I’ve been working from home for 10 years. I love this arrangement and I really appreciate the fact that technology allows us to regularly use video conferencing instead of dialing into a conference bridge and listening to tinny voices. Being able to see folks is important to me because I never know when it’s my turn to talk.
The cheap headset shown in the photo works well for this purpose. I picked it up from Amazon for less than $30. I also purchased a USB extension cord so I can move around a bit, especially when I have my desk in a standing position.
I’ll eventually move to a wireless earbud arrangement, much like what’s shown in Microsoft’s vision of the future back in 2009. I’m particular about this sort of thing, as in ear earbuds give me weird sinus pressure and the inability to hear my own voice the way I want to hear my voice.
I like a lot of things about that Microsoft vision of productivity in the future, even though that future is suppose to be now. We use a lot of Microsoft products at work, and they do the trick, even though they’re much clunkier than Microsoft would like to admit.
I wish AI would make things more productive instead of things like ChatGPT bringing us erroneous facts like the population of Mars being in the millions. They fixed that last point, but there’s a lot of folks relying on “AI”, which is actually not Artificial Intelligence at all and more of a Large Language Model, just pulling words from various sources and putting them together coherently. Some folks think ChatGPT is magic. It’s not. It’s not Samantha from “Her”.
As I ramble through this blog entry with no end in sight, I should probably bring this to a close by once again mentioning where I think AI and collaboration should really be going, and that’s in the direction of the vision of Mercury OS. If you’re interested in the possibilities of AI really doing something compelling, take a look through the Mercury OS website.
It’s a shame the big companies like Google, Microsoft, or Apple don’t seem inspired to try something new. Must be not enough money in it.
