You mentioned that you have a USB key; do you carry your work back and forth with you? It might be beneficial to bring some text home so you can read it on your own time. It’s sometimes hard to cram all of your knowledge-work into an 8 hour chunk of time in your day. If you feel like you’re letting your employer down with your workday contribution, you might find that one way to improve your work is by bringing it home with you.

Unfortunately, for this strategy to work you will have to take the work out of the bag after you get home. If you leave it in the bag, none will benefit from the “work” that you have done in carrying it from work to home and back to work. Even if it is light-weight, like the USB key that you mentioned, it is still not really worth your time carrying this USB key unless you are going to use your data in more than one place.

This is probably much easier than getting approval to install a corporate VPN client, but either way, you should establish a work-flow and seek approval by your supervisor.

Long Distance is crucial, we can do mailing lists but some people don’t do mailing lists, so presentation using voice or even face-to-face meeting is crucial. Really each person is going to need a phone, and as long as we are all in Rochester they can be cheap phones with unlimited local calling plans. OK, really I’m just trying to sell you a phone. I’ve got two. I don’t need two phones. Take one and I’ll call you!

We need a server with a public HTTP front-end and a revision controlled back-end. We’re going to have one or more queues that data is living in, and a number of fetchers that retrieve those bits of data, perhaps manipulate or process them in some way, and then pass them on to another queue or receiver. Think football: no don’t think football, but I was just thinking about football, in case you were wondering.

It makes sense that anything produced on Thomson time belongs to Thomson, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically fair game: I suspect that we do not leave all of our authorship rights at the door. I have a 25 page delicious database and another 250 pages at least in my own name, going back as early as 2005, and some of these might have been logged during paid time worked for another company or a University!

All that’s well and good, but at the end of the day unless a substantial sum of money comes to me, I am stuck with a tremendous bill for college tuition and my own living expenses that have not ceased with their incessant mounting. None of us really knows if there’s money inside of me or my organs; now lets be sure the bills are paid!

printer was displaying annoying messages, on account of HP driver software. /kpb Fixed, OK?
No antivirus is installed /kpb Done
Verizon dongle is not working /kpb This is resolved, the USB mobile dongle was replaced with PCMCIA and the (probably bus speed) issue appears to be resolved.
Statistics software will not run with less than 1GHz processor according to the spec. /kpb Is this a real problem?

Is there any need for VNC for remote desktop? How about a private VPN? You can always invite someone to join the U of R vpn, but then you are opening yourself to attack from within the U of R network. Are you interested in Subversion?

The Sixth Layer?q=verizon
KPB Code?q=verizon

It’s a phone, nothing special about it, just it doesn’t send you a bill every month. Also you can’t really make any long distance calls… not any distances over 30 feet… yet!

This is something I wrote for Grandma the day before I proposed to my wife. Instant messaging is also something like a phone, but substitute fingers and keyboards for vocal cords, microphones and speakers.

It’s hard to be all places at once. Remind me again why Red Hat is the biggest loser? Must be the times. They’re doing good work, really not deserving to be undervalued.

This one I was looking for to show your friend Diane! Can you imagine, a phone salesman who won’t sell you a phone, because he thinks you’ve already got one?

Long distance is hard. Short distances, well, these days we can do that without any help from anyone! I mean anyone, except for the Cisco company and those under it.

Long and short is this: if you are consuming resources, and those resources belong to somebody, then you’re going to have to pay somehow.

Your job is to learn this “how” at least well enough to earn 102.5% of what you need. Make as many friends as you like in the mean time, they will help you on your way.