I got a new computer at work last week, a desktop that will now be my main workstation. (I get to keep my old laptop, too, I suspect because it is so ancient that no one in IT wants it.) There were a few things that were missing from the standard developer setup when I got it, and it took a while to get those resolved. I could have done it myself if the procedure for installing the software that wasn’t working had referenced the procedure for configuring the other piece of software that was causing it not to work, but no, it did not. In the old days, I would have just updated the document myself, but Purple Systems is getting bigger and bigger and now there are rules about that sort of thing and phrases like “SAS-70 auditors” get thrown around regularly. I did ask the person who can update the procedure to do it, so we’ll see.

Once the basic setup was done, I still had to install the non-standard stuff I’d had on my old machine and missed. That we are still allowed to do, and we’re not limited to work-related software, either. I’m not going to get in trouble for downloading the tools I use for post-processing and post-processing verification at Distributed Proofreaders, for instance. It’ll be a while before I get everything I want on this new machine, but I did move my iTunes library already. I got the music over okay, but managed to lose all my podcasts—not just the episodes I’d downloaded but the subscriptions, too. For the past few days, I’ve been adding them back. I think I’m about done, so this seems like a good time to document the list somewhere I probably won’t lose it, like my links page. (While putting together that list, I realized how rarely I visit the websites associated with the podcasts—some of them I’d never seen before.) Now if I can just convince the latest episodes to download on the desktop, I’ll be all set (it seems to balk if the files are over a certain size, but why this should be I do not know, since it’s the same network with the same access as I had with the laptop and that didn’t pitch a fit like this).

Maybe I should hold off on doing more of the personal stuff, though, since a mandatory developer meeting has just been called for Wednesday morning. No more information was provided other than the time and place. In the past when these types of notices have gone out the announcements made in the meetings haven’t been good news. I know worrying isn’t going to change anything but that doesn’t mean I can keep myself from doing it. I’ll probably spend the time between now and the meeting thinking things like “surely they wouldn’t be upgrading computers if a bunch of us are being fired” and “if only a few of us were being fired, they’d just send out e-mails after the fact like usual” and “we just had a developer meeting and an all company meeting last week, so something’s changed”. I hope personal use of company resources isn’t what’s changing; I know most companies already ban that sort of thing, but I came to Purple Systems because it wasn’t like most companies I’d worked for. Treating me like a person who can be trusted is a big factor in motivating me to work hard. But no sense in getting myself agitated about this now; I need to wait until Wednesday to see what’s actually going on.