing, testing, dowloading and installing, meddling, fiddling, prototyping and breaking my machine. Then I have lunch, quite often with my wife who downstairs somewhere chasing Samuel around, trying to stop him from getting into stuff he shouldn't. And then after lunch, at about 1pm, I fix my machine and do more thinking-related stuff, hold meetings (mostly through calling through Skype at around 2-2.30pm when India is getting into the office), write emails, and try to come up with plans, thoughts for the next day, and scheming in general.

I try to follow this pattern as much as I can. It's a lonely job in many ways as I don't have that office intermingling that I love. So, to keep myself sane I go places. I often go to the Kiama Library where I meet up with Tim, the crazy-fun-beardy local IT librarian. I sometimes meet up with a few guys I know around the place (not that many) and even got to meet up with Murray Woodman from Sydney the other day. As often as I can, at least once or twice a week.

And then, just like in over a week or so, I go to India (Bangalore mostly, but sometimes Mumbai) for 10-12 days to do an intense stint of socializing, hacking, planning, talking, planning, teaching, drinking excellent Chai tea, more planning, around the clock until I don't know what day it is (which suits, given the jet-lag). Then back home for another 2-3 months of working from home again.

It works. It's not perfect, but it sure beats living a crazy stressful life in a big city where you don't have control over your surroundings. Here, if I'm stuck with something and need a break, I put on my slippers, open the door, and walk 4 minutes to the beach. All is well, and when I get back I know for sure that implementing the Bessel function in my Topic Maps Reference Model is an excercise for the modeler and the TMDM engine, not for the technical implementation itself. Problem refreshingly solved.

Oh, and do come and visit. I'll buy the coffees.

Spilling a few beans

I think enough time has passed, don't you? I've been hinting to what I'm up to these days, but I've been rather careful about spilling the beans, I guess because, well, it's a brand new adventure and every storyteller should get their story together well before writing it down. I'm keen to talk about this stuff, though, because it is wickedly cool and I'm keen to not only do it, but to talk about it and involve more people in it as well.

As you probably saw from my last post I'm currently in India, and yes, my new employer is an Indian company, but I work from home (in gorgeous Kiama, Australia, 1.5 hours south of Sydney) and travel to India every so often (4-5 times a year as a rough guide). We work over the Internet, including video conferencing and remote controlling and the like, and as such is a new interesting challenge for me to be somewhat isolated from the smiles and sideways nods and the tacit knowledge floating down the hallways of our headquarters in Mumbai. I've got plenty of ideas of how to deal with that, so we'll see how it goes.

My company is Free Systems Technology Labs, a nifty medium-sized IT development company with main offices in Mumbai (from where I'm writing this) and most R&D and development in Bangalore (where I've been the last week), which is a daughter-company of another company mostly known for more hardware orientated stuff, like computer building, server hosting and various gadgets, but they only have a number of software outlets as well. I'll be working with anything from planning to execution, and mostly in the domain of Topic Maps. Yes, the very thing I've been talking about for the last 9 years is now going to be my main concern as opposed to secondary or third (or some periods not at all) at the whims of other jobs, and I can't even begin to tell you how excited the prospect of that is to me; I believe in the ideals and practice of Topic Maps so strongly, and it's going to be good for my soul to pour it into something as cool as what we're going to do. (More on that later) The guys here also happen to share many of my own ideals (open-source, development methods, goals, community and societal building, and so much more), and they've been spoiling me. I'll miss the tea, that's for sure.

I became part of this through a weird mix of happenstance, but mostly because the people involved here have been, put simply, a fantastic bunch, in terms of technical brilliance, sincerity and honesty, and in convincing me that I should join (they obviously think I'm good for something :). I've been with the company now almost three months where the first two months are more like a warm-up, but it's been a very good ride so far.

But I need to talk about something that's been on my mind ever since they got in touch with me last year, and that's prejudice. The world is full of it, and I entered this adventure with a slight degree of scepticism. No, not the bad kind, but a certain carefulness, because, you know, they're Indians, and Indians got their mouth full of rice, and you're not getting any! (A joke I got from an Indian friend, so that makes it alright, yeah? :) Not only did they have to convince me, but also my wife. "Honey, how about I drop my great-paying safe cushy job in one of the richest countries in the world, and rather work for strangers from a strange land full of poverty and strong smells and interesting hairdoos, and do it over internet?" Yeah, she was keen, as you can imagine.

You can't work for Indians! They are supposed to work for us!

Sure. But they kept talking with me, flew me to Belgium (they own half of a company there) and were not only completely honest with me but simply blew me away with their knowledge, seriousness, and most importantly their friendliness and openness. Me and the wife thought long and hard about it (probably longer and harder than my company wanted me to :), and here we are.

Everything I knew about India was either heavily adjusted, or simply wrong, but I've seriously enjoyed being corrected. I've embraced everything that's been thrown at me, including very hot food, weird drinks, amazingly crazy traffic and the sweltering heat, the chaos, the smells, the meetings and the way they interact, the attitudes and the values. I think the tagline "Incredible India" is truer than they think.

Ok, that's enough for a first intro, now I have to get to bed. I'm flying home tomorrow and I'm looking forward to seeing the wife and kids again (Lilje just won an award for her art at school, so I'm mighty proud as well), and we'll be spending the weekend together, and on sunday celebrate Norways national day in Sydney.

And then, a little bit later, I'll tell you about the wickedly cool stuff we're going to do with Topic Maps.

Where in the world is Alexander?

Short answer; Bangalore, India.

Longer answer; my new employer which I started with a couple of months back is an Indian company with strong ties to back-end systems and support, hardware manufacture and design, and software services. I'll tell more as things progress, and I'll probably talk a lot more about how they plan to use Topic Maps to solve some really crazy and hard problems. But before I do those kind of detailed stuff, I wanted to just quickly show you this picture which pretty much summarises my first impression of this crazy, lively, contrasting, weird, interesting place, and if you can't read the sign, it says "Follow traffic rules." I realise that in India, if you ask kindly, they just might do what you ask, but riding as a passenger in a car through this traffic was, err, an experience I won't forget anytime soon. However, it's interesting that in a language such as my own (English, or Norwegian, or Swedish, or Danish) we base our expression mostly on words alone, while in India the reason traffic works is that they've got such a strong foothold in semiotics that makes it work. A honk here, two honks there as we pass a car, a blink of our beam lights racing past a "moto" (small scooter that's kinda rebuilt as a tiny car) ... I still have much to learn about this language. The cool thing is that it's global; even I can do it. Except I would never drive here. Never. Ever.

Anyway, I'm in India to train staff and meet and plan with them in all things black magic and drink their excellent Indian tea and eat their amazing food, and generally get a feel for the country, the culture, and most importantly, the people I'm working with, which so far has turned out to be a fantastic bunch. I'm here for another week or so, and I'll suss out the details and let you know all about it in due time. Until then, there's a chapati drenched in yummy chutney with my name on it. India is, truly, an amazing place.

P.S. Hey Barta, where can I get my sweaty hands on your TM as a filesystem? Would love a play with it right about now. Oh, and that near NLP query stuff you mentioned that one time in the back-alley while drinking gin and discussing the meaning of wife. Or life. Or whatever.