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Lessons from 18 months of Work from home

I passed 18 months of Covid related work-from-home last week.  I wouldn't be surprised if I hit two years come March.

I thought when it began I'd do a lot more blogging. What happened is after eight hours in my home office, I am happy to leave it and not return for the day.

There are lessons I have learned in the past 18 months that do make my life more pleasant.

My enjoyment of the Twitter account RateMySkypeRoom did make me finally hang up posters and such I'd bought at aviation museums over the years.  While the number of actual camera-on meetings I have is small, it is nice to present the illusion of order and neatness in my chaotic world.  Next up is to hang my my ancient Radio Shack Model 100 in a shadow box.


And the old TV guy in me (I majored in Broadcast Journalism but was seduced into the then-new personal PC space soon after graduation), lead me to use a gifted Amazon card to buy a Ring light.  Even before it arrived, I thought that was foolish, I had few video conferences.  And indeed I haven't used it much.

My wife used it quite a bit at first, for online conferences and meetings.  My adult son uses it a lot for online Dungeons and Dragons. When he moves out soon, I'll have to make sure he doesn't sneak it out.  It bigger success than I thought.

Several gifts over the last several years were prescient.  A Yeti Blue microphone my wife got me is handy for video conferences without a headset.  About 2016 I received one monitor for my personal laptop, then asked for a second before Covid.  I asked for a third for my 2020 birthday.  Three is the perfect number for me. One in the center for active project, and two outliers for communications (chat/email) and statistics of my work environment.

I've only made a couple of purchases to augment the work-from-home environment since Covid began. The day before we left the office, I purchased a docking station from Best Buy. I was in a hurry and wanted to pick it up on the way home, so Amazon lost that one order.

My personal laptop is 2013 vintage so no USB C or Thunderbolt ports.  I needed a dock that used USB A. I only had two monitors then, so I had one monitor hooked in by HDMI, and the second by VGA. I'm not linking to my dock; there are so many and most are better than my impulse purchase.

When I added the third monitor, I couldn't hook it to the docking station but could to the HDMI port on the laptops.  I now had two cables to swap from work to personal laptops.  Obviously that was a problem I couldn't live with! 

To switch the HDMI was easy. I purchased a HDMI switch. The one I bought is no longer on Amazon, but it looks like this one.

I used a USB switch to switch the docking station from one laptop to the other.

The problem is that the cable from a docking station to the USB A plug on it is not long, just inches. The signal degrades fast if you extend it much.  I have to forget about good cable management,  The switch has to be visible of course and the cables from it to the two laptops as short as possible to get acceptable performance.

Now I can switch from one machine to another with the push of two buttons.

My dream is a docking station with two switchable outputs. Considering the number of people now running a work and personal machine, I am surprised no vendor has jumped on this.  There are maybe costly solutions, but I try to keep each purchase under $100 if I can.

Which brings me to my final point, none of this needs to be costly.

My monitors are just 1080p resolution. I don't game, so they are fine. I don't need 4K high performance monitors. My monitors cost about $100 each.  The docking station was $79, the HDMI switch $12, and the USB switch $27.  The ring light was $50. Cables and such a few dollars more.

My wife watched me working on my personal machine one day, with windows open on all three monitors, as I worked fast and efficiently and commented that I looked so happy.

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