Just back from vacation and am getting back up to speed. Some random stats that are meaningless without context:

1. Number of new emails waiting for me: 2377
2. Number of new computers waiting for me: 1
   1. This is actually really nice. As we've moved away from physical boxes for our day to day testing and over to HyperV virtual machines, the most apparent limitation is RAM. CPU and hard drive speed are nice, but having more RAM lets me have more VMs running at once. The new machine has 16GB of RAM, giving me enough to run more than 7 VMs concurrently.
   2. Since I have my own servers in virtual machines, I can now connect from multiple clients running in different VMs and perform testing an verification with one physical piece of hardware.
   3. Multimonitor setups really make this nice.
3. Hours to set up the new machine: about 4. Need to install Windows, move a hard drive from the old machine to the new (it has all my virtual machines on it), then run some setups for miscellaneous utilities I need. I can usually just kick off an install of some sort or the other and leave the machine alone. For instance, as I'm writing this, our automation scripts are building on that machine.
4. Number of To Do items waiting for me: 11 (they are mostly pretty small)
5. Number of To Do items that got done while I was out: 4 (thank goodness for delegation)

So it's a pretty standard week and a half away. One of my coworkers here once stated he only liked taking time off near major holidays so work wouldn't pile up while he was gone. He wanted to avoid the problem of needing to work extra hard to get ahead before leaving, then extra hard again to get caught up when he got back. Interesting viewpoint, but I put some faith in item 5 above and that definitely helped lighten the load this time.

Once I get my new machine completely done, I can get back to using Fiddler to observe some OneNote network traffic and show how we use that in our testing.

Yep, that's it. Nothing else has happened around here while I was out.  Nothing at all.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John