Return to on-site work

I was on campus last Wednesday, I may not yet have mentioned that it is much as one might expect from outside impressions. I have stopped in a few times before but this was my first full workday there, which I got to finish by taking a look at our large pulsed neutron beam facility. My group is one of those trying out a hybrid work policy, working from home some days and on campus for others. For me it makes good sense, from home I am more productive (fewer distractions, less time lost and energy wasted in travel), more collaborative (physical presence is no longer part of reaching out or listening in), and more accessible (few things pull me away from the computer screen for long) but it is also nice to see people in person, have access to gyms, etc. I have not quite thought through lunches, for now I shall probably fall back to typically breakfasting on fried eggs, bowls of granola or oatmeal, whatever, then bringing a couple of sandwiches into work, not that American grocery stores offer anything like the range of convenient sandwich fillings that are abundant in Britain. I hope that management ultimately deems this hybrid work tryout to be a success. Among the staff, students, and contractors, a high fraction is vaccinated and SARS-CoV-2 cases are rare, it is refreshing to be able to relax indoors with more than carefully selected neighbors.

Computing transitions

After facing various unexpected thorny issues, some of which I mentioned here, I have been making better progress with my personal computing, both at home and on remote servers. I even have the wireless access point working in client bridge mode, something that should have taken but a few minutes, not a few days.

On the remote server side, ( e-mail now flows well. )

On the home side, I am ( switching to a new laptop computer. )

Reading about Abrahamic religions

I am reading a book that describes various aspects of the largest Abrahamic religions. So far it has discussed them fairly separately, which means an odd diversity for me in how it feels to read it. I know Christianity well, I have had easy opportunities to find out about Judaism, less so with Islam, though, by odd coincidence, one of my neighbors studied Islam a bit in college. It is curious to experience a book that keeps shifting me between comfortable familiarity, passing acquaintance, and considerable ignorance.