So, we worked from home Thursday and Friday (thanks, Adobe!), and these two days turned out to be the hardest this week! Once I was back on ‘the grid,’ meaning Adobe colleagues could see me on email, IM and the Exchange calendar, the pent-up work items began flowing in (which is just fine – it would be worse if nothing awaited me).

There was a minor bug firestorm that required a well-phrased explanatory document which took a day to craft with colleagues in DC and San Jose, a new EULA to carefully review (EULAs are hard – the lawyers deserve the moneythey get to craft these things), and my new boss, a very bright guy who I hold in high regard, noticed that during medical leave I had missed about a dozen Adobe performance review deadlines. So I spent part of the day getting my Windows machine into good enough shape to access the Adobe internal systems, which turned out to be unnecessary (my new boss being happy to plug in my input via email on site in San Jose).

Being that I help manage a cross-platform product, I can choose to use either Mac or Windows, so Parrallels has been a godsend – I don’t have to drag 2 PCs around to demos et al. However, my WinXP VM was in just the state I left it Oct. 9 when my ‘commute’ homeward from Adobe was in a San Jose ambulance. I had been on a press tour with colleague Lonn Lorenz, nightly downloading latest builds of A8 release candidates for demo purposes.

My WinXP registry must have been reasonably trashed from the constant beta install onslaughts, and I must admit that an uninstall and reinstall of the GM Acrobat 8 cleaned the machine up very nicely. Once I solved a VPN problem (completely user error here – not XP’s fault) WinXP chugged along very nicely on my MacBook Pro (sorry Mac fans). So, I’ve had 2 full days, attending meetings via Acrobat Connect (with an iSight for video on my end) and it’s worked great on the new LAN wed to our Comcast cable connection (despite the miserable outbound bandwidth assymmetry Comcast enforces).

In the midst of all this we’ve had furniture rental pick up (the rented bed), deliveries (the new and very nice furniture Linda ordered from Thomas Moser in Vermont) and an oncological fire drill that meant getting to a blood lab very quickly. Sheesh… but it’s sooo good to be back….

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