ERIC@SEARN.BITNET (Eric Thomas) (02/02/90)
Effective immediately, my electronic mail address has become ERIC@SEARN. This
is a permanent change, so please update your NAMES files. I have left CERN and
the wonderful world of HEP, SES and Apollo workstations to take over
responsibility for the (pre-SES! :-) ) SEARN machine in the SUNIC group at
KTH, Stockholm (to avoid numerous questions, let me say here that the
temperature and weather conditions are identical to Geneva - bleak, windy and
rainy but nothing to do with Siberia :-) ).
I did not announce this change before because it was conditional - a work
permit was (of course) needed, it is not automatically granted, and it took
much longer than originally expected to get an answer from the embassy. I also
wanted to avoid the harassment I would surely have been subjected to if I had
shown my intent in advance.
To avoid any possible misunderstanding, the only relationship between my job
and the EARN Association is the last 4 letters of the nodeid of the machine I
am now taking care of. I am paid by the Swedish University Network (Sunet -
the swedish part of Nordunet), and before accepting this job I have of course
checked many times that EARN would have about as much power on me as they do
on, for instance, Andy Robinson and the other BITNIC folks; in any case if
that were to change I would immediately resign and move somewhere else.
My new snail-mail address (for LISTSERV requests and the like) is, using the
"international" alphabet:
Eric Thomas
Datorraadet
Drottning Kristinas vaeg 37B
S-100 44 Stockholm
('aa' = a with a circle on top, 'ae' = same as the german umlaut)
Mail sent to my CERN (snail-mail) address will not be automatically forwarded,
so please make sure to use the new address! Electronic mail sent to my CERN
userids is, of course, /FORWARDed.
I should now, within a couple weeks, have a considerably larger amount of time
to work on the network (and here "network" no longer means "SNA
reconfiguration", since we don't even have SNA here :-) ). Most of this time
will be spent developing software, but technical assistance for politics-free
problems is not at all out of question. However it should be understood that
such assistance is by no means what I am paid to do, ie there is again no
point trying to apply pressure to force me to collaborate to a MVS version of
LISTSERV or whatever (I picked up an imaginary project to avoid offending
anyone).
Finally, to avoid running out of spoolids at SEARN, I would like to say here
that I will not answer questions about swedish girls (it looks like this is
the second question people ask me after "So you're not coming back to CERN?"
:-) ); if you want to find out, I'm sure SAS will be delighted to sell you a
ticket to Stockholm :-)
EricPDB@CORNELLF.BITNET (Philip Bogdonoff) (02/05/90)
Thanks Steve. I'd already sent him at note at CERN and he replied amazingly quickly from SEARN! -- Phil