Rather than trekking in to London as usual, I’m working from home today as South-east England has the worst snow it has seen for 18 years — and UK public transport websites like National Rail and London Midland (the train company I use) cease to handle any traffic, just like the roads. I may have had to postpone a couple of meetings but I can crack on with the projects I’m working on just as if I was in the office. That’s the beauty of cloud computing.
I have my Extrasys hosted desktop for Microsoft Office applications, shared data and email etc; and I’m also logged into one of our Linux development servers via an NX Client. My bottom-of-the-range DELL laptop acts as a top-notch thin client terminal for me.
So, while many of my fellow commuters struggle to get to work, or work from home as best they can, I’m just picking up my work where I left it before the weekend. The only downside for me today is that my central heating system broke down as a pipe froze, but I fixed that with a hair dryer, step ladder and an umbrella (to avoid electrocution!); and I’ll lag the offending pipe later using the time I’m saving by not travelling today.
