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.

In lieu of the rantings of some of my coworkers on their new cubicle accommodations, I figured it was finally time to start blogging on some of my adventures in my new house. I still plan on writing up the details of my new prowess with all things electrical (along with the obligatory story of almost melting my face in the process), but for now I’ll stick to the topic at hand and show off where the majority of my home improvement work has gone thus far.

The actual work area hasn’t changed much from my previous house. I still use dual monitors with synergy over to the laptop, complete with Red Hat posters to (attempt) to add a level of professionalism…

… which doesn’t last too long once you start to look around. This desk houses my gaming rig. Having it in my office has revolutionized boring conference calls. Above it is a corkboard showcasing the artistic stylings of my 2 year old.

Yes, those are the Left 4 Dead campaign posters. They look even more epic than I thought they would.

Not shown is the single greatest addition to my office: the ceiling fan. I even tempted fate by installing fan controls to the wall switch, which is somewhat irrelevant since it’s a rare occasion that I don’t want it set to the “hurricane force winds” setting.

I had all summer to gradually start cleaning and packing to move in November. Naturally, I did nothing. I finally started to feel a sense of urgency when my wife threw down a to-do list on my desk. While I’d normally blow it off, she titled it “Phase 1″, which to be honest, scares the hell out of me for what’s in store in later phases.

So, I started in the depths of my office closet where I knew I’d come across some relics of computing past. What I hadn’t realized was just how much I’d find and how far back they go. Below are just a few of the ancient, dust-covered computing artifacts I came across:

• Two copies of Windows 98.
• One copy of Microsoft Works Suite 2001. Unopened; I think it was part of a restore package for an old laptop.
• A copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3. At least I wasn’t a complete Windows whore back in the day.
• Four “spare” keyboards (so far) not counting the one I already use to bait my daughter away from my real keyboards.
• An external Iomega Zip Drive and a few disks. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it sports a cool 100MB disk size at a time when floppies and modems ruled the day.
• A 500W ATX power supply. This is actually pretty new. It came with a case I bought but I needed something more powerful. The real question is why I kept it around.
• A Palm V. Amazingly, the screen isn’t shattered.
• A SCSI hard drive of unmarked size that I haven’t got a clue what it may contain.
• At least 25 ethernet cables of assorted sizes. I have no idea how the hell I came to own so many, it’s like the reproduce or something.
• Five laptop bags. I think every time I quit a job, I’ve take the laptop bag as a trophy.
• A 12 foot keyboard extension cable. No idea where it came from, but one has to question the practicality of a keyboard extension so long that you couldn’t possibly see what you were doing on the screen.
• Assembly instructions for a desk I got rid of three years ago.

And the worst of all?

• One copy of Windows Me.

This is all just in the office closet. I have yet to venture into the attic. If I find an external modem up there I’m gonna lose my mind. I really should save some of this stuff and set up a small monument to computing history in my new office.

I’m a bit late on posting this. Two weeks ago, after signing our names a few hundred times, we finished with the initial batch of contracts for our new house:

… at least, that’s what it will look like when it’s actually built (exact model, orientation, side car garage, and siding/shutters). For now, however, this is what we actually own:

A big pile of dirt. More accurately, an expensive pile of dirt. I’m pretty sure somewhere on the land where the house should be is a pile of dog shit.

Once it’s actually built, it will be a 4 bedroom, living room, family room, dining room, study, basement, gourmet kitchen, and two car garage full of pure awesome.

The process sounds like it’s going to be… long. Really long. We’re past the phase of selecting options and just today selected the colors for the granite counter tops, outside siding and shutters, carpets, hardwood floors… and so on. If it sounds intimidating, it is. Thankfully, my wife and I have virtually identical tastes, so we literally didn’t run into a single problem selecting any of those details.

Amazingly, this is still just the beginning. We haven’t even had our “pre-build orientation” yet. I’m not sure what that is, but if it involves any ice breakers or having to learn goofy songs (a la Villanova’s orientation), I’ll be downright creeped out. After that, we have a bunch of walkthroughs at various points. The one I’m most interested in is when the frame is set up but without drywall, at which time I’m going to show up with about 500 feet of CAT5 and wire up pretty much every square foot of the house with internet access (including the toilet, thereby fulfilling one life goal of one day taking a dump on a toilet with an IP address).

Outside of the house itself, the location is freaking great. We’re in a cul-de-sac (I’d love to know why I actually know how to spell that). Across the street — er, circle — they are putting a park with a “tot lot”, so assuming my daughter doesn’t inherit my allergies to everything outside, she’ll have the opportunity to spend a lot of time outside. We’re number 144 in the development layout:

Now we just need to decide if we’re going to sell our current house or rent it out. Anyone want a place in scenic NJ?