With this post, I reached the coveted "God Member" status! Woo hoo! I have some mixed feelings, though: why do I have to trade my 4 gold stars for 5 silver ones?
After several months of talking up Arduino to my team at work, I finally got one of them -- my boss, no less -- hooked. He bought a bunch of *duino loot from several of the big suppliers, and now we spend quite a bit of time in our one-on-one meetings talking about all the projects we're going to build someday.
I realized suddenly that if he starts reading these forums, he'll see how much of my work time I spend posting. I'm busted! Fred, are you reading this? If I seem to have disappeared from the forum, it's probably just that I have had to create a new, more opaque, user identity.
Looks like 3 to 6 posts per day, 2 or 3 posts during work hours, and usually small posts. The big posts with quotes, you are doing later in the evening.
No one can focus continuously on a single task, if you take a break every couple hours and spend a few minutes catching up on something you like which could feed back into your job, I don't see a huge problem.
I'm reminded of the Google (and other companies) 20 percent working time for personal projects rule.
@mem, I'm not sure company policy permits me to divulge the name in a public forum, but let's just say I'm a software engineer working for a chip manufacturer. A large one. The LARGEST one, in fact. Fred and I work in the networking division.
@macegr, I appreciate your assessment. It's a real pleasure to be in this forum with all "the good people". Sometimes I think I spend a little too much time here -- time I could be developing Arduino projects, or working!
@Fred, please post a reply if/when you start using the forum, so that I can better assess what to do next.