Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Tal G in Jerusalem
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Thursday, December 26, 2002

11:27 - Room to stretch out

(top)

Well, we're now more or less fully moved over to our new building a block down the street. (Actually we were moved on Monday, but... ye gods, the boxes to unpack, the labs to rebuild, the rough edges to sand down.) We're no longer right across the intersection from Infinite Loop. We're now far enough away that to see it, you have to stand on the roof of the parking structure (we have a parking structure now! Woo-hoo!) and gaze off over the tile roofs of the one-story buildings that line Bandley Drive, the little green-swathed industrial access road that until a couple of years ago was known as "the Apple Graveyard"-- because all the buildings along it used to be Apple buildings, sporting striped Apple logos on the "tombstones" out front, only to be replaced with dot-coms as Apple retreated into itself in the early-to-mid-90s. But lately, the shiny single-colored Apple logos (each building a different color) have been staging a comeback, most recently with Mariani One (right across Mariani from our old location) being reoccupied in triumph by its old fruity tenant.

They somehow managed to miss all of our explicit directives that our lab space was a lab, not a machine room; so all the 19-inch racks that we've had them install ended up bolted to the edge of the platforms nearest the wall that you can see in this picture. It is left as an exercise to the reader to imagine how much walk-behind space this would have left us, if all of our machines were flush-mounted (as they tend to be. Machine rooms tend to have center-mounted devices). All the racks you see here have been uprooted and unbolted so they can be reattached further away from the walls. We're all sure glad we got a networking-lab specialist to do this part of the move, instead of leaving it to the regular contractor.

Still, that's one helluva nice lab, innit?

But anyway, if there's one major complaint I have about the new place, it's the cubicles. Look at 'em. I mean, geez.

Okay, maybe it's not obvious what the problem is-- but that's probably because there are lots of them. See, first of all, there's this stupid corner piece with its cutout section and adjustable keyboard tray with eight axes of motion and fourteen little levers and two-way slide-out mouse boards. If I lean on this thing, it sinks under the weight of my elbows. I can't move the keyboard out of the way and eat lunch in front of my computer as I'm accustomed. And because my size is such that my hands are most comfortable with a keyboard sitting flat right on the desk, I have to raise the keyboard tray to desk level-- which means the mouse tray that slides out to either side collides with the side of the cutout part of the desk (or slides right under it, so I can't fit my hand in between it and the desk, much less a mouse). Plus its surface completely confounds my optical mouse. So I tried putting the mouse on the white desk part, but if I try to move the mouse to the upper left side of the screen, it disappears with a squeak (and a "Fly, you fools!") into the crevasse between keyboard tray and desk cutout. Clunk.

So I moved my primary machine-- my iMac-- over to the straight desk. Trouble with that is, the straight desk is about two feet deep, as opposed to the three feet that our old desks had. So there's barely enough room even for the iMac and its keyboard, and much less for a 17-inch CRT; I tried putting the PC monitor on the straight desk and a keyboard in front of it, and the keyboard hung over the edge by about an inch. Not good. We'll either need to get deeper desks for most of the engineers (all of whom have multiple computers), or buy us all LCDs. Heh. (Many people, by the way, have already unbolted their keyboard trays and are living in the little cutout nooks.)

But this should work out okay; I think the solution I have here, with the iMac (which doesn't take up much space) on the straight desk and the PC in the corner (where the monitor can take advantage of all the corner space that otherwise would have been wasted), is a viable one. Plus there's like a little sticking-out bit of the corner desk that I can use for a Diet Coke holder. In fact, I had worked all the bitching out of my system, but these days I find that it just doesn't feel right if I don't commit such things to blog for permanence and catharsis. Plus it's a shame to have my digicam here and not use it for every little excuse that comes along.

iPhoto really needs to have a way to control the JPEG compression on the Export function. I mean, it really really needs it.