Ken and I wrote the 200th column for the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser liftout run on Tuesdays called "You Magazine". In it I described the job of an academic at least as I see it. The job is in six parts: research, scholarship, administration, professional development, teaching, community engagement and other activities as directed by the Vice Chancellor (or his nominee).

• Research is finding new knowledge and is the main activity of an academic. Writing grant proposals to win money for research is a significant related activity.
  
• Scholarship is learning and writing in an academic manner with the aim of being an acknowledged world leader, published regularly in high impact journals or having substantial commercial benefits already achieved from the work, a winner of awards and an invited guest/presenter at the most important discipline conferences.
• Administration is contributing to the running of the University and often consists of lots of meetings.
• Professional develop is learning about the job of an academic.
• Teaching is giving knowledge, skills and experience to students.
• Community engagement is things like contributing to public debate by writing in the newspaper or being interviewed for radio or television.

Of interest was a blog entry by an ex-Microsoftie (who now works for Google) on the design of Windows Vista Shutdown. In it he noted they have a Macintosh "that we looked to as a paragon of clean UI design". Joel Spolsky who also used to work at Microsoft on an early version of Excel details the ways that Vista can be turned off and described how all but one could be eliminated.