Graves On SOHO VoIP

Dave Michels, principal of Boulder’s Buffalo Communications, has a great post today detailing recommendations for effective teleworking. His recommendations are backed by some detail about his own home office installation. As someone who has worked from a home office for over a decade his advice definitely rings true.

In fact, I’d like to take a moment to amplify and extend his recommendations based upon my work situation. Most of the things that I’d like to highlight reflect the difference between the occasional teleworker and the full-time home-office dweller.

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Many thanks to Dave Michels who earlier today passed a link to this blog post from New Zealand’s James Forman about Controlling Applications With Asterisk. James’ project is an excellent example of the sort of thing that sets Asterisk apart from everything else. He used a multi-step process to have DTMF tones issue commands to control a VLC VideoLAN media player.

His approach is very similar to what I had initially envisioned for my home automation project. Where James is dealing with the VLC commands I was going to have the IVR process call AGI scripts that would cause xsend.exe to send predefined commands to various X-10 home automation modules. That was part one of the project.

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Many folks, including Tom Keating, Garrett Smith and Dave Michels are looking for a next generation consumer electronics device. Over the past while I’ve seen some enthusiasm expressed for the Open Peak’s prototype gadget. I hesitate to call this device a phone although the Open Peak prototypes appear to be a cross between a cordless phone system, a tablet PC and an iPod Touch. I certainly agree that it’s really pretty.

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Today was the day that I finally got around to taking the Vera home automation system out of the box. It was a simple beginning as I have only one Z-wave device to control at present, a Monster Cable lamp dimmer. In about two hours I was able to get Vera on the network and upgraded to the latest firmware. I also had it controlling my one lamp. Woo Hoo!

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I puzzles me how to see how many people find the diagram of my home/office network interesting. Yet it consistently gets a lot of traffic, so here’s an update to the original one I posted in March.

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GigaOm’s Web Worker Daily has a really nice piece called 14 Things Corporations Can Learn from Seasoned Web Workers. It lists ways that companies can adapt themselves to newer ways of working. I liked it do much that I emailed the link to my boss, and his boss….something that I rarely do.

As someone who has worked from a home office for over a decade I truly appreciate anything that helps traditional companies and managers to evolve around the reality of a distributed workforce. From network infrastructure to managing personalities from a distance, it can be a challenge. We need to encourage our superiors to continue to examine, and possibly embrace, all things new and different.

There’s a forum over at www.broadbandreports.com where people post photos and drawings of their home and home-office networks. Some people have some really simple setups, while others have truly sophisticated installations.

I’m sure ours is somewhere in the middle. I posted a drawing over there so I suppose that it only makes sense to post it here as well.

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Every now and then  something takes me back to a time and place where I haven’t been in a long, long time. It’s usually enjoyable, but often a bit of a ride. Bear with me as I lay out how and why this little device has found a favored place in my home.

In high school I had been a disk jockey, both at school dances and on a local community cable access channel. Musical reproduction (a.k.a “stereo stuff”) had been very important to me at that age even though I didn’t have the funds to pursue the interest in any depth.

I went on to study music, and eventually recording and live sound reinforcement. I have engineered studio sessions and live performances. However, as I wound my way through my twenties home audio was not a subject of much interest. My career path drifted from the purely musical to into broadcast video production.

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