Out of the loop

Jeepers! Blogspot hasn't deleted this thing yet?

When I recently came up for air and poked my head out of my cubicle, here are a few bits of interesting news that had transpired while I wasn't paying attention:

• Large Hadron Collider. Wait. There's a machine that could create an earth-devouring black hole? How did this happen, and why wasn't I notified??
• Lance Armstrong. Come on, now. You didn't really believe he was going to stay retired, did you? Although part of me suspects this may be a his way of capitalizing on the wave of interest in cancer research, the truth may be that he's just bored and hasn't enjoyed being so much out of the public eye.
• Changes at Dell. Some of this came as no surprise. I've been too lazy to bother changing the IE home page on my work laptop, so I've seen some of the stylish new desktop and laptop designs Dell is coming out with. What bothers me is that the next time I decide to order a new desktop machine, I may not be able to tweak the components like I've done in the past. Then again, by the time I reach that point, I may have decided to just invest in a good dockable laptop or… no. No, I don't think I could ever afford a Mac.
• Chrome. Another browser? Where do I sign? I installed this just the other day and really haven't had much opportunity to play with it, except to take a look at my web sites and verify that they render correctly. My initial impression is that it's a sparse little thing with not much in the way of extraneous buttons and toolbars. But that's Google's style, isn't it? I do kind of like the "incognito" feature, which is a browser window that supposedly doesn't keep track of history or cookies once you shut it down. I guess that could be handy for keeping things tidy on one's work computer.

Meanwhile…

Things are starting to settle down at work. We spent August in a kind of limbo, where we weren't the company we used to be but hadn't gone through legal entity combination and weren't yet the company we were going to be. But now (as of 1 Septemb3r), we are.

Most of administrative hassles involved with getting signed up for benefits, rolling over my 401K, signing up for a dozen or more new network accounts, etc. has been completed. There's still a bit of confusion as we try to figure out the culture of our new masters, and the future directions of some of our projects are still to be decided. But we're getting there.