I have been working at Sun for three days now. It's really good to see old friends and colleagues. I did miss a lot of them. You can actually credit my return to the insistence of a handful of people that kept trying to convince me to return for a few months now.

Some things haven't changed. I am still waiting to get my account setup so I can get on SWAN and access the resources I'll need for this job. The difference is that it is going faster this time than it did before. The offices are the same, the campus feels very comfortable and familiar to me. The dining hall hasn't changed much since I left. It's strange, but I really did miss the Broomfield campus.

Other things have changed. You used to be able to connect a laptop or computer to SWAN and have access to many internal web sites without challenge. Now you have to provide credentials before you can access the network. Thankfully the campus wireless network allows me to stay connected to the rest of the world while I wait for my credentials. The parking lots do seem a little emptier than they used to be.

One thing that I do love is that the team I joined is excited about the project. We are blazing new trails here at Sun and the response is very positive so far. It also helps that a lot of the red tape I used to face seems to be gone. There is indeed hope that the corporate immune system isn't going to re-assert itself like it did before. That in itself should help a lot.

I have a few friends at Sun who are working on projects that I never thought I would see at Sun. The kind of projects that I left Sun to pursue. They are excited about their work. They have a manager that gets it with a management chain that is willing to give them the flexibility that they need to be able to get the job done. Best of all, they believe that I would be a great addition to their team. They have told me so over the last few months. I finally listened. I'll be joining their team on April 23rd.

I don't know yet how much have been announced, so I'm not going to go into details about the project itself. I can say that the Sun I am going to join isn't the Sun I left. Dynamic languages are now getting public support in NetBeans as well as within Sun's management. A lot of the overhead that was frustrating me doesn't seem to be an issue any more. We are talking about a company that is excited and exciting again. Big changes have happened that I didn't thought would be possible at the time.

I am sad to leave my TransZap colleagues behind. This is a team of good people with a product that solves a big problem in their industry. I'll miss them. I'll also miss the foosball matches as well as hearing the scooter whizzing in the hallway. I wish them the best of luck and success.

I decided to give Twitter a chance. My profile is all setup, all I need is a few friends I guess.

I like to keep a distinction between my personal computing and the office computing. As a result, I tend to bring my Mac with me when I work. It's convenient to have all my music, personal email and RSS news feed subscriptions at hand. I even keep an iCurve stand at work so I can bring it up to eye level. Of course, that makes the trackpad and keyboard harder to reach. So I also kept a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to compensate. The problem is that my current office setup doesn't work very well. I can certainly feel the strain in my wrists and arms.

At home, I have a KVM switch that I use to share my monitor, mouse and keyboard between my PowerBook and an even older PC. This works pretty good for me. I didn't want to invest in a KVM for work though. There's no point for me to share the display. I just wanted to share the mouse and keyboard.

That's where Synergy comes in play. Synergy runs on Windows PCs, Unix, Linux and, yep, even Macs. I just installed the software on my work PC, which is acting as the server. I then installed SynergyKM on the PowerBook and configured it as a client. I can now move the mouse back and forth between the PC and the Mac without having to reach over the desk to reach either mouse or keyboard. Best of all, it's all free since both tools are released as open source software.

The LifeHacker blog has pretty good guide to configuring Synergy on both PC and Macs. It was a very helpful starting point to get this working. I'll have to see how things go and whether this helps relieve the strain on my wrists.