This month in the labs

July is setting up to be an interesting month for the Syracuse NWC staff. I've almost completed my evaluation of IP accessible KVMs. They work decently well for people connected on T1 or Cable/DSL lines, although even at 100Mbps you can't get a true on-console feel. There is always a bit of a delay and lag with the screen redraws. I also have a ton of equipment shipped to me for this article. Approximately 17 appliances, 40 dongles, 20 KVM cables, 17 power cables and a couple of serial cables are sitting on racks and in boxes behind me. I'm getting ready to start a video conferencing review in a few weeks. It deals with hosted solutions, so fortunately I don't need to worry about setting anything up beyond a few client installs of Windows.

In two weeks I'll be heading to Chicago along with the rest of the staff. We try to do this every year, where we can all get together in a room and talk about the upcoming year, new initiatives, coverage areas and so forth. It's also the time to plan the editorial calendar for 2006. Some cover stories can take up to six months to complete from start to print date, which is why we plan far in advance. The edit cal isn't set in stone, and we've been known to dramatically change stories from what was previously planned based on the market and industry shifts. If you have any story suggestions, including reviews and workshops, feel free to email them to me or the other beat editors by next Tuesday. I have already gotten several story ideas from fellow readers, and they're all quite good.

We're preparing to move the lab too. Next week, my lab will move about 75 feet to the west and 20 feet up. We actually have two labs in Syracuse. I'm in the Machinery Hall lab along with Bruce Boardman and Secure Enterprise's Mike Fratto and Joanne VanAuken. The other is the SciTech lab, housing Ron Anderson, Sean Doherty, Dave Molta and Pete Morrissey. These two labs are in separate buildings located about 500 feet apart. We will be moving into a single, completely remodeled, unified lab next week. The best part is that there will be an attached enclosed machine room to house the computers and air conditioner. No longer will I need to hear the whir of fan blades and air compressors. Sean's automatic two pot caffeine coffee maker is the second best part.