Not everyone works from home. In fact, most people don't. But I'll bet that a lot of those people who don't, wish that they did. Well, I work from home, and if they want to work from home, I'll gladly switch places with them. Your home is possibly the worst place you could ever work.

First of all, there are the distractions. When you're in an office all day, there are still distractions, but chances are you won't be taken away from earning your paycheque because of laundry or the dishes. And if you think annoying co-workers are a distraction, just try working from home when you live with parents, siblings, or kids. You won't have much peace for cranking out code for that project...

Second, of course, is the lack of oversight to make sure you're doing your work. "But Chris," you say, "there's not much supervision at my office anyway, letting me read your blog or do online shopping from my cube." You might think that, but your co-workers probably know what you're up to, even if you don't tell them. So might your boss. You might just be getting away with it for now. At home, you're much more likely to do so, and end up screwing your job if you're not careful.

Third is the lack of communication. If your job is primarily anti-social, or at least asocial, then this might not be a problem. But if you're working in teams, it hurts not being able to communicate with your teammates regularly, face-to-face. Trying to communicate via phone is painful enough, but possible if needed. However, all the people will have to go by is the sound of your voice, missing out on potential visual cues which are always there. If you're using an instant messenger, then your oral cues are missing too, and you better be good at providing context or communication becomes a lot more painful.

So to all of you working in an office, I'd just like to let you know that you've got it better than you think. Working from home is no picnic, despite how it might seem.

According to Sault Ste. Marie News, Bell and Telus have a new plan in mind for text messaging. Are you a Bell Mobility or Telus Mobility client? Well, expect to start paying for incoming text messages, even if they're completely unsolicited. The charges gouging begins on August 8, and both providers are looking at a 15 cent charge — the same customers face for sending a message.

So, you might want to think twice about receiving Twitter or Facebook updates on your phone. And if you get cell phone spam, you might want to get text messaging on your account disabled (if possible), or just get rid of your phone altogether.

Rogers isn't following suit, but there's more than enough reasons for not wanting to use their service anyway. So, once again, we Canadians get shafted by our mobile telecom services. Business as usual.

This week, I'm looking forward to tackling one of the issues that so far has kept me from moving Toast IT Toastmasters from the current (lame) website to a new one I'm building in Drupal. The problem has been that while there is a module for signing up for nodes, there is no module that does the same thing for CCK user reference fields. (Well, that's the one I'm tackling, anyway. There are others, but not as important.)

I'll be starting work on my new module on Wednesday, as tomorrow I'll be doing actual work in the morning and early afternoon, and have the usual Toast IT meeting in the evening. Now that I'm sleeping at a sensible time of day for a sensible period of time, there's no more burning the midnight oil working on projects. I'm old, can't do that any more.

Am I the only person who has found that Firefox 3 won't keep you logged into various sites between sessions, whereas Firefox 2 would? Between this and the fact that some of my favourite add-ons won't work with the newer version, I'm considering switching back to the older version of everyone's favourite open source browser. I'd rather not, as some of the changes in Firefox 3 are real improvements, that I have found quite useful.

Perhaps the problem will be fixed in 3.1, which I hear is coming out in a month or two. I hope it will be.

I was taking a look at the new design of coldacid.net in IE8 beta 1, simply to find that it doesn't look right with the new rendering engine. Putting the browser into IE7 emulation mode, it comes out looking just fine, however, and I already knew that it works with Firefox 2 and 3. It's pretty interesting. Likely things will work just fine by the time IE8 final rolls out, especially given that the site (or at least the front page of it) is nearly perfect HTML and CSS (and the only validation errors wouldn't affect the rendering anyway).

I think that the issue is simply due to the fact that Microsoft is practically rewriting the IE rendering engine to make it more standards compliant. And as many have already said, the changes are likely to break a bunch more websites, even some that have already updated to match IE7's rendering engine. Right now, the new engine is in beta, and so some of the CSS features that the current design uses aren't implemented, at least not properly.

When beta 2 comes out in August, I'll see if it does a better job of rendering the site. I'm pretty sure it will. In the meantime, if you are using the IE8 beta, you might want to keep it in Emulate IE7 mode when not actively testing sites.