Weekend Activities

I have been trying to create conditions in my office/computer/datacenter room that will allow me to spend more than a few minutes in it at a time. Historically it has been one of the most cluttered and ugliest areas of my house. An ancient hand me down particle board desk presided over a chaotic collection of archaic computing components. It was a big mess, and it pushed me out to the living room with the laptop as my primary home computing experience. The computer room does have some cool things though, such as large dual monitors and a wired Ethernet connection. This week I decided it was time to fight my way back in there.

The computing situation is a lot saner since I built the quad core ESX 3i box. The ESX box and my desktop are the only computers I need, and the FOUR others I had in various states of disrepair were ready to go live on a farm somewhere. The big L-shaped desk is a problem though. It served me well for many years and I am very grateful to the friend who gave it to me, but it is really showing its age, and it has these enormous hutch pieces with shelves and cabinets that I have fallen out of love with. I now just want lots of open surface area from a desk. I care not for drawers and shelves and cabinets. I have room for all that stuff in other parts of the room.

Friday night I went to Staples to look at desks. I was very disappointed.  The desks at Staples look much better as 360x360 jpegs on their website.  I couldn't find anything that didn't look like a cheap piece of crap or was close to the size of my current desk for under $500.  I just wanted something basic, sturdy, big enough for two monitors and a laptop and that looked like it was made out of actual wood, but of course, capitalism let me down once again. I sighed and thought "Why do I always have to do everything myself?" I guess I have to build my own desk. I went to Home Depot and looked at wood. I am still formulating a plan. It will be more work than I wanted to do. I think it is an excuse to buy a biscuit joiner though.

In the meantime, I cleaned a massive amount of crap out of the computer room. I filled three large garbage cans. I tossed ancient speakers, about a hundred CDs, boxes and manuals for motherboards I bought five years ago  tons of crap. I unearthed some artifacts. I found a journal I had kept in a little notebook in the late 1990s, which was somewhat interesting. It mostly seemed to be about drinking, roommates, and working in call centers. I also found some German homework from 10^th grade.

While doing all this work in the room, I watched Leo Laporte doing his job on live.twit.tv. I had listened to a couple of the twit podcasts fairly regularly when I am puttering around the house, but I never watched the video feed before. It is fairly entertaining.