Keeping In The Best Shape While Working As A Remote Staff

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Remote employment is not for everyone. It requires discipline, ability to work independently, proper time management and other related things (stable broadband, stable electricity, understanding spouse etc :) )

Apart from those thing, how about the change of the work location itself? I've been working remotely from different houses in New York, Washington DC, Perth (West Australia),  Skudai (Malaysia), Bagan Datok (Malaysia), Ampang (Malaysia, most of the time) and lately - I tried to work from an Island - the Perhentian Island. This island is reachable around 45 minutes from the Kuala Besut Jetty. Pretty awesome journey and nice view since the weather was good. 

We (the whole family.. my wife and I, plus our two kids) went on the boat and saw this awesome creature - a turtle! The turtle managed to float itself to the surface for a while but unfortunately that time I was not ready with my camera. So I just put my action cam in the water to take a close picture. Our boatman later offered himself to dive an took the video of the turtle in the floor of the ocean. Awesome, huh


The water is so clear that we could see through the water to the bottom of the ocean. Awesome


I brought along my laptop (MacBook 2015) as I was on-call on two days within our four-days trip there. We stayed at Arwana Resort in Pulau Perhentian Besar. When we first arrived there - there was no phone line connection at all?. I just felt unconformable as we can't be sure if something happens to our family member on the main land we couldn't know about it due to that silly situation. Luckily the situation  was temporary and the connection went back during our second day there. I used two phone lines Digi and Celcom. Digi was non functional there and Celcom's connection was good. So I don't have to worry about any server downtime since I could reach the infrastructure through VPN connection if anything comes up.

After we reached back the mainland I then drove my car heading to the South - Kuala Terengganu through Pantai Timur Highway (LPT) and on the next day back to the city - Kuala Lumpur. The road traffic was smooth. However during that one hour drive  I was paged by two servers' downtime alerts so I have to find a pit stop to check the infrastructure issue. This took it took a bit longer since the nature of the issue was not so easy. Luckily my wife was understanding enough so I could work calmly  to handle the situation.

Yeah, it took a long route to reach there - Besut - almost 500KM from KL (hence, it means around 1,000KM for return trip) But the satisfaction is undeniably high. We managed to stop at one of a food stall around Pantai Penarik in Kuala Terengganu during the en route back to KL, the view was quite good too.


Aufa and her mum enjoying the beach view


It's common for Terengganu beaches to have this "cradle" in their beaches

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