Happy with my office

Well, it's the end of the week at my new job. Still ferrying things in from home, with which to decorate my office...

But: I luuuuv my office! Academia is probably one of the few jobs left where you can get your own office without being a manager or supervisor…

My office is on an internal corridor, halfway between the reception desk and the photocopier/printer – and directly next door to the breakroom/kitchen. The “front door” of the corridor is by the reception desk, and the “back door” is by the photocopier. Through the back door and directly to the left is the men’s room (handy!), and to the right of that is the stairwell, where – up two flights – is the breakroom of my old part-time job, with the ‘fridge with the ICE MAKER!!!

My office has a single large window (with blinds) that opens on to the corridor. Folks on the other side of the corridor have a corresponding window that opens to the corridor, plus a correspond -ing window that goes to the outside, providing daylight. Thus, I get second-hand natural light -- from outside, through someone’s office, across the hall, and into my room.

Between the hallway lighting and the second-hand natural light, I don’t bother putting on the fluorescents in my office. However, I usually have a small desk lamp on, just for the warm ambience.

In addition: my extension number is “x33533” – what a **great** sequence!!! (symmetrical; all primes; nice and repetitive!).

The only downside is that the standard allocation for personal server space is only fifty megs!!!! In this day and age, that's just wacky low...

But, I mentioned this to the dept chair, who independently declared that to beridiculously low – so they’re bumping me up to around 600-700MB. For my purposes, that's pretty reasonable. Although: the university bills the department five bucks per 20MB. So, my 600 additional MB will cost the department $150!!! I just saw an ad in the paper where you can get half a **terrabyte** (500 GIGS!!!) on an external hard drive for that price. That's a factor of a a thousand, for the same price (or, technically, "1,024 times").

Oh! And, as you can see in my diagram (**not** to scale!), I've rigged up dual monitors: the flatscreen on top of the PC box, and a huuuuge CRT monitor that I brought in from home to the left. (Easy to do: the flatscreen runs off the DVI video card, and the CRT monitor runs off the built-in VGA port.)


Anyhow, good stuff. :)


--GG