Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

A while ago, I stamped my feet like a child and demanded an enormous flat-screen monitor to draw pictures on, and lo, one appeared on my desk. If I run anything at less than 1920x1200 now, it just feels like I'm looking at a Commodore 64. This has been perfect for a number of design projects and is also rather nice when you fill the enormous screen with Team Fortress 2 and pick off a few engineers. However, the system that powers this huge screen is my own, and although it does the job very nicely, it's sometimes difficult to manage the overlap of home and work projects on one machine - especially when the whole family has an account on there.

Although I have a splendid work-supplied laptop, I've been been waiting for Sun's official work-from-home hardware for a long time. The laptop supports my job very well, but it isn't always the best thing to work with when you're sat at the same desk day after day, thinking you want, say, a proper screen and a keyboard that works with real fingers. So, imagine my delight when a dubious delivery company phoned me on my mobile phone to ask me which direction they needed to drive in to get to my house, because they had something from, erm, 'sunlight', or something, for me, on the back of the van. Could this really be the fabled Sun Ray @ Home system of which I've heard people speak? It's sighting is something akin to spotting a lion in your wardrobe, but Dave from DGL Deliveries says he's got one for me.

You can't really believe how easy this thing is to set up. It is one of the 'misconfigured' units that needs something done to it, apparently, but all I did was plug it in, stick an ethernet cable in it, and it asked me to log in to the Sun network. No network configuration, no service pack, no drivers, no multiple reboots. In fact, it was a total letdown. I was looking forward to spending a couple of hours tinkering around with router tables, NAT, dongles, ports, installs, uninstalls, etc., but no. It just works. After about 3 minutes, I had Thunderbird, Firefox and everything else I need to do my job, which was unfortunate, as I then had to do my job, but you see my point - this was almost zero installation time, out of the box to full-functioning.

Notwithstanding the fact that I was already impressed, I forgot about the pièce de résistance. I haven't used my Sun ID badge in earnest since I visited the Colorado office in February, and I didn't even know where is was (can I say that?), but this Sun Ray 270 has a slot in the front. Yes, a slot. Where you put a card. Where I put my Sun badge and it knows who I am. Isn't that exciting? So, after I locate my badge in the pocket of the jacket I only ever wear in America, I slip it out of its plastic holder and gingerly slide it into the central orifice. Well, blow me if the slot doesn't just light up like Christmas, and the screen says hello to me, using my name. Well, my Sun ID number, but it's the same thing to me. I'm looking forward to taking it out of that slot one day, flying back to Colorado, using that card to access the building, and locating a Sun Ray and putting that same card in, and that same session I left back in my home office in the UK suddenly springing back into life, just as I left it. That's how it happens. It's been like that for years at Sun, but its still a novelty.

The Sun Ray 270 also supports the laptop as a stand-alone and very nice monitor, of course, so everything's coming together at last.

Tunes: Radiohead: Bodysnatchers