I’m terrible at doing work from home when I’m traveling. When I’m away, I’m focused on the things in the new environment—in this case, Microsoft activities. It’s easy to forget that back home, people are waiting for me to get things done. It takes an effort to remember that home isn’t in a state of suspended animation until my return.
So, today I’m going to focus on RIT work. Grading, finishing up details on the upcoming lab workshops, and grant research. It’s beautiful here today—through my hotel room window I can see blue sky, green trees, and mountaintops. The temperature’s in the 60s. But I’ll be spending the day in my room, not out in that pretty day.
Must. Work.
I did take my powerbook to the apple store on Wednesday. The diagnosis? A hard drive that’s on the verge of collapse. I spent Wednesday night backing up files to DVDs (my most recent backup in Rochester is several months old, alas), and being grateful that I’d brought two computers with me.
The powerbook is still partially functional. I can run my browser and email programs, as well as iTunes and iPhoto, which meant I was able to backup everythign that mattered. But my aggregator (NetNewsWire) and blogging client (ecto) have already stopped working, and the email’s starting to get a little flaky.
So while I’m here, I’ll be working mostly with the TabletPC. I’ll have our tech guys send my laptop in for repairs when I get home. (It has one other really odd problem; when I’m in an airplane, the E key doesn’t work properly; I’m guessing this has to do with the effect of cabin pressurization, but I don’t know if it’s the keyboard or the logic board that’s reacting.)
Seems like a lot is going on at Microsoft this week…I found out yesterday that I’ll be working for Marc Smith rather than Lili Cheng during my year at MSR, for reasons that are good for everybody involved, I think.
More details when I’m sure that it’s okay to provide them.
Since I’m stuck on my PC this week, I’ve been using Trillian as my IM client. It’s a really nice multi-protocol client, so I can use it for AOL, Yahoo, and MSN IM, as well as IRC.
What I didn’t realize until today is that it also does automatic lookup of words and phrases in your text in the Wikipedia. So today when I was chatting with someone about when the social computing symposium starts, it highlighted the word symposium for me—and displayed this definition when I rolled over the highlighted word:
Originally, the term symposium referred to a drinking party; the Greek verb “sympotein” means “to drink together”. The term has since come to refer to any academic conference, irrespective of drinking. We have literary depictions of symposia in the sympotic elegies of Theognis of Megara, as well as in two Socratic dialogues, Plato’s Symposium and Xenophon’s Symposium.
Hmmm. I kind of like the original definition.
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