When I recently met with Rick of J. Scott he said that he was jealous of the fact that I can do most of my work from home now. I can login to servers and workstations of my customers as well as the websites I maintain. I can download patches without having to put a CD in the drive and clean up most issues on a computer. I can also write code and zip and email the result to my customers after they let me know over the phone what they need (I used Microsoft Access). I pretty much don't have to go to the office of my customer at all. In fact I have never been to one of my customers offices. It is CJ Plumbing and is partially owned by Rick as a side hobby because he just doesn't have enough to do apparently. He ordered a server and I picked it up from J. Scott and set it all up then delivered it back. Rick then took the server into the offices of CJ's Plumbing and plugged it in and turned it on. He also plugged the workstations in and got me some IP address info. I then logged into the server from home and helped with workstations as needed.
It has all happened quite naturally over the last couple of years and sometimes I don't even think about how huge this is, or didn't until Rick said something. I don't drive as much, hardly every have a work commute. In the past I used to drive to one or two customers a day which could easily account for 2 hours of driving not to mention eating out at fast food restaurant and spending that money as well as spending my valuable health. I have all that time back and now eat much healthier lunches and dinners at home. If I need to work a little late not a huge problem I can still stay home with the kids if my wife needs to run an errand.
This is quite simply the future of the Internet. You could say that it will keep people inside and they will never get any exercise. I suppose that could happen but in my case the regular hours and being close to my weight equipment and healthy snacks has mean I get more exercise and my health has improved (so there). This is not all that there is to the new wave. Microsoft just released Internet Explorer 7 and it incorporates a Feed Reader. I don't even have to browse much any more to get the information I desire. It comes to me. I also set up Google Alerts as well as Windows Live Alerts and those arrive from time to time in my Email. So there again better time management.
More and more we will see information coming to us. And not that useless information we call spam, but good stuff the stuff we need to see. It's all going to be right there.
The funny thing was that I have thought over the course of the last few months how much I would like to be in Rick's place building houses, developing land and that sort of stuff... he does some pretty cool things. After my visit though I realize that it would be fine so long as I can build the houses from my living room. Not yet but some day.
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