2001-04-27 - 1:04

You gotta keep workin' it

I'd say that I definitely got through my illness in record time. I even managed to put in a fairly solid day of work. No, the office isn't ready yet (I was back over there yesterday); but I did some work in the boss's basement and at a customer site.

It was fun to actually get some hands-on work happening again. As I've mentioned, I'm only semi-productive working from home. It'd be fine if I was preparing documentation or doing some work that I can actually do on my Windows box; but since I am a networking guy and I'm not really able to set up a network in my bedroom . . . yeah.

I think that feeling guilty about not making more of a contribution is what held me back from trying to get the company to fly me to Alaska to present my paper at Infocom. I imagine that Bis presented, though. I'll have to talk to him sometime. There are some guys from the old job who I haven't heard from in a while.

Anyway, back from getting sidetracked . . . today was enjoyably productive. I spent a while working on coming up to speed on a piece of equipment I'll probably be using to test our product for a customer's needs. (I hope my writing about work isn't too boring when I go out of my way to make it generic. I just got worried about talking about work inappropriately after I started getting hits from my old workplace. It really is more fun than I probably make it sound.)

Then in the afternoon, I went with the doctor to a customer site for a demo. Actually, the customer was my old employer, although we were at one of its other dozen locations in this town, not my old stomping grounds. In a way, it seemed like the demo was just an excuse to set up a testbed. I didn't mind at all, since I got to actually get back in a lab. When I stopped to think about it, though, at my old job, I would've been embarrassed to have somebody connecting a few nodes and setting up routing tables for me. But I guess they must be used to working in other areas, since they seemed like intelligent people.

Hmm . . . given how much space I'm devoting to the topic, I'd almost say that I'm missing doing real work. Heh. Actually, though, I am getting excited for the near future. It's going to be great when the lab is ready and my boy Greg is up working with us again. It was funny talking to him the other day. It'll definitely be cool having him around.

Basically, the way it has worked out is that one of the guys I most respected at work, and probably the one who I got the most laughs out of, got the operation set up, hooked me into it, and then got the best friend I ever had at work to join us. How cool is that? Okay, I missed out on Alaska and I no longer get to work for the two guys with whom I did almost all of my old projects; but on the whole, I certainly can't complain.

Well, I can complain about my discman, which, while I was writing this entry, seemed to have developed a previously unknown tendency to skip for no reason, but that's another story. Overall, life is good.

J.