Networking the news... Someday

This morning I was looking at the Microsoft Research site and saw this article
about the benefits and increases of productivity that people see when working with
multiple monitors, and OS changes which could result. It reminded me of one day recently
when I was working in my office, composing an email, updating information in a large
spreasheet and reading individual status reports in a sharepoint library. I have a
laptop that I dock under a stand that holds my beautiful 17-inch LCD monitor. Tim came
into my office and said "Hey, have you thought of using both monitors?" I had briefly
considered it, but it I didn't see enough of a benefit in it to deal with the logistics.
Tim described his set-up, and later when I tried it out (although not in a way that
I could use all the time) I realized how much easier it would make so many things
in my work to have two monitors. I'm on the lookout for something that I could use
to position my laptop screen next to the monitor, while it's still docked.

Why was I cruising the Microsoft Research site? Isn't that what most people do on
a beautiful Sunday morning? Okay, probably not. Last night we had dinner with some
friends, and were talking about various interconnections in the world of politics.
Then this morning, with all the news that's finally being pursued about the Valerie
Plame fiasco, I was wondering how long it's going to be before it will be easy
to model networks based on publically available information (and even news stories!)
and what that will show us about who really has power in this country. So, I was looking
at the Social Computing Group's site to see what was publicly available about the
work they're doing (See MSR Connections and MS Connect and Point to Point on this page.)
Not much really, But I believe!