As planned, I went to work at eSoft today. Didn't actually end up doing any real work yet, though. :) Was presented with a fresh-out-of-the-box new system with a barebones copy of Win98 preinstalled (promptly deleted by me), a Red Hat cd, some basic intranet info, and was basically left to mess with it for most of the day. :)

Since the company is spreading out into a new office, and I'm new and not already settled in to the old area, I got the pleasure of being one of the first to inhabit the new cubicle section across the building. Almost completely void of human habitation, with the exception of a couple other early movers, it was almost eerily quiet. Tomorrow, the other people in the team I'm to work with are expected to move into the new building, so there will more than likely be some real work to do.

Now, on to some new random ramblings policy. As anyone who has followed these writings for long knows, I abide by a few self-imposed, loosely kept constrictions regarding what I write here. One is that I generally don't mention people's real names unless they explicitly tell me that they're ok with it. After thinking a bit about it over the last couple weeks, I've decided to add another.

As of now, as a general rule, I won't be commenting on anything that goes on inside the company. That's not to say I'll never make a statement about how my day was, but I think it would be a good idea to generally avoid posting summaries of day-to-day happenings, like I sometimes do with other parts of my life. There are several good reasons for this.

1. I don't want something which would potentially violate SEC rules to accidentally slip out. Upon signing the agreement to work, I was given a thorough briefing on Insider Trading rules. This is not stuff you want to mess with. We're talking fines and/or jail. I'm not saying that making general comments about my life at eSoft would be a violation. I just don't want to get anywhere close to the border, or be perceived (an important word in policy documents) as even hinting at inside info to readers of this page. Someone once told me, "If you're a private company, you can talk to anybody about anything. When you become a public company, everything has to be a secret." How ironically true.
2. Revealing company secrets. Upon entry, I signed a document agreeing not to reveal proprietary information about the company. Again, I would never knowingly or willingly break that, and most general commentary about my life at work probably wouldn't fall into that category. But when there's a question, I like to stay on the safe side.
3. This is a personal web page. Therefore, my professional life doesn't belong here. It's that simple.

I'm stating here this mainly so people don't start wondering when I don't say a whole lot about my new job. Just going totally silent without any explanation wouldn't be cool. (Not that I haven't done that sometimes before about other things, for other reasons, but anyway...)

Anyway, to wrap this up, I'll say that based on the experiences I had today, I have a feeling I'm going to like working there. I'll also finish with a random quote.

"It seems that you have been living two lives. In one life, you are Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you help your land lady carry out her garbage.

"The other life is lived in computers where you go by the hacker alias Neo, and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for, including the unauthorized use of the D.M.V. system for the removal of automobile boots.

"One of these lives has a future. One of them... does not."

--Agent Smith