No Open Blockers

Damn, that title would have been a lot more fitting if I actually had my red fedora in my office somewhere. It’s still packed from the move.

A coworker is looking to clean up his home office and asked me about my setup. After 3 years and as many different rooms, it was a good opportunity to look back and think about how it’s been going.

I posted a few pictures in my last blog.

We have an “office” room on the first floor, but that was immediately out of the question due to the sheer amount of foot traffic on that floor. So instead I use the smallest of our spare bedrooms. Having a door to close is a requirement when you have kids. Or a stay at home wife. Or both.

I use my home desktop/monitors, a dual core 8GB fedora box, which is soon to be completely rebuilt as F12 (I upgraded from F10 to F11 and it always felt a bit dirty). I have my guests on there and do 99% of my dev there. It’s configured for the Red Hat VPN, but I rarely have to connect to it from that box.

I also have my work laptop in there, using synergy to use the same keyboard/mouse on them. That stays on the VPN when it’s not being unceremoniously punted off of it and mostly handles chat and e-mail. I’ve gotten into a routine of trying to make sure my desktop code is committed before I have to go to campus so I can just update and have my laptop in sync. That’s not always possible in which case I pretty much just rsync my source tree over. Once this semester ends at Villanova this will be less of an issue since I’ll rarely be working only from my laptop.

Since those are my primary two machines, I have experimented with an external network drive as a way of sharing stuff (I also use it for a bunch of different things). It’s worked, but I wouldn’t say it was necessary to my setup.

That’s the only desktop in my office, the rest are in the basement. Having the door closed most of the day results in some grossly stale air circulating (insert fart joke here), even with a ceiling fan. More desktops just leads to unbearable heat and a tropical climate in my office. I bought a cactus when we moved in (you can’t see it in the pictures, it sits on the desktop). I’m using it as a canary of sorts; if the cactus dries out, I really need to entertain a new solution.

My Red Hat supplied desktop along with a handful of older boxes I have are in my basement. I have a wired connection from my office to the basement; in the old house I figured out a way to run it myself but in the new house I leveraged the fact that our phone lines were run using cat 5e. 99% of the time I can get away with using SSH to them, VNC in worst case. I’m almost finished with the wiring I need to do in the basement, at which point I’ll have all of those boxes on a KVM to a spare monitor down there for the rare occasion I need to actually be at the box.

Only annoyance? Having to run downstairs in the morning to power them on, though I may finally look into network booting for the cool factor.

Ergonomically, the biggest issues I’ve faced are related to lighting. I’ve had to play with monitor position in relation to the windows and background light for the monitors. In the new office, it hasn’t been an issue; the light on the ceiling fan is actually very good for my purposes. The nice part is that, unlike a corporate office, I have 100% control of your decisions on what to do about it and don’t have to deal with SOX stuff.

I’ve also found a need for having a downtime after work, something that used to happen during the commute home. I can’t just walk out the office door and immediately be husband/father. It’s like switching gears without a clutch.

Most of the time I’ll sneak into my room and just watch TV for 10 minutes. Other times I’ll run an errand or go to the gym if I didn’t go at lunch. But in my experience, I don’t do well when going straight from office desk to dinner table.

That’s largely been the work at home experience so far. Going forward, I’m curious to see what it’s like having my gaming rig in here. All kidding aside, I’m not worried I’ll be tempted to play during work. It’s more that if I’m really into a game that will mean I’ve spent a good 90% of my waking hours in the same room and frankly, the door isn’t strong enough to prevent my wife from kicking it in and dragging me out and back into the real world.