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 :-)

Picture the scene: a young software developer, still wet behind the ears, is asked by his boss "how long will xyz feature take to implement?" Eager to please, he says "oh, about six weeks". The boss goes to the customer and says "it's ready" and gives him the developer's direct dial number.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I (err, I mean he) sent a beta version to the testing department, who went at it with a hex editor and removed the "beta" string from the version number. Cue irate customer wanting support on what was now a production-quality product.