It’s day two in the new office. You have seen the layout in a previous post. What you may not realize it has windows from desk level to the ceiling on three sides; that’s a lot of window and a lot of heat. We put in new electricity line to handle all the equipment, and put in new baseboard heating on a separate zone. The view out the window is nothing short of stupendous.
The room sits on the “premier etage” – the first floor above the ground level. In front of me is a small lake covered with lily pads. Surrounding the lake are several 100+ year old trees. There is a graceful oak tree with branches that span out over 100 feet. And there is a soaring maple tree with a girth the size of a small cypress tree. All around is a riot of color. Leaves are turning yellow and red, and orange, mixed with a sea of green. A small drizzle is rippling the lake. Occasional ducks land on the surface en route to warmer climates as the seasons change. We hear the gaggle of geese.
The tranquil moment is marred only by the steady hum of my computer fans. Not sure whether it is my Dell Server or whether it is my switch that has the louder fan. The shelves in the back of the office are up. We now have two large white cabinets to store the messy wires that come from running a computer business (old USB cables, network cables, power cables, serial cables, parallel cables, mouse cables, and an assortment of devices whose purpose have drifted out of memory).
Moves are interesting. In packing up we left a wide pile of devices in the waste bins. Who needs a “floppy drive”? Anyone continue to use a ZIP Drive … wore 100 MB of storage? I had a serial to mouse adapter. Remember when serial ports were all the rage. And now there is the universal serial bus (USB). Bluetooth was supposed to replace that. But my latest acquisition, a Plantronics wireless headset still uses a USB to power the device. I finally decided to retire permanently my Dell Pentium III server. With a RAID V SSCI drives of 50GB (once immense) , the whole system only can store 150 GB, not even enough to backup my current server. And weighing in at 80 pounds, that was one solid hunk of metal. It certainly has freed up space on my computer rack.