Setup Evolution

Everyone starts somewhere, and this is where I started. Freshman year of college I was granted this lovely (sarcasm) Dell Latitude D610 as part of my scholarship. Wiped it, installed Ubuntu, bought a $70 office kit from Walmart, and I was good to go… mostly. I would constantly overheat the dainty little machine whilst compiling and brute forcing passwords.

Part way through college it became obvious that the Dell laptop was not going to cut it. The monitor was too small, compiling code took way too long, and the battery would constantly die. This was the first machine I built myself, and as you can see the cable management was not so good. Granted, that’s in large part to the horrible power supply. Modular power supplies? Ha!

Also featured here is my Blue Snowflake mic (still have it), and the last Razer product I ever bought. That Kraken headset was horrible and their customer support was even worse.

Graduate, get a divorce, get a Mac, and let your setup reflect your life: a complete mess. There’s a lot going on here. I began working professionally as a web developer (hence the switch to Mac) and started paying attention to things like ergonomics. See the Ergotron arm? See how it frees up my desk space for more junk?

In 2010 I ditched my little apartment on Main Street and got a real 4-bedroom house. Setup pretty much stayed the same, but I did have more room for activities.

After moving in June, I soon started re-vamping the home office. Business was doing well, so I invested in things like a real desk. This picture was taken during the setup process. It’s around this time that I also discovered velcro ties.

2012 saw us renting office space in downtown. Acquired a few more monitors, a TV (for testing Roku apps), and discovered the magic of 3M. The desk at home worked so well that we bought 3 more.

In 2014 our whole company went remote, ditched the downtown scene, and moved back home. By this time, the oldest munchkin was in school, and I decided to take over one of the four bedrooms. Painted the walls a nice zen mossy color, and purchased a couple wood desks (these desks suck and scratch really easily).

And here we are today. I’ve included a short video tour that goes over the basics. I have a hideous backlog of reviews to do.

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time dialing everything in. The layout is a series of geometric and feng shui compromises. Having an old house can be limiting. Once we have new windows and redo the electric (or buy a new house) it may be possible to move some things.

A look at the future: my son surfing the web.