Stefan Didak's Home Office Overhaul : The Making Of Story

After roughly two days of moving all the equipment, servers, workstations, monitors, and devices out of the office space and performing a paint job on the walls. I smoke, so you can imagine that regular painting and cleaning is one of those things that's a good idea to do every now and then - and it gives me a good reason to overhaul the office and make some improvements that come to mind because of practical necessity. This left me with a nearly empty space where I could start all over.

More than 6 boxes with cables, pre-sorted by type. USB upstream cables, USB cables, monitor cables for DVI, Single Link and Dual Link, all of various lengths (2 meters, 3 meters, 5 meters, etc.) and of course power cables, power adapters, UTP network cables (mostly CAT6 and a bunch of CAT5e), cables cables cables and more cables. And yes, those boxes can get quite heavy with all those cables in there.

There! A shot of the desks I've been using for many years. These are extremely heavy desks, mostly metal and solid materials and just the kind of weight you need to carry a lot of weight for the new 24" TFT monitors that had to go onto it. This picture is also especially for all those people who mistakenly thought that my desk consisted of a huge door draped on top of several big tower computers.

Did I already mention that I love Ergotron? No? Well, I do! This is one of the four Ergotron LX monitor arms that will be holding up four of the new 24 inch screens. Amazing quality and heavy metal! If you have a need to move monitors around in an easy and efficient manner then I can fully recommend these LCD mounts. They are very easy to attach and assemble and after adjusting the screws for the weight of the monitors you mount on them they're absolute bliss. They aren't the cheapest monitor arms around but I do believe they are worth their weight in gold. Hmm... wait, it's September 2008 as I write this and the gold prices have been going through the roof. I take that back. They are not worth their weight in gold but they are CERTAINLY worth the price that Ergotron is asking! :)

The four Ergotron LX monitor arm mounts attached to the top layers of the desks, using the clamps. It took a bit of measuring and moving to get them in the right positions but the length of the arms has such an amazing reach that being off by a few inches would not have mattered at all.

The three pictures above show more of the Ergotron LX monitor arms. The first showing the first section being mounted (you just slide it over the base cylinder), the second and third photographs showing the second part of the articulated arm that contains the monitor mount head. Once these arms were mounted on the desk and tested for strength (by trying to pull them off with most of my weight!) I became an instant fan of Ergotron. Did I mention the amazing quality? Ergotron also has a lot of really cool multi-monitor/multi-screen arms but in my specific situation I felt that a single LX arm for each of the floating screens would be the better solution.

A frontal shot of the Ergotron LX arm, this time with the HP TFT quick mounting plate installed. These mounting plates make it real easy to take off the monitors, and putting them back on again too. The mounting plates came from the four HP LP2475w monitors that I got to replace the old setup I was using.

The main location where all the networking is centralized. I've replaced most of my 3Com stack of gigabit switches with a fresh HP Procurve 1800-24G (a 24 ports gigabit switch). If you need a lot of gbit ports I can recommend this switch. It does tend to get a little warm when running but that's within the specifications and it sure beats the models with the high pitched noisy fans.

Just a few of the power socket surge protectors that you can find all around the office in many places. The model I've been fond of using is the Belkin SurgeMaster Gold. Combined with clean power running through APC UPS'es this is able to handle the enormous Wattage that surges through the office. The reason for mounting them on boards like I did was mostly to get them off the floor and thereby have more flexibility in how I tie and route my power cables. It's cleaner and doesn't cause all the cables to run over the length of the floor. It also makes "dust management" easier (e.g. easier to vaccuum and clean dust that collects). Cables and dust... a horror I'm sure most of you (who don't like dust) are familiar with.

The round thing you're seeing on the floor there is a 25 meter roll of double sided Velcro (the real Velcro!). Keep that in mind because I'm sure I'm going to mention it further on. :)

The second day of installing and configuring the office started to show more shape and form of what would eventually become the final result. The papers on the desk contain the layouts and cable diagrams I made up prior to doing this overhaul. Knowing your cables and especially distances is important because you don't want to end up putting in a lot of effort only to discover you are missing a few cables of the appropriate lengths. Of course, as good as you plan it, there will ALWAYS be some cable you need and don't have and I'm no exception to that rule. On the third day I had to rush out to get several cables because the ones I had were either too short (a problem!) or too long (too much clutter to bundle up!).

A shot closer up from the one above. Since there's nothing wrong with the 3Com switches that form 'The Stack' you see I decided to keep them around. Some of the extra gigabit ports have already come in handy for some of the other computers in the house. The silver thing there is a Creative DDTS dolby digital decoder that runs to the speaker system. At the back of it there's a coaxial S/PDIF coming in and three optical (TOSlink) cables that will provide 7.1 sound from some of the workstations.

As you can see, day 2 of the overhaul provided more of an idea of what the office would end up being. And there are still plenty of boxes sitting around with cables, more cables, more cables on top of cables, and oh I probably mentioned cables.

Just in case people are going to ask, and I'm sure there would be, that strange pedestal thing you see in many of the pictures is an Air Purifier and Ionizer (with metal filters, not the disposable crap). It sucks nicotine and single celled organisms from the air and produces negative ions (because there's plenty of positively charged ones floating around with all that electrical equipment in the home office. Does it work? Hell yeah!

