The New Place: Getting it together

This is starting to be my fourth blog post in the series “The New Place”, it seems. You can read part 1 (regarding some serious delays in getting things set up) and part 2 (about finding the actual new location of the new office) and part 3 (the early results of setting things up) at their respective links. Or just follow the Office 7.0 Beta tag.

Let’s start by the good news. The quotes for some new systems are starting to reach me and the new cables have arrived. Another poor iPhone camera shot, but that’ll have to do because I’m not about to waste too much time trying to get really nice shots of the office. I’m saving that for when everything gets together and I can do a proper job at a new “making of” with all the details.

It doesn’t look like a lot of cables because of the lousy angle I shot it from but those were two big and heavy boxes that reached me overnight from Monoprice. A total order of $544 worth of network (all cat6 of course), audio, DVI, HDMI, DP, and power cables of various types and lengths. Anyone familiar with Monoprice knows what $544 worth of cables buys you. 🙂

Once I’ve received some other stuff (like some small and a big APC and some computers, of course) I will be posting some pictures of the new way of how I decided to do cable management. It’s much like what I have been doing with Velcro but in a slightly different way. I’d have to either show you or draw it for you to understand what I mean when I say “hanging loops at multiple depths, segmented and divided, under the desk”. In short, it involves a lot of little drawer handles and a few big ones (also known as towel rods) that are mounted under the desk (to the back of it) on which different size loops of Velcro will be guiding bundles of cables under the desk, out of sight (mostly) and leaving the floor (mostly) empty enough to still be able to have the vacuum cleaning done. But more on that in a later post.

I’ve been asked a few times now whether the pictures I showed in my previous post are part of me trying to do different configurations with the desks. No, they’re not. It’s just a larger office than the previous one so there’s more desk space and, likewise, more desks, involved. Just to clear up any confusion, though, here is the original layout I planned for the space and it has come out pretty much exactly like this. The yellow block is a 27″ monitor (the iMac), the green ones are the 24″ monitors, and the blue ones are the three new Dell U3011 30″ ones.

The old Aeron and the new Embody (once it arrives sometime in the next days) will complete the seating arrangement. Since it’s impossible to use that much screen realestate and that many pixels as a single overview and the 3 x 30″ provide a very nice area by itself, I have decided to split the monitors into islands of their own where, along with the computers that’ll hook onto them, are more task-based and defined as to their use and purpose. The 3 x 30″ area will be the new “main” area.

Oh, and to answer another question that I’ve been asked a few times now. The desks are IKEA Galant desks. In particular, two corner desks, two regular 120x80cm desks, two 80x60cm extensions, two 60cm half-round extensions, one 80cm quarter-round extension, and five desktop shelves to complete it all.