An Experiment in Corporate IT

I’m trying an experiment at work. For the last three or four years, I’ve always had my personal MacBook (or iBook before it) with me in the office, and have been able to turn to it when things got too difficult on my quasi-locked down work PC. But there’s a problem with that. It means I’m not using the same kit, with the same restrictions, as the people I need to train and evangalise to. So, for the next few weeks, I shall be using only the work laptop during the working week, unless I hit something I really, really need the Mac for. With a bit of luck, this will allow me to find alternative solutions to recommend to our journlaists or point the way to changes we need to make in the IT kit we provide or allow. For example, I participate in a chatroom that recently moved from AIM to Jabber. And we don’t currently seem to have an approved Jabber chat client at work. So, for the time being I’m using the [Meebo](http://www.meebo.com/) web-based IM service to work around that. Will it be a good long-term solution? I don’t know. But it’s interesting finding out.