The two smaller desks are going to form a secondary workspace that will hold some of the systems and what you are seeing here is the cables that will go into some of those. When I configure the office I start with the cables and ensuring that there isn't a lot of clutter. Once computers start moving in it limits the space I have to crawl around and stick my arms through so my rule is; start with the cables, give them enough flexibility and space to move a system if needed (e.g. don't tie them up too tight).

The audio system by Behringer. What you are seeing here are the Behringer Eurorack Pro RX1602, the 16 channel line mixer that provides me a central place to control the volume of many of the workstatations while being able to hear all of them without having to go over the speakers. The box right below is is a Behringer DEQ1024 (Digital Stereo 31-Band 24-Bit/96 kHz Equalizer/Feedback Destroyer/Dynamics Processor) and the small box at the top is a Behringer MiniAmp AMP800 headphone amplifier with multiple inputs and outputs (since I have headphones on quite a lot).

As I mentioned before... VELCRO! Double sided Velcro, the real stuff, the nice stuff, the strong stuff. This is the greatest stuff ever invented. Well, next to sliced bread, perhaps. Cut a piece of Velcro from the roll and wrap it around whatever you are trying to cluster or tie together, or tie it against other elements. A perfect way to do some cable management. Just make sure to not overdo it and allow your cables enough room to flex around a bit, otherwise you might end up with cables that are too tight.

Things are shaping up but as you can see, there's still plenty of Velcro to apply to the streams and reams of cables that are coming down and going back and forth.

The first of the HP LP2475w monitors getting mounted on an Ergotron LX monitor arm. As you can see in the above two images, the range of motion from below to the upper limit of the arms are nothing short of amazing. Especially if you consider the weight of the HP monitors that it has to support.

As you can see here, the length of the Ergotron LX monitor arms is considerable. Doing this does not make the arm sag or bend out of shape at all. Instead it's just sturdy, stable, and stays in position.

After doing cables and more cables, the third day was the day when the monitors finally got mounted, one by one. The top four are 24 inch HP LP2475w monitors while the bottom two are Eizo monitors. There's a good reason for that which I'll explain below.

The two Eizo Flexscan S2431WH monitors on the main level of the desk. Here you can see the reason why I didn't go for more of the HP LP2475w monitors. The base I need for monitors that are angled on the desk need to fit somewhat below the second layer of the desks. Eizo, being high end and really wonderful, are made even more wonderful by the fact that you can get these screens with the EZ-UP base/foot instead of the standard one. This allows me to angle the screens more than most other pedestals would and it gives me a greater flexible range of motion. The reason the other four monitors are HP and not Eizo is because, unfortunately, the Eizo screens that offer more than one or two DVI inputs have a slightly curved bottom side, which I don't like in my multi-screen setup and the HP's offer a much wider range of connectivity (two DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, Component, Composite).

Finally, the desktop surface and multi-screen configuration is showing its final shape. And, it's exactly what I had in mind and planned out on paper (well, with Visio). The sheets covering the monitors were just for protection.

At this point, more Velcro! This time to tie the monitor cables together and to the base and arms of the Ergotron LX arms. With a little extra length it provides enough flexibility to position the screen in any position I like. If I were interested I could even rotate any of the displays by 90 degrees for portrait mode. Again, always make sure you leave enough cable length and don't tie it all up too tight.

Day four has arrived and today all the systems are moving back in, one at a time. While moving them in hooking them up to the cables I had prepared and laid out each got powered to test if everything was fine. It's easy to accidentally hook up DVI1 to DVI2 and vice versa. Things are really shaping up now and things are starting to look more familiar to me because a Home Office without all the systems just isn't much of an office. Certainly couldn't work and for the past week my only system was the HP laptop that I used to check and reply e-mail.

And yes, that is the old original Amiga 1000 there. I just won't get rid of it and since it has a lot of sentimental value since it basically got my career started I'm going to hang on to it and provide it a place in the office.

Finally, things are shaping up! Unfortunately, at this point I should have already had the new workstations I had ordered but there have been several delays at the dealer because of some parts that were difficult to get and were on backorder for some weeks and then the wrong batches of WD Velociraptors arrived (the GLFS instead of HLFS versions). So final pictures of the office in fully functional working condition couldn't be made yet. In fact, while I write this I am still having to postpone taking the real quality pictures because the systems aren't here yet. Once they are I can update the site with the proper "Home Office 6.0" pictures. The cables are ready to go so once they arrive I can get them up and running quickly and efficiently.

The two ugly cables you've seen running in all the pictures and are even clearer in the shots above were two network cables to one of the DSL modems that had been running all throughout the overhaul of the office. I had relocated the most important servers and capacity into the living room where they continued to run in a business as usual fashion. The total downtime I had for my servers was less than 3 minutes for the entire 8 day overhaul.

Last, but not least, I also decided to get rid of the old shelves I used for the books. When I got them a few years ago they looked solid enough but turned out not to be. Especially with the weight of the books things started to sag and I decided to replace it before any of the shelves would bend out of shape. It wasn't easy finding BLACK bookshelves and cases though, but eventually I managed to get a few. It's funny to think that this is just a subset of the books I had in previous versions of the office. I think I got rid of about 3 times as many during the previous overhaul.

Many years ago someone asked me if I had read all the books or actually used them. I'm sticking to what I said back then, "no, I just put them there to make me look smart". Clearly, now, many years later, I feel a need to look less smart? :)