So I was cleaning my office yesterday… and by cleaning I mean I took out three garbage cans of stuff and I still have more to go. In the process of cleaning I ran across some photos from Kingman and entire stack of photos from my time at NAU. One of those photos was of my desk at NAU and since I often use my desk for various picture testing moments I thought it would be neat to examine the evolution of my home workspace since that is where I tend to spend alot of time.
So first off is the NAU desk circa June 1999.
Fun things to notice in this photo… flat bed scanner, Zip drive in the tower, and of course the 19 inch monitor of doom. This evolved pretty quickly, as I remember it the scanner was put on top next to the printer sometime that summer and shortly after the new year I purchased my first laptop. The first laptop was never photographed neither was the desk in the apartment I had my senior year at NAU.
I had pretty much maintained this type of setup for the previous four years… monitors and CPU’s changed but other then that everything else stayed the same.
So next up is the office my house in Kingman, this photo is circa spring 2004.
This photo is intersting… it’s from right before I completely changed my workspace at home. You will of course notice that there is a video game up so you can probally guess what i was primarily doing at this point. What you don’t see are the three computers on the floor (1 windows box and 2 linux boxes running whatever I was running at the time) attached to the KVM. There is a laptop around at this point but it’s off to the left if it’s anywhere.
Shortly after this picture was taken I ended up with a large corner desk that I broke out the linux boxes to one side and the windows box to the middle then put various network devices and what not towards the other end. That worked out pretty well but I never really utilized the space liked I had hoped I would. That would feed into design decisons later. Also the corner desk was ultimatley left with the house when I moved.
Next is the most compact and probally efficent workspace I’ve ever had and this circa late July through October 2005.
Ah Mesa, so incase you haven’t been reading the blog for 10 years or your last name doesn’t start with the letter “K” this was when I was living with Curtis and Kristina. For the first time things really start to come together in terms of workspace and making things work together. And once again you will notice that I have a game up on both screens. And this type of setup would continue to serve me well for for the next couple of years. Other things to notice; no printer the iPaq is up and out of the way and the iPod is down low where I can get to it very easily. What I can’t figure out in this picture is why does the laptop of a PCMCIA wireless card when I know that the laptop had a built in wireless card? I’m sure there’s a good reason…
So flash forward six months I am no long restrained to one desk and have version one of the home office.
Not much change in terms of technology. The laptop would go on the left side of the table and there is another table directly behind me that keeps various other computers and networking gear. Which it turns out is really nice when you need to work on a computer that is not yours.
From this point the work space remains pretty stable… in the summer of 2007 the first MAC makes an appearnce.
This marks the transition to the laptop as the primary computer. Slowly over the course of the next year or so I transitioned off of the desktop and onto the MAC for most all of my day to day computing that wasn’t gaming. The montior on the left was also shared between the MAC and the PC for times when I needed a dual screen it stayed primarily attached to the PC. This also marks the first time that workspace decsions are being made for ergonomic reasons versus gaming reasons. Of course I say that and this is the first picture without a ergonomic keyboard or game on the screen…..
Which brings us to today….
The PC is the same as the last picture, the MAC and iPad are new. Other changes, the MAC now has a dedicated secondary screen that is physically and logically located above the primary screen. The iPad is off to the side for illustration purposes I really don’t have a good place for it yet. Right now the main purpose of the ipad is couch surfing and email.
This setup is really nice when I get my vmware on and decide I want a couple of machines going when I’m working on a project and insist on seeing the desktop of more then one VM.
So that’s the evolution of my workspace in the last 12 years but you know some people just never move past a half built toliet.
