New Office Setup

For the last two weeks, I’ve been depriving myself of good health and sleep in the interests of getting a couple of volunteer websites off the ground, writing, and cleaning and throwing away crap in preparation for having a temporary roomie at the end of the month. My office is becoming a guest bedroom, and my new desk and reading chair are moving into the bedroom.

Looking at this in the long-term, it’s great, because it means I can push for a two-bedroom apartment when Greg and I inevitably move. Being on different sleep schedules is going to complicate things a bit, since he’ll be dead to the world when I’d normally sync my phone: about 07:00. It’s an inconvenience I think I’m willing to put up with, since he isn’t bothered by it.

Then again, maybe he’s just waiting on me to get frustrated and flee back into a full office.
I’ve managed to drag my feet for three months on getting the desk and filing cabinet ready to sell, in part due to wanting to avoid the creep-factor of Craigslist.

The roomie gets here on the 27th, so I’m going to need to get on that. Like, tomorrow.

Moving my office into the bedroom meant that doing a wired connection from my desktop became problematic. We’re already having enough animal behavior problems in our house without just handing over puddles of cables to the cats. So I’ve gone wireless: a plain-Jane PCI 802.11n card. Well, not too plain Jane. The damn thing has an external antenna. But no wires. Signal strength is 4 out of 5 in Windows 7, and my weird networking problems are gone, lending credence to the idea that it was a driver issue. My available internet bandwidth is far more capped by RoadRunner cable speeds than anything on the wi-fi level, so my surfing and NetFlixing experience is the same as always.

The new desk is nicely small–just 47 inches wide, which is room for my two monitors and side speakers, with things like the external drive and subwoofer behind the monitors. Clean, and no room for clutter.

I ordered a new CPU, motherboard, and case yesterday, and if it’s half as nice as I expect it will be, I may have to become one of those people who put their computer stats in their email and forum signatures. Nothing top of the line, but it’s a Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz. I’m currently running an Athlon 64 3800. Good for the time, but… you know. Not sufficient anymore for the way I game and compute. Combined with a smaller case and a MicroATX mobo, everything getting a little smaller and a little faster. It could all be here as soon as tomorrow and almost definitely by Monday, so I’m quite excited.