Just got back from spending a week up in the Bay area. Still working for Cisco (not SysCo) and boss has kindly allowed me to stay in Santa Barbara for half the time this summer. In some ways, I'd like to spend all my time in SB: it's cheaper this way and I don't have to drive as much. But Glenn (boss) is right: I get more interaction up in San Jose and that does help quite often.

The biggest change between the academic life during the school year and my teching it up now has been a sort of time shift. Even though I am always complaining about not having enough time to finish my papers, the truth is that I have plenty of time to finish my PhD, which is the real project. There is no deadline to publish a paper or present at a conference. You do things at your own pace.

But I get to Cisco, and time actually becomes an issue. When can we get an extra server to test out our work so that the customer can install in a week? Need to finish work before such and scuh a deadline since the customer has this window of opportunity to make changes to their server. One small proejct I'm working on is doing a single sign on (SSO) solution using a federated identity provider (IdP) and the vendor's marketing packet (V'SMP) has a big red button with the word "FEDERATE" written on it. But not just that, there's also a sticker beside it, which combine with the button to form "FEDERATE NOW!" I almost never see this kind of urgency in academia. Yes, speed is good but original ideas is better. As for me, I just have to make sure I don't start talking to clients about how they are reifying the heterogeneity of the internet or start setting deadlines and specs for my papers. On second thought, I really should do the latter...