Flying Solo...

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

How many of you work alone? I work for a small chain of banks about 10 locations and 100+ lusers. After spending my first year fixing what was wrong and my second year updating them to current tech I find I have blocks lot of empty time. At the last place I worked there was a group of about 8 guys and we screwed around a lot. Now I have to find stuff to keep me busy and sane.... I have made linux clusters out of old PCs, pen caddies out of floppy disks, race cars out of old hard drives, and pretty much anything to keep me entertained.

I need some new ideas.

What do you do?

Comments

[heuteistmeintag.livejournal.com]

i found an online forum to kill my time in and eventually found a girlfriend via the forum.

that, and LJ

[bhall.livejournal.com]

Watch TV, Read a lot, piddle around online, chat, day dream about sleeping.

[flexor.livejournal.com]

Build a Linux install server. Make it install new PCs with no hands beyond the first netboot. That'll keep you entertained!

[kerberos.livejournal.com]

Oh how I pity You.

It must be madness!

I'm on the opposite. ISP support tech with sole responsibility for Web,email,domains for ooh 4000 clients?

Yeah. I ain't really got sparetime to worry about anything.

;-)

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

I wish i was busy like that, that's what i'm used too. I've run out of things to do and making stuff up stuff to do is getting old. There is only so much network documentation you can do. :)

[wignersfriend.livejournal.com]

Would you like to switch jobs?

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

I have thought about it but i have pretty flexible hours here which works great for me plus i'm kind of tied to the area(small town). If I could work from home that would be even better.

[talmun.livejournal.com]

I work on the overnight shift with one other person, so I do lots of web-browsing, reading and I've started writing: http://zero-cabal.livejournal.com/

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

You know all those little magnets in old hard-drive motors?
The really powerful ones...

yeah, gauss gun!

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

I play EVE Online, and used to play World of Warcraft.

...but then, I work from home.

[egearman.livejournal.com]

*salute*

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

Played WoW for a while doing the burning crusade trial right now. I'm thinking of rejoining.

[fenrirvallin.livejournal.com]

Don't do it. The programmers who have a clue are all working on Starcraft II.

Personally, I have an entire folder of bookmarks dedicated to webcomics to read while I'm at work, and a link to archived scanned regular comics.

[politas.livejournal.com]

You could take up knitting. Or write a book. Try whittling small figurines from blocks of wood. Take up archery and spend your downtime fletching arrows. Do some tablet weaving and sell the results to RenFaire/SCA people. Learn to paint, or draw. Study architecture. Read about science in books by Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, James Gleick, Isaac Asimov, etc. Fix up TagZilla so it runs with Thunderbird v1.5 (please? ... anybody?) Learn to play the harmonica, or tin whistle.

Oh, if only I had the time!

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

I have made some chainmail items but my boss likes to randomly pop in just to say hi say so it's pretty hard to stuff that doesn't look work related.

[glenathon.livejournal.com]

I envy you, but from a management standpoint, it's your boss' responsibility to keep you happy. If he catches you 'slacking' that might be a good time to bring up having him assign something for you to do. If he has the nuts to yell at you, it's his fault, really...

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

No, He would never yell at me for anything. He's an Exec. VP not real tech savvy and he knows it, and doesn't try to pretend he does. which is a good thing. I love my job i just get bored when I'm caught up with things. I actually look forward to when the Govt. Technology Auditors show up. It keeps me bust for a week or so.

[canray.livejournal.com]

Webcomics. Lots and lots of webcomics.

One of my friends at an old workplace made Chainmail. Used it as a second income, and to make nice outfits for LARPs.

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

There was one i was reading for a while but i lost\can't remember the site. It was sort of a D&D type comic they battled their evil twins in a couple issues. if you know it send me the link. :D

[talmun.livejournal.com]

Order of the Stick:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0464.html

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

Order of the Stick is absolutely fabulous. I love what they've done with the storylines. :)

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

Perfect that's the one thanks.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

Code... Learn to code, and you'll find many things that need to be coded.

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

way ahead of you on that one. Started making little apps. i have a new employee database tool that will store simple information started as a new user setup request app.

I made my own panic button app too.
http://webpages.charter.net/r3700l3r/
Panic! works on xp and vista it does require .Net 2.0
I'm slowly adding feature like a delay and a countdown timer for sys tray and so on...

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

A killer app would be one which allows a series of user-settable network tests to be run and the results displayed as a stack of colored (red/yellow/green/blue) 'lights' - sort of like a gridded bar chart.

Then each section of the bar could be set to ping/tracert/nslookup/ifexist/whatever a certain host/file/setting etc (either fixed or calculated from system settings) between the PC and, for example, either a known good Internet site or a corporate internal network. The whole thing would update every couple of seconds.

