Ant-Like Persistence

This blog article talks about “power over ethernet” or POE.  Those who are affected by work-from-home arrangements might find it helpful to learn a little bit about POE even if you have not been trained in electrical engineering.  This article talks a little bit about POE. Continue reading “A new work-from-home skill – wrangling power over ethernet”

In an earlier article I offered some tips for making work-from-home work well for you.  Here is one more tip.  Make use of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Continue reading “Another work-from-home tip – MBSR”

This article talks about things that you can do in your home to get the best possible work-from-home results. Continue reading “Tips for best work-from-home results”

It is fascinating to see the various things that companies and organizations are doing in the face of the Covid-19 problems. As one example, my firm’s favorite voice-over-IP telephone company, VOIP.MS, has expanded its tech support hours to 24 by 7 (blog article). And now Comcast says it has reconfigured some of its Xfinity wifi hotspots so that they are available to everyone for free. Continue reading “Some Xfinity wifi hotspots now available to all for free”

What follows is a reminiscence about how I learned to write.  Be advised that this blog article rambles.  Set this article aside for some time when you are having trouble getting to sleep. 

The main point of the article, I suppose, is that in general we take too long to think of saying “thank you” to those teachers and mentors who invested in us.  And if so, then the only thing we can really do is try to pay it forward and try to be good teachers and mentors for those who come after us. Continue reading “A long and rambling story about learning to write”

In our firm’s work-from-home setup, everything is Voice over IP (VOIP).  This means it is super easy to make it so that a work-from-home employee can have a phone on their desk at home that works exactly like the phone on their desk in the office (blog article).  But what is very interesting to think about is that if you have a VOIP telephone system, any employee who wants it can also have his or her office phone extension operating on his or her smart phone.  Continue reading “Putting your office telephone extension onto your smart phone”

Before we migrated to our work-from-home arrangement, most people in our office had fairly boring looking desk phones.  But the group of employees whose job it is to answer incoming telephone calls on our main office telephone number each had a fairly fancy phone as shown at right.  Such a phone has what phone geeks call a “busy lamp field”.  (In our office we call it a “sidecar”.)  When we migrated to our work-from-home arrangement, we decided to splurge and give each employee a phone with a sidecar.  Why did we do this?  Continue reading “Busy lamp fields”

At Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC our work-from-home setup is a work in progress.  Yes each person has a phone extension at home that works exactly like the phone extension that is on the person’s desk in the office (blog article).  Yes each person has a VPN giving them access to all of the office resources (blog article).  But how about some way that each work-at-home person can let the others in the office know of that person’s status?  Is there a way that at a glance I can see who is “on duty” and who is “off duty” right now?  Is there a way that I can see at a glance whether the best way to reach a person just now is by dialing their office telephone extension or by dialing their cell phone?  We managed to work out a free-of-charge way to make this possible. Continue reading “Who is in and who is out?”