Home of the World Famous Home Office Setup
Yes, it’s almost done! I’m still waiting for new computer equipment to arrive at my dealer and decided to wait until the new office setup reflects the actual working conditions before I start shooting proper pictures and updating the site. In the meantime, here are a few shots of the new layout with the new extreme multi-monitor configuration. And before you say it… yes, it still looks like a mess.
The Home Office Overhaul (going from version 5 to version 6, as I call it) is in full swing. Except it will take a while longer before I can properly update the website to reflect the new working conditions. I’ve been at this for a few days now and it seems there’s a few more days of work ahead of me because everything just sucks up time like crazy. The first two days were spent clearing everything out and moving the most essential services running on servers from the living room. Then another day to give everything a paint job. The past two days have been cable hell.
My dealer doesn’t have all the new equipment ready yet but did get me the imporant stuff I need to start, namely the new monitors. However, the various three and five meter DVI cables that were sent to them were white instead of black so we’re waiting for the arrival of the correct black cables. Without the cables there’s not much point in clearing out the office. The RAID backplanes have also not arrived yet but adding new workstations is not a requirement for starting this overhaul so that can wait. The cables are definitely more important.
WhereWeDoWhatWeDo is “a community-built visual database of the spaces in which we spend our days, nights or both doing whatever it is we do”. If you want to see some other home offices and fun spaces, go over to WWDWWD. And while checking out the many images, you may encounter something that looks somewhat familiar.
Two days later the second of these small APC backup UPC devices, an identical model, decided that the battery needed to be replaced (what, not even 3 years after initially installing them?). Except this UPS decided it wasn’t just unhappy but extremely pissed at me because instead of just sounding the beeping alarm and flashing the error lights it decided to temporarily, for about 5 seconds, pull the power from the server it was providing with current (it wasn’t running on batteries but on pass-through current).
People have asked me to write something about some of the typical usage scenarios that I often find myself in at my home office. Since those are generally not easy to explain in a few words and since they could otherwise fill up the FAQ page a lot I’ve decided to just write them as posts in the blog and relink those back from the FAQ page for details. Note: This was written when I was using the old setup, not the new setup, so details now vary but the general idea of the content here is still the same and as applicable as it was before.
Someone just sent me a link explaining that over in Russia there is a competition going whereby my Home Office is being compared with that of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer. Unfortunately I can’t read a single word of Russian so I’ve got no clue what the battle of the offices is about but I thought it was rather hillarious! See for yourself! There are, of course, other people who fell for the Russian joke and actually do think that this is Mr. Ballmer’s office. Unfortunately (for Steve!), he probably wouldn’t feel very much at home in my office… there are computers here that run Linux, you see. That might be too much to handle and cope with.
Today I noticed, while looking at the web logs, that there has been a tremendous increase in traffic generated by the Home Office and FAQ pages. I knew that for some reason it has been linked to a lot and draws a steady number of visitors but the traffic over the past few days is off the scale. Just over a 24 hour period of Feb 01 to Feb 02 the logs show a total of 19.355MB got served. 19GB of traffic? Wow. Most of the traffic didn’t show its origins so I’m not clear on that. Two weeks ago some 4.5GB was served mostly to visitors from Poland (all the *.pl domains in the log) but as of the past two days traffic is coming from all over the globe. Maybe I should start a reverse tracking page that automatically keeps a list of all the incoming links.
I am frequently asked how I manage to get my workstations to make use of so many monitors to simultaneously show the output of a single system. While there are various ways to accomplish this, often involving multiple graphics cards in a single system, I have been using configurations whereby each system has a single graphics card that uses two outputs in order to create a dual-screen setup, while enhancing the functionality of the screens on other systems using a wonderful software-only solution called MaxiVista.
Stefan Didak’s Home Office Comments
Over several months many comments have been made about my home office setup. A lot of these comments reside on the various blogs and forums where people have been posting links to my home office pictures. This blog entry, now that I have a personal site to play with, is a way to allow comments to be left directly on the site itself. If your comments are really funny, silly, or outrageous I’ll consider adding them to the collected comments archive.