I’m working from Alabama now.  Things happened and my company offered to let me do my job remotely and here I am.  There has been definite change and adjustment period, both personally and professionally.

In this age of high-speed networks and always-on connections, I am blown away by how much stuff didn’t work out as planned when I set up my work station (keep in mind also that I don’t like networking and don’t know much about it).  I assumed that when I got here, I would plug my computer into the wall and my machine would magically call home and I would be sitting on my work domain, just like I was in the office.  Instead I have an very locked-down home PC that connects to the internet.

At first I tried using and FTP client to grab files I needed, work on them, and then dump them back into the FTP client.  Workflow doesn’t exist this way but it did make me more confident in my markup and look harder for mistakes since I would not save and refresh as much.  Now I am using something called WebDrive.  WebDrive is a little like drop box in that there is all of a sudden a mounted drive on your machine that looks and acts like a drive but in reality it is a network service.  WebDrive mounts FTP sites on your box to act like a drive.  It’s good, better then the FTP hell, but still not perfect.  Uploads are slow which is expected, unless you are assuming you are saving to a networked drive instead of a costumed FTP client.

A solution may be around the corner.  The mothership has told me that there is a functioning VPN and I am being sent a super router to IPSec tunnel into it.  This may be the, “plug your computer in and everything works” I was hoping for.  I imagine my new IPSec tunneler will look a little like WOPR.

IPSec Tunnel? Who knows!