Wow

Has it really been 2 weeks since I updated this? Has anyone even noticed?

Homelab
I added a node to my homelab. A reasonably powerful PowerEdge R340. It has a single CPU socket, 64GB RAM, and. 2x 1Gb/sec ethernet interfaces. I added an older Mellanox 10Gb NIC and a Dell EMC BOSS card with 2 mirrored 240GB SSD's. The machine also has a pair of 2TB 7.2k SATA drives. 

I've installed ESXi 6.7 on the machine and it was great. Peppy performance, although because it's not the same as my HCI cluster, it can't participate in vSAN (well, not THAT vSAN anyway). I literally spun up a FoH client on the machine, which proceeded to demonstrate the drawbacks of a Xeon E 2124. Friends don't let friends crush all four cores of a 4 core CPU.

I've decided that this class of machine is probably a little too lightweight as a "tech refresh" target for my HCI cluster, but makes a really nice management and TIG stack host.

Not much of a story but it's a slow news day.

Work Hacks
I have to say that working from home with zero airport visits for 75 consecutive days has my "honey do" list well sorted at home.  For work, I've focused on optimizing the "sit in a chair with back to back zoom calls with zero time in between for 14 hours a day for 5 consecutive days every week" (read that without spaces - you'll begin to understand the insanity). I've taken the following steps:

1. Bought and installed a standing desk. (Editor's note: WHAT TOOK SO LONG FOR ME TO DO THIS). I now stand for at the very least every other meeting.  Huge difference.

2. Decided that I am only attending 25 minutes of a 30 minute call - and 50 minutes of an hour long call. I'm also ending regular calls that I host 5 or 10 minutes early depending on the length. If we're not finished, we will schedule a follow-up call. I strongly encourage you to consider this. It's helping tremendously.

3. Declining meta-meetings. Think about the words there, and you'll understand what these are. If someone must have a meeting ABOUT a meeting, I'm not coming. The exception here is preparatory meetings for important client interactions (like being added to an existing conversation thread that I had not previously been a part of) - BUT - those meetings should really only be 15 minutes or so. Give me the cliff's notes backstory - I'll figure out the rest.

4.  Take time - block time - and make it immutable. Calendars like mine mean that I'm either forced to work all weekend to produce whatever it is I agreed to during the week, or work from 6am-8am and then 7pm-10pm on some days. Mine is a global role, so I'm frequently on calls at odd hours, so that plan (early and late work) doesn't really work -  and it's horrible for work/life balance. So -  I've blocked an hour each day for work. And that hour is sacrosanct. I don't answer the phone, decline invitations, and will not "give up" that hour for anything or anyone. I may move the hour based on demands, but out of my work day, I will have one hour of uninterrupted work time.

I would love to hear any work hacks you've come up with. Work hacks are part of a global weekly call I lead - we spend at least a few minutes talking work hacks and how to navigate this new reality we're all in.

/finis