News you can use below the fold on telecommuting. First a bit of levity . . . or is it?

Do you speak Java?

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Over at TechRepublic, Exec. Editor Jason Hiner writes that at last week’s Interop IT trade show in Las Vegas he noticed buzz (#3 of 4 on his list) surrounding efforts to support a decentralized work force:

. . .one vendor told me that 70% of all employees now work outside of the corporate headquarters. Another vendor told me that number is actually up to 80%. One representative of a very large IT company said that it recently moved into a new headquarters and that the employee-to-workstation ratio is now 4-to-1 (up from 1.5-to-1). That’s because they now have a lot more mobile employees and they actively encourage employees to work from home during times they don’t need to come into the office.

There were a number of technologies taking center stage in order to support an ever larger number of remote offices, telecommuters, and road warriors. One is fixed mobile convergence, which is aimed at allowing employees to use a dual-mode phone to connect over the Wi-Fi network at the corporate office (or their home) and then to connect over the cellular network when not on a trusted Wi-Fi network. FMC also allows employees to consolidate phone numbers and voicemail inboxes.

Another technology for enabling a decentralized workforce is what I call “WAN caching.” You’ll hear it called WAN optimization, WAN acceleration, and a number of other marketing terms, but the speed burst comes primarily from caching large files so that they aren’t being sent over the WAN multiple times. . . .

And managers worry about what telecommuters are doing at home?

Corporate Zombie Figures

“There are times (it seems quite a lot of them) when the sheer drudgery of work transforms us all into zombies. No doubt we’ve all met a few when buying a burger or a PC–I’m sure there’s a link there. We all know a few people at work who are, without beating about the bush, quite clearly members of the un-dead. Heck the corporate world is littered with them. Zombies are not particularly social souls, in that they’re all after the same thing, namely eating the living. So what better way to protect yourself from the barely human than by dotting these ridiculous Corporate Zombies about your desktop. Once the bright young things of GiantMegaCorp, they have been ground down to mere shells of their former selves. Complete with posable arms and eerie green skin that glows in the dark, they carry the trappings of office life, and if nothing else makes one muse ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. Soon they will become your friends, and whilst they’ll never buy you a drink down at the pub, on the upside they’re very unlikely to eat you.”

Features
Four zombified office workers.
Gaunt, green faces.
Glow in the dark.
Limbs are posable and removeable (eek).
Seven office accessories; mug, clipboard, pad, calculator, mobile, laptop, briefcase.
Suitable for the cynical aged 16 years and older.
Size: 7 x 3.5 x 1.5cm.

Of course the alternative to becoming a corproate zombie to work from home, to telecommute.

But you already knew that, right?

What do telecommuters and bovines have in common? They both pass gas.

People who work from home use less gasoline, and that’s a good thing. Cow farts and burps, on the other hand, are no laughing matter. In fact, livestock ‘emissions’ contribute to global warming more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together!

Unlike humans and most other animals, bovine digestive systems produce large quantities of methane gas. Methane is believed to be twenty times worse for the environment than the carbon dioxide that comes of the back end of our cars.

New Zealand proposed last year to tax farmers in attempt to mitigate methane. But the farmers rallied and created a lobby, Farmers Against Ridiculous Taxes (F.A.R.T.) . The group made a big stink and successfully plugged the issue.

On our home soil, a couple of California entrepreneurs are determined to get to the bottom of the problem. They’ve invented a bovine methane recapture apparatus that, while it may make Nellie the laughing stock of the barnyard, it could put an end to our global warming woes–it’s sort of a cowalytic converter to stop tailpipe emissions

Honestly, we don’t make this crap up.

Did you hear the one about the minor league baseball player who was offered a big-league chance to work from home? He thought they were going to make him a catcher.