Effective immediately, my electronic mail  address has become [log in to unmask] 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 :-)
 
  Eric