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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Going the extra mile?

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As you know, I'm currently working for a large financial company integrating Connections/Quickr/Portal using the WebAppIntegrator.  In my local development environment I'm running 3 VMWare's:  1 for Portal, 1 for Connections and 1 for my DB2 database.  As you can imagine, this takes a toll on my T60p.  It takes about 3 minutes for a simple document to open in Notepad.  My hard drive light bulb doesn't turn off (it's been spinning like crazy for the past several hours -- will that break it?) 

I currently have 2GB of memory, but need at least 3GB in order to run these three VMWares together at the same time with no performance degradation.  I put in an order through our internal procurement system to get additional memory but it got rejected. The request at least did get escalated so hopefully it'll go through in the next day or so.

Anyway, because my computer was so low in memory, it was hard to run Notes 8 and Sametime 7.5.1.  I switched to Notes 8 Basic, but it was still running very slowly!!  I thought, "it would be great if I had another computer where I could run Notes and Sametime".  As I sat there in my Home Office, frustrated by all the slowness, I looked to my right and saw my nice and pretty iMac lying there -- powered off.  A light bulb went off in my head: "perhaps there's a way to connect my Mac to the IBM network?".  On one hand, I thought that I shouldn't be using my personal computer to do work stuff.  On the other hand, I could multitask; answer emails that are pending, make myself available on ST, evaluate my health insurance options for next year, etc.

After thinking about it for about 5 minutes, I decided to go the extra mile and configure my iMac to connect to the IBM network and install the necessary software.  I did a Dogear search on "mac remote access" using the Dogear Firefox plugin.  Several links came up which led me to the Mac Fans community.  That led me exactly to the two pages that I needed:  FAQ for Mac users and IBM Downloads for Mac Users.  I LOVE DOGEAR!!  I did some quick reading, installed and configured VPN access to IBM on my iMac, got Sametime v7.5.1 installed and configured, and then accessed my Lotus Notes Mail using iNotes (otherwise I would've had to install Notes 7 --  yuck)!  I did all of this while my VMWares were processing a request!!! 

If it wasn't for my iMac, I would've been very unproductive today.  Now I want to know... for those of you who work from home, do you tend to use only your work laptop, or do you also have your home computer hooked up to the IBM network to multi-task and make you more productive ?
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