Thank you all for your comments. The most important things to take away seem to be dedicated workspace (I'd pretty much guessed that one) and the discipline to keep a bright line between work and real life. I think the thing I'm looking forward to the most is the lack of a commute: at the moment I despise it more than anything else. I can leave work feeling bright and awake, but after battling through crowds and enduring the awful train service home, I'm shattered when I walk through the door and can only think about dinner and the sofa.

I should have said at the outset that the company I'm going to be working for is small, and everyone works from home. I suppose that introduces a different dynamic when it comes to communication, and I assume that they have some sort of regime to talk to each other during the day.

They don't need to be connected to the Internet to get infected -- they just need to be connected to something, with a link to something else, that happens to share a wireless network with another computer, that once had a laptop connected to it with a crossover cable, that sometime in the past had an infected memory stick plugged in.

Protecting humans from pathogens involves strict biosecurity, and computers are no different. Isolated means *isolated*. Maybe they should use token-ring for the secure network to make sure nothing else can connect :-)