Making An Office Away From the Office

I don't always have the opportunity write from home, and I do have my favorite places to write from in those cases. I've had to settle for spotty internet from places like Starbucks and Panera, which I know you've read about from me both here and on my Facebook page.

My number one favorite out-of-the-office office is in a data center in downtown Los Angeles. Whether or not I can work there depends on whether or not I can find street parking, which isn't always a given. This is downtown Los Angeles, after all!

While I'm here, I put on a set of comfortable headphones and play music as I write, as it helps to put me in the right frame of mind to write. I try to use music that's appropriate to whatever it is that I'm writing.

For this blog post, it's Cat Stevens.

In this office, which is about 400 square feet in size, I've got a gigabit wired connection and a quiet room all to myself on a rarely visited floor. I even have a locking cabinet in here with me (I have the only key) I can use to store the things that are good to have with me, but that I don't want to have to haul all over the damned place. It makes life so much easier, as I haul enough heavy crap around with me all the time without having to add to the burden.

I've still got to get the proper wiring to connect my Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (my workhorse computer) to the currently unused monitor that sits atop the upper level of the glass and metal desk I use here. Of course, that wiring would hit the cabinet when I wasn't around. It would stand too much of a chance of being appropriated by someone else.

As this office is also periodically (though very rarely) used by data center employees for working on computers and servers, it's cluttered and full of boxes and equipment, both working and dead. It's sort of a peripheral computer graveyard, if you're familiar with the concept. I've seen the main graveyard, and it's much more cluttered than this small room.

I've done my best to clear the area I want to work in, although periodically I'll walk in and discover that some asshole has been in here to work and strewn their discarded crap across the workspace I use. Then I remember and practice at least a few of the bad words my father so thoughtfully taught me and proceed to tidy up the electronic and cardboard carnage.

I'm considering putting up some simple artwork on the walls to quietly suggest to those people that they aren't the only ones using this space for something. I clean up after myself well enough that they might not realize that someone else makes use of the space, but you'd think they'd have noticed that the open desk surfaces aren't covered in greasy black dust anymore.

That might be expecting too much of them, I suppose. If you have any suggestions for simple artwork that can be printed up, please let me know. I'm open to new ideas.

Technology...

I usually use my trusty old Surface Pro 3 for my writing, but last night, it decided to get stuck in a boot loop that wouldn't complete. Now I'm facing a complete reformat on the thing and doing a fresh reinstall of the operating system.

For now, I'm using the relatively ancient Dell laptop I refer to "As The Slowest Laptop In The Multiverse" to get anything done, and believe me when I tell you that it's a royal pain in the ass to use. It's so old that there are keys that just plain don't work anymore, and even though I have it stripped down to barely nothing to use RAM, it still plods along like a kiddies' pony-ride pony at the Fair.

I've decided that the next time I have an unexpected financial windfall, I'm going to get a new Surface Pro, whatever that model ends up being. My current one is a few years old, and I know the newer ones are better. It's just making sure I have the money to get the model I want, and not settling for something less. That means it's got to have the i7 processor, at the very least.

As I sit here, I realize that my cell phone (an iPhone 7) is leaps and bounds faster than my first computer, which was a homemade desktop we dubbed Calvin Clone that weighed a proverbial f***-ton (and for some reason, had lumpy/pokey things on the bottom that made it painful to pick up and move) and that moved at the speed of slow. It had two 5.25" floppy drives and I eventually installed a 3.5" drive on it when those became available.

When you played Othello at the "beginner" setting (I played it a lot) it took a minute or two to make its move. If you tried playing it at the "master" setting, it could actually take five to seven days for it to make its move.

I kid you not.

You could turn the thing on and then walk away while it booted and start a pot of water on the stove for tea. If you pushed the "turbo" button, it would move just a hair faster. Not that that meant much. The thing only had 640k of RAM in it. When I finally added more RAM (which had to be paired, mind you), I paid $120 for each stick of 1MB of RAM.

The Bard's Tale ran fairly well on it, as well as Might and Magic (do you remember those original games?), and I also liked text-based games like Planetfall (FLOYD HERE NOW!) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Now I couldn't pay someone to use the thing as a doorstop. To say it would be obsolete today is the greatest of understatements.

And now I think of all the young people who have grown up never knowing a time when there was no internet. Young people who are old enough to drink alcohol. They really don't realize how good they have it now. They've grown up spoiled by the ease with which they can access information on reasonably fast internet devices.

What will the future hold for us in twenty years' time? What new things wait for us on that technological horizon?

I'm looking forward to it.