Office Decor

January 31st, 2004 · Comments

Below is my attempt at a handheld panoramic shot of my office area at work. Pretty shaky, but it conveys the point.

The main thing I did today was that I began hanging frequently used CD’s up on the wall. It got to be a pain trying to find them in my CD binders, CD stacks, and underneath all the university paperwork I have to deal with regularly. The CD’s are everything from Solaris 9 to Gentoo Linux to the NT Password Reset disk.

The second cool thing I did today was began collecting mice of various UNIX systems, and hanging them up on the wall. From left to right, you see the very unusual mouse of a DECstation 5000, Apple G3 iMac, Perfit Contour Mouse, and you can see the tail of an SGI granite mouse as well. Kinda geeky, yah.

As far as the systems you see in the office, from left to right: SGI Indigo^2 (not on), SGI Indigo (not on, it’s my laptop stand!), Apple PowerBook (main workstation), SGI Indigo^2 (future webcam box), and then a dual-Opteron Linux workstation, and a Sun Ultra 10. Pretty complete, eh?

The posters up on top are an OpenSSH poster, some diagrams for work, a frog poster, and a PowerBook poster.

Bet you couldn’t tell I was a UNIX admin, eh?

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Thomas Stromberg 01/31/2004 11:04 AM 1 point
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My keyboard was looking a bit grimy too. The Kinesis I have at work was actually a gift from my last company, who figured they couldn't give it to anyone else. :) I ended up spraying it heavily with some fantastik all purpose cleaner, and rubbing on each key and surrounding areas with some industrial strength paper towels.

As far as learning so much information.. I can't say I have much trick to it. I've determined that I really only have two learning methods: experience (long-term), and long brute force high-speeed flash-card type systems (short-term). The only book-learning I seem to be decent at is for history type classes, where for me it's just cool cause it's all a neat story book that actually happened.

I don't actually learn very much if I'm just "told something", which frustrates a lot of people. I have to go and try it, and often fail in order to figure it out.

Knowing my long-term learning method is experience (mixed with the positive reinforcement of people being surprised at me that I accomplished it, and the negative reinforcement of totally messing up), in order to learn the computer things I have, I've had to set challenges and goals.

For instance: Learn Solaris by using it as my primary workstation OS at home for 3 months. Move my mail server to an AIX machine. Put all my photos up on the internet in a time-based format. Learn the innards of Windows 2000 (when it first came out) by trying to make a working installation operate with under 100MB of disk space.

The challenges I've put myself have seemed weird to others, but they've always served to teach myself how to do things. I especially enjoy it because it makes me try things that people wouldn't teach otherwise, cause it's too strange :)

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Elliot Robinson 01/31/2004 06:17 AM 1 point
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For all the books and hardware you have in there, everything looks pretty nice and neat. If I were anal, I'd be snobby about dusting your bookcase, but it isn't that important.

My room goes from looking immaculate one day to a total disaster the next.

As for one of my workspaces in the supermarket, I haven't taken any pictures. One of the customer service desk, the other is at the cash register and another is down the aisles. It's probably something better just kept in memory. The keyboard for the Western Union has thick gobs of dust in it that don't go away no matter how much I try to clean it.

Heck, the crevices of many things there has either crumbs, dust, dirt or other nasty things. We do a decent job cleaning, but some things (like the keyboard) just need to be replaced. I was tempted to find a cheap replacement on ebay, but decided not to. It still works and its current state has little effect on my productivity, so why should I spend my money on it.

What kind of approaches have you taken to learning such large amounts of information?

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