jeffjudge.com

I call my wife the goat, she calls me the fish. I don’t remember how we get these nicknames, I think off of an astrology place mat at a Chinese restaurant. I just saw on the goat’s calendar (we share calendars via Google) an entry for GNO on Friday night, which I think means ‘girls night out’. That made me smile, she’s so cute with her acronyms.

Erin and I bought 2 tickets to see Jeff Tweedy at the Vic Theater on 1/26, but it looks like I’m going to have to sell them. Email me if you’re interested. Tickets are $100 per ticket as it’s a benefit show, proceeds will go to youth scholarships in the Chicago area.

Update: The tickets have been sold

I just setup a Disqus account, and I’m going to try out that as my comment system for awhile. It was easy to install - all I had to do was setup the account, install the wordpress plugin and activate it. The only thing I don’t like is that I can’t import my previous comments, but it looks like they’re adding a solution for that soon and it’s really not that big of a deal. To be honest, I’m a little wary of this as I have plenty of experience with hosted comment systems from helping people setup their own blogs over their years (yes, at one point blogging systems didn’t support comments so hosted comment systems were more popular). Anywho, a bunch of other yappers are using it - so I’m sure it’ll work just fine. If you haven’t seen their commenting system yet, I think you’ll be excited. Their threaded comment view is killer.

Here’s a good article (via svn) from the New York Times about the downside of working out of a home office. I think it’s especially difficult for couples where one person works in an office and the other one works from home. I’m going to speak in generalities here, but I can since I’ve experienced this personally. The person working in the office has been through a long day at the office often combined with a commute, and a lot of times that person loves to come home, grab some dinner, hang out and relax. In contrast, the person working from home has generally been couped up in the house all day, isolated from other people, and is looking forward to getting out of the house after a long day. These two opposing forces creates an issue for sure, one that takes a fair amount of balance to overcome.

I tried working out of the house for a few months after I left Orbitz in May 2006, but I didn’t like it for the reason I outlined above. I got an office four months later and will never look back. I’ll occasionally work from home, but it’s pretty rare.

I think what we’ll see as our society continues to become more mobile, is that a lot more communal work centers will develop - either the kind of place where you pay to have your own office and that office has common amenities, or the kind where a bunch of people literally share an office. I’m really interested in both concepts, and at some point I’d like to be involved in the development of such facility. I bought the domains workspacecoop.com, workingcoop.org, chicagoworkingcoop.org in anticipation.

I found this article via Harper Reed that talks about google and facebook joining the data portability movement. this is terrific news, as these two giganto services understand the importance of data portability vs. a walled garden. This is exactly what Brendan and I were chatting about last week. I will be closely following the dataportability.org workgroup and will jump into to participate, test, help drive however possible. I’m fascinated by this stuff.

btw - i’m really loving blogging lately. i want to start writing a lot more.