My Office

For my curious friends, and bored strangers, a little tour of the room I spend much of my life in these days, the programming room at the offices of The Maine InterNetworks in Fairfield, Maine.

The coffee corner

Mmm, coffee. This little table holds all of our coffee, espresso, and tea paraphernalia; you will note the little brown bags of whole beans purchased from Jorgensen's Cafe, waiting to be ground. One of them is on top of a plastic container of mint leaves from Andy's parents' garden, and makes for some good tea.

Until recently we had a bigger table, but Nathan needed the old one. Just as well; we had to rearrange stuff anyway. That filing cabinet used to be on the opposite wall, but with the space cleared, we were able to install a gigantic dry-erase markerboard from Ray's previous workplace.

Note the Linux Penguin plush toys stapled to the walls. We used to have a whole array of them in a sort of Rene Magritte riff that Cindy pulled off while in a wacky mood. Sadly, most of them have been sold since then. Perhaps we'll reconstruct the original piece someday; there's still several dozen left of the 100 penguins Andy and John bought in 1998.

Note also the penguin inside the candy machine. Sometimes, when he's feeling flush, John will fill the machine with M&M's or Skittles, and then use the change thus collected to pay for highways tolls during his frequent trips to Boston.

My corner

Here's where I wear out my eyeballs all day long (and often through much of the night, as well). Directly over my monitor (a very nice 17-inch Viewsonic) a print of Picasso's "The Old Guitarist" is tacked to the wall. While I like the piece, I don't take any particularly great inspiration from it, despite what its central positioning might imply. I just happened to have both it and a blank space on the wall to fill at the same time. Perhaps someday I'll try to find a more uplifting image to hover behind my screen.

Dangling from two of the poster's tacks are my convention badge from MacWorld SF 2000, which I attended as a panel speaker due to my Mac open source software site, and one of the two giant "Clergy" badges I got from the Universal Life Church, for which I am an ordained minister (but who isn't?).

On the left, we see most of Andy's "The Whole Internet" poster, which he had mounted on a sturdy foam backing (and upon which I have placed the Darth Maul doll I got at the office's Christmas Yankee Swap in 1999), and on the right is my autographed "The Wizard of Speed and Time" movie poster.

The colorful spot on the bottom of my computer case is a big sticker of Tirade the Broccoli, drawn by Andy Looney. Andy's game company, Looney Labs, packages one of these with many of their products (many of which I am a happy owner). The bottle next to it used to hold some XTZ-branded root beer, and the yellow book beside that is the Yellow Book, aka the New Hacker's Dictionary.

The computer, incidentally, is a "Trademark" branded box with a severally upgraded and recompiled Red Hat Linux 5.2 distribution.