It'd be frickin' fantastic as a diagnostic tool for remote-dial-up laptops or ISP customers. A full green bar would mean they were completely connected. A red bar would mean no connection at all. Partial colorations would indicate how far their connection was getting to before dying. Couple it with a psuedorandom alphanumeric code generated from the bar data, and get users to read off that code to technicians. Tech punches the code into a decoder at their end and it expands into the full set of which tests are returning what results, thus saving hours of trying to walk nontechnical users through checking settings, running tests, and accurately communicating the results.

Every helpdesk in the world would want a copy they could tweak to their own configuration and push out to all their users.

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

Hmm. that would work for my branch offices when they have issues. I'll look into it.

[etlutu.livejournal.com]

Sounds like Hobbit (http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/).

[soruk.livejournal.com]

Where I work we have some homegrown thing called "Bulk User Management". God only knows how they got that name past mangement, but it's resulted in lines that are now so old they're not remotely funny, like "I've just put your new joiner in BUM. What areas will he need to access?"

I don't really work alone, per se...

[armaphine.livejournal.com]

But I do pull a weekend midnight shift, which is about as close as one can come to working alone.

As for what we do... me and the other Tier 1 guy will habitually insult each other, and each other's mothers, read Digg, re-read Digg, watch movies on YouTube, look for pirated TV shows and movies on the YouTube clones, play whatever little flash games we can find, troll through the local Craigslist postings looking for weird shit to laugh at, looking through Wikipedia for random information to argue about.

Oh, and time permitting, we'll occasionally take a look at the system monitors to make sure nothing has catastrophically failed during our incessant bickering.

[snyperwolf.livejournal.com]

Have you built a mythbox yet out of one the old PCs? Then you could record TV from home, and then stream it at work.

Brilliant!

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

Excellent idea, i have been tossing around the idea of a mythbox. My next project.

[krymsonrose.livejournal.com]

http://www.instructables.com/id/E9N3IONHLIEP287NKS/

Build a Trebuchet out of office supplies :)

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

That's where i got the floppy disk pen caddy idea. Love that site. :)

[wherdafux-d-cat.livejournal.com]

That is just so full of win!

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

You don't want to know what I did when I worked alone, cuz then I'd have to kill you.

...

Actually, I had my own laptop I took with me, and had access to a dialup connection, so I would chat with friends and watch movies or play games in between calls and maintenance scripts.

[fenrirvallin.livejournal.com]

If you work in a place with access to the hotel's wireless across the street, you can do damn near anything without having to report yourself to the boss for breaking the rules, too.

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

Our building is like a natural Faraday cage. Steel reinforced Concrete... I'm the NetAdmin anyway so i can do whatever i want on the internet with out and problem.

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

And if you worked alone on the graveyard shift in a building with the most minimal security system ever...

[jecook]

I work 2nd shift, and is occasionally gets slow some nights. I've been known to go an mad cleaning/organizational tirades in the build room I work in, because my other co-workers are a bit on the lazy side or on the "I'll just slop it on the shelf and not tag it" style.

I change to a different site for next week for that week. God help them, because I'm going to open a can of Whoop-Ass™ on that place. it's a pig stye.

[verata.livejournal.com]

You could do what I did and admit to your boss that you're bored and have him find something for you to do. It may not even be entirely related to your actual position, but it could be a nice change of pace. I went from being a drooling second-level tech with set hours to independently managing my own project and making my own hours as part of the company's initiative to replace old hardware and migrate to a new OS. It's 1PM here and I'm still in my pajamas.

In lieu of that, I find Wikipedia to be an endless source of informative time-wasting. I pick a topic, I see a link to another topic in the article I'm reading, and I switch to that article. Lather, rinse, repeat.

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

Cross stitching! That's going around! You have to be a crafty person (and I honestly think people who build apps for fun are like-minded to people who make crafts for fun) and very confident in your masculinity (I'm guessing), but, it's relaxing!

(Skip over the stamped ones and go to counted instead)

That, and Lj comms...

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

I actually have done counted cross stitching before but the themes of most patterns do tend be a bit girly. Now if they had a pattern book of say 80's cartoon characters i would be all over it. A big one of Thundercats or Orco from Heman.

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

HA looky what i found....

http://www.darklilac.com/upload.jsp

Actually works.

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

ZOMG!!

/owes you an internet for a prize

[taleya.livejournal.com]

Make floppy disk satchels (http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/09/how_to_make_a_floppy_disk_bag.html), Floppy Disk Handbags (http://blog.gizoo.co.uk/?p=122), Floppy Disk Notepads (http://www.popgadget.net/2007/02/floppy_disk_jou.php#020817) or Floppy Disk Notebooks (http://www.popgadget.net/2006/04/floppy_disk_not.php#015681)


Sell them on ebay

Profit.

[r3700l3r.livejournal.com]

My Next Floppy Disk project will be the "The awesomest trapper keeper."

[forever-damned.livejournal.com]

Waste far too much time on forums, slashdot and numerous other places.

That's when I'm not training, around driving town doing SOHO tech or small scale deployments.

Speaking of training - have you enquired about it? Easy way to expand your skill set on the company dime, which also gives you incentive for payrises, plus time filled by studying?