Posts made by Carnival Boy

Well I can dream, can't I? I may have a problem in that my salary precludes the ability to buy a home in some of the most desirable places in the world.

Actually, that last house I linked to was too big for my taste. This would place would be perfect:
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-27304344.html
I reckon a few hours of remote IT work in the morning, and off hiking the mountains in the afternoon, followed by a couple of pints of real ale in the local pub in the evening. Life couldn't get better than that. I just need to find a million bucks from somewhere and I'm sorted.

@scottalanmiller said:

The sky is the limit.

Does that include an unlimited budget? If so, I'd probably buy somewhere like this on the shore of Lake Windermere in the Lake District here in England. Failing that, somewhere more modest nearby.
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-40692617.html
There would have to be some money left over to buy a boat to go with it as well.

Has anyone experienced this in use in a non-IT environment? It's marketed as a purely IT helpdesk solution. We manufacture heating and ventilation products for domestic use and are in need of a ticketing system to manage the thousands of units we've had installed. I can't see a fundamental difference between a heater (a white box with components, tracked by serial number and location) and a computer, so this may be a good fit for us, and obviously a lot cheaper than most non-IT field service management solutions. Am I crazy or might it fit?

@Carnival-Boy said:

@JaredBusch said:

Read the above posts discussing the subject. I would never have deployed hamachi as you did for security purposes. Yes, it works, but I do not like the method.
Then again, I do not like a VPN gateway for users either since it does the same thing. For IT staff yes, but not users.

I did, but I don't understand them

Seriously, if anyone could explain, in simple terms, the security risks in Hamachi (or similar VPN) I would be really, really grateful.

@art_of_shred Workbench + drafting chair: this has always seemed the perfect solution to me. I don't understand why people are talking about desks that move up and down. Surely it makes more sense to move your arse up and down (via a drafting chair) rather than move your entire desk up and down.

Writing games on the ZX Spectrum when I was about eleven.

We want to do this. I know free Meraki, which we currently use, doesn't do this. I trialled 3CX, which does, though I didn't get on particularly well with it. Probably worth looking at though (http://www.mobiledevicemanager.com/)

We want to use it to stop our service engineers from sneaking to the pub whilst they should be working. But we use iOS and there is no way to prevent them from simply turning the tracking app off, so I've abandoned the project for the time being.

@JaredBusch said:

Read the above posts discussing the subject. I would never have deployed hamachi as you did for security purposes. Yes, it works, but I do not like the method.
Then again, I do not like a VPN gateway for users either since it does the same thing. For IT staff yes, but not users.

I did, but I don't understand them

Not quite everything, I guess. We mainly use Hamachi for remote workers to access the corporate intranet, which is running on Windows 2003 Server. I believe Pertino won't support this

I've fallen at the first hurdle.

I tried to get a guy to setup DirectAccess here about 3 years ago. He completely failed, I don't know why. It did seem very complicated to setup. We've been using Hamachi for a couple of years, without any major issues. The only issue is that very occasionally the Hamachi service sometimes needs restarting on the client for whatever reason. The one thing I really want is iOS access. Hamachi released a beta app a year or so ago, but it's still in beta for some reason and I've never managed to get it working.

I've just started trialling Pertino. Erm, how does Hamachi compare to Pertino?

I believe it's $6 per user per month.

We currently have around 30 staff who claim expenses using the traditional method of filling out a two-part expenses form and handing it in, or posting it, to the accounts department along with a handful of paper receipts for approval and processing. I hate it! I'm hopelessly disorganised when it comes to expenses. I either lose the receipts or simply forget to claim. It's costing me a fortune. I always submit my expenses months later, and get a ticking off by the accounts department. It's a nightmare.

So I was interested to discover expensify.com. You sign up, take photos of your receipts with your phone and the app takes care of everything else, with a bit of tweaking. I haven't tried it. But paperless expenses is definitely the way to go for me. It's pretty much the last thing I need to sort in order to make my work life completely paperless. The only issue is that I'm not sure how well expensify will work in the UK.

How do y'all handle expenses? Any good ways of helping me ditch the little paper receipts I have strewn around my home, office and car?

I've been wanting to try it. There's a filing cabinet in my office that is the perfect height to use as a standing desk. I've persuaded my boss to go standing, which he's been doing for about a month now. The biggest thing that puts me off is that my co-workers would think I'm nuts. Either that, or they'd think I'm just copying my boss to suck up to him. Or probably both.

I'm really looking for a setup that allows me to spend half my time sitting and half standing, but that's difficult with two monitors.