Today was Moving Day in the office — the day of my transition from my lousy old cube to my shiny new one. At my old location, there was a sort of open public area that is “graced” with some tables, supposedly to encourage small groups to collaborate there instead of visiting each other’s little hidey-holes. Unfortunately, those tables had become the default location for any meeting that was too lazy to check to see if there was an open conference room, and the nigh-constant meeting chatter had me well on my way to going quite severely postal.
My new location is among a pod of other developers that I have to deal with pretty regularly anyway, so that’s a definite improvement. I am far from the stupid meeting tables, and up against a REAL WALL for the first time in my post-college career. On the down side, I have the sysadmins on one side of me, and someone that argues with them a lot just across the way from me, so I will probably get a lot of chatter from that… But I heard that stuff from my old desk anyway, so I can’t think that it will be that much worse. And it should drown out anything coming from the accursed meeting tables, and that’s really my major goal–not to eliminate all noises, because I can’t, but to reduce the total number of noises that my brain is going to try to ignore while I try to get work done.
So I moved all my stuff over to my new digs today, got settled in, and am really enjoying it so far. It’s given me a chance to establish a much better desk layout, with both of my computers on the floor to maximize the work surface (which I find myself using more than other folks… I like to doodle and psuedo-code on paper first).
I need to find out whom to call about mounting my whiteboard on the Real Wall; it’s too tall to hang from either of my two cube-farm walls, and I would apparently be in deep shit if I just drilled holes in the wall and mounted it myself, despite being more than capable of hanging a dumb-ass office whiteboard after all the home improvement work that Liz and I have been doing lately. And also the overhead light doesn’t work, so it’s a bit cavelike; that will certainly need fixing. However, a glace to the left allows me a tiny glimpse of the windows, so I won’t be completely oppressed by our dark grey ceilings.
Now… now it’s way past bedtime. I’ve been up late the past couple of nights researching digital cameras that my brother-in-law Andy might like for a wedding present. I think I’ve found a couple of good recommendations (feel free to share yours, please), but it’s an exhausting process to sift through the massive amounts of information and model/manufacturer permutations available, and it seems to have really kicked my ass in the needing to get more sleep department.
So, with that… adieu, aufwiedersehen, good night!
- Mood:happy / tired
- Music:Yoko Kanno/Seatbelts - “Go Go Cactus Man!”
5 responses so far ↓
Do your doodling and pseudo-coding on the white board. It’s more environmentally friendly and you can use all sort of pretty dry erase colours for different blocks of code.
And the one piece of advice that as a physicist and horrendously amateur photographer I can give is that there is ABSOLUTELY NO substitute for optical zoom. Digital zoom is an ugly hack. A big optical zoom is the number one thing to look for in a camera. For a given price range, pick the biggest optical zoom you can, then look at megapixels and other things.
Re: digital zoom / optical zoom — I completely agree. As a camera user, I reached that conclusion pretty quickly.
As far as doodling/pseudo-code… I like dead tree if it’s just me, and whiteboard if I am meeting with someone to design stuff. Also I can come back and look at dead tree notes in the future, which I can’t once the whiteboard gets cleaned off. It’s all a matter of the right tool for the job…
Hey, I’ve never seen this feature before - the comments page is showing up in your style rather than the standard LJ one! Is this a paid user benefit, or just a new feature, or what?
I think it might be a paid member feature… Basically it’s the choice of the new style system or the old style system… There are new Journal layouts that apply to more/all of one’s pages, and even a whole new look & feel for the LiveJournal site itself, complete with wacky CSS-driven menus. I like the look of the new LiveJournal site, but the CSS menus are a little awkward sometimes, especially with higher resolutions, where hitting the “Friends” link means some delicate mouse motions. But otherwise it’s cool.
brent recently got a camera from my dad and we like it alot… it seems to be 3.2Mpixels with 3.1/3.0 optical/digital zoom, Sony with rechargable battery. it’s very fun and user-friendly.