So this is remote working!

Last Thursday was my first full day of proper remote working. Ouch. For a start, I was supposed to be back at The Cottage much earlier. But due to a combination of persuasive friends and an infrequent devonian bus service, I didn’t land until Tuesday night.

My first proper remote job, apart from The Ministry, is with a characterful character by the name of Mr A. Clever, erudite, charming and a javascript whizz. And a good egg to boot.

The problem was that the job was supplied with all the graphics sliced up and ready to incorporate into the web page. Unfortunately though, you really need to know how to build a web page if you are going to optimally slice up the graphics. I have managed to save about 90KB just from rejigging the backgrounds. However, this took time.

Also, there were no flat graphics, and the supplied Photoshop file had Layer Groups. The GIMP is growing on me but it doesn’t handle Layer Groups yet, so I had to download a trial copy of Bloatashop CS3 to open it up and make sense of it from within a VirtualBox virtual machine.

To save time I worked within the Windows virtual machine, using Notepad++ (now at version 5, which is sweet but with all the tag highlighting can look a bit like a candy store) and Firefox 3 with the requisite add-ons.

Lessons I have learnt so far:

1. Have a Windows machine ready in case people are daring to use proprietary software.

2. Exercise self discipline and have a timetable.

3. Don’t always act on the advice of your friends ;)