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New Office Finally Finished -- Photos

After what feels like forever the new office is finally complete. Here's what I see when I come through the door:

As you can see I went for the Aeron chair based on the majority consensus from the advice I asked for. It's second hand off eBay (I couldn't bring myself to spend the price of a new one) and cost about half the RRP. So far I love the chair. The fact the castors move so effortlessly is worth the cost of a new chair alone.

Looking to the right and back towards the door here's what I see:

Warmth is provided by the panel heater on the wall. It's not been properly tested yet (it's "summer" here now) but it seems quite good. The plasterboard on all four walls is backed by an inch of "polystyrene". The floor has 8" of Celotex under it. The roof has 4" of sheep's wool in it. I'm hoping for a cozy winter.

The two servers in the shot above are disconnected and waiting for me to decide what to do with them. They're redundant in that they are now replaced by virtual servers on the Mac minis in the shot below. They're still trusty old dogs though and it seems a shame to get rid of them. They're merely decorative for now though.

To the left and rear of the desk is a whiteboard and bookshelves / cupboard:

You might recognise the monitor as the 22" Samsung (226BW) I bought this time last year. This is now fixed to the wall on a swing arm and acts as the window on to the two Mac minis. My main monitor is now a 24" Samsung (the 245B) which gives me a more than ample 1920x1200 resolution.

The smaller monitor will spend most of it's time in the position you see it above. When I'm debugging at the server console I can swing the monitor over so it's right next to the main monitor and I get to see exactly what's going on at the server. Perfect.

The only other aspect of the office is the view from the window:

The view looks out over the "main river" our property has a border with. Although I can't see it from the desk I can hear it trickle by with the window open. So far I've seen a surprisingly diverse set of birds perching on the branches. All in all it's a nice relaxing environment to work in. A million miles from the relative chaos of the house.

All the furniture you can see I ordered from Furnitureatwork.co.uk. It arrived in good time and was easy enough to assemble. Worth considering if you're looking for an alternative to Ikea.

The combined cost of chair and furniture is just over a grand. That brings the total for the whole project to £7k, which is about 2 more than I was hoping to spend. Still, I think it's worth it and I didn't really have another other option. There was nowhere left for me in the house!

Now that the spare room is empty of all my office stuff it's down to me to turn it in to Felix's new room. Just when I think the DIY is over there's always something else to do. All this before the new baby arrives at the end of next month. Needless to say I'll continue to be busy over the summer. Stick with me. I'll keep posting and have lots of techy stuff to get on here. Thanks for persevering.

21 Comments Read - Add | Fri 16 May 2008 | Open »

Eating Your Own Dogfood

What's that saying? Something like "learning to eat your own dogfood". It means that you should practice what you preach, which is something I'm reminded of this morning.

A bug had been troubling me for a while now whereby the submit button for a custom (non-Domino) "nested" form was not displaying in IE. It would magically appear if you re-sized the page but not if you then pressed refresh. It just didn't render when the page first displayed. After trying various CSS hacks I decided to look for the root cause is the HTML.

The problem turned out to be a familiar one. What I'd done was close the Domino form inside a DIV that was opened after the Domino form was opened. Something I warned against just over a year ago. The problem being that, in the year that followed, I'd forgotten my own advice and broken the cardinal rule:

Never, never, never close the Domino form inside subsequent DIVs. Always, always, always close Domino's form at the very top of the actual Form in designer.

There you go. You've been told. Twice. Maybe you got it first time round. Hopefully I'll get it this time and save myself hours of messing about in the future.

1 Comment Read - Add | Mon 12 May 2008 | Open »

Settling in to New Office

My plan was to be in the new office by the end of April. I was a day late in the end, moving in last Thursday.

Although I've only been in here one working day so far I'm already seeing the benefits. Mainly the peace and quiet. All I can hear is the tweeting of birds and (with the window open) the trickle of the brook at the back of the building. Gone are the cries of Felix and the clatter of the washing machine. Worth every penny. All 600,000 of them!

There's still some work to do before it's finished and I'm waiting on the new furniture I've ordered before I can post a photo of the finished room. For now I'm just going to shut up about it and try and get back to posting more regularly about the techy goodnees you're used to.

4 Comments Read - Add | Tue 6 May 2008 | Open »

Office Chairs: Your Advice Needed

As the new office nears completion there's one final thing I need want to add to it -- a new chair.

The chair I'm sat on at the moment, which you can see in this shot, is five years old. As well as being tatty round the edges it has a wheel missing, which means I take a jolt backwards every now and then. It's a nice wake up call sometimes but I could live without. That and the fact I fancy treating myself to a new one.

Can any of you recommend a chair? Or is it much too personal a choice?

As far as I know I don't have any special needs of a chair and don't suffer with my back. All I really want is something that looks the part, is comfy to sit on and moves about easy enough (probably in that order of importance).

When Mike "Notestips" Golding and I worked together the company we worked for moved us to new offices where every desk had an Aeron chair that cost about a grand a piece. So expensive that they sent a man to make his way round every desk and make sure you were comfortable and sat properly. Shortly after the move they had to make a load of budget cuts and my contract wasn't renewed.

My budget doesn't quite stretch to an Aeron but could probably stretch to a couple of (maybe even three) hundred pounds if I thought I was getting a decent chair that would last.

Anybody have any advice? Wherever I look there seems to be an overwhelming choice on offer. Without being able to actually go and sit on them all I'm at a loss as to which is the best and would have to resort to choosing a chair based on looks alone.

21 Comments Read - Add | Tue 29 Apr 2008 | Open »

Garage/Office Update -- Moving In This Week, Hopefully

I bet you're all wondering how the office is coming along? Well, at least one person asked for an update, which is enough for me.

It's coming along nicely, as you can see. Friday just gone was six weeks to the day since dad took a sledge hammer to the old one and was the day both plasterer and renderer finished off. As you can see it's all but done.

There are still a load of jobs to do -- trimming on roof, paint fascia, fit guttering, lay a path, build new dog-proof side gate etc etc, but all the major and costly work is now complete. My priority now is to get in to the office.

First thing I need to do is let the office part dry out:

While the plaster is drying I need to lay the floor and fit a door. Once the wiring is complete I can finally get my desk in and relax a little. I'm hoping this will happen before the week is out.

Needless to say it's going to be another quiet week on codestore (I'll try and post something useful though). Once I'm in the new office it will start returning to normal. Promise!

7 Comments Read - Add | Mon 28 Apr 2008 | Open »