First conference call of the year

Things are definitely getting back to normal at work; I had my first conference call of the year today, and, of course, it was at lunchtime.

IBM changed their health plans for 2006; they no longer offer a $150 “rebate” for not smoking; instead, they’ve taken that money and made it available to employees who go through a “Preventive Care” assessment and commit to taking at least some of the actions recommended. It worked on me; the assessment reminded me that I needed to schedule a physical (well, a screening) with my doctor, and I did so.

They also offer a $150 rebate for following an exercise program for at least ten weeks; the requirements were very low last year, but they’ve beefed them up a little bit for this year. You either have to exercise four days a week or exercise two days a week and do an online assessment and coaching. The required “exercise” is not hard to attain — 20 minutes a day is sufficient — but I’m doing the assessment and coaching, too. So far, it hasn’t been as effective at changing my behavior as the Preventive Care one was.

Tomorrow, my schedule features four conference calls. It was nice while it lasted…

Coldstarting the year

Today was the first day of work for the New Year. I hadn’t really done anything with my email while I was gone, though I did take a quick look over the weekend and got rid of the obvious spam, so when I arrived today, I had 120 or so “real” emails to deal with. Of those, all but 43 were broadcasts and therefore easy to deal with. But the remaining 43 kept me occupied for the whole day, since some took real thought to answer.

I also did my annual cold-start of my mail, copying all of last year’s mail to a backup database, then deleting it from my live mail database. And I took advantage of having a small mail database (only 50MB, down from 500MB before I started the process) to “upgrade” the design to the latest version, and, for the first time, I installed the special IBM version instead of the vanilla Lotus out-of-the-box edition. And then I added back my own personal tweaks. The process was time-consuming but not difficult.

I left the office with an empty inbox. I know it won’t last, but it feels good for now!