Building a home office

As part of starting my new position, I’m transitioning from a job where I’m going to work at an office to a work-from-home position. This has a number of personal benefits for me, but I also knew that I was going to need an office to work out of. Working from my dining room table, or from the sofa, was going to be problematic for me for the following reasons:

1. I need a transition between work and home – I knew that if I worked from inside my house, I was not going to be able to easily do the mental switch from “I’m at work” to “I’m at home”. “Home” and “Work” was inevitably going to blur into some mishmash that I mentally dubbed “Hork”. That did not sound pleasant, either for me or for my family.
2. I need quiet – Like a number of homes, mine is occasionally very noisy. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, that’s just the way it is. Very likely, there were going to be numerous occasions when I needed quiet when working and what was happening in my home was not quiet at all.
3. I need room for work-related stuff – Where I worked was also going to be where I was going to use and store my work-related gear. For my own peace of mind, I didn’t want to store my work-related equipment near where my pets and younger members of the family would have access to them.
4. I need to set up work-related equipment on a permanent basis – For various reasons, I like working on a desktop workstation, with attached displays, keyboard and mouse. I also like not having to constantly disassemble and re-assemble my desktop and its attached peripherals, which means I need a place where I can set them up and trust that they’ll be able to stay there on a long-term basis.

With all of those needs in mind, I decided to go the route of having a purpose-built office constructed for my work needs. For more details, see below the jump.

Moving on

At the beginning of November, I made the following announcement via Twitter:

After six rewarding years at @HHMIJanelia, I'm moving on in January 2017 to join the Mac CoE @SAP team.

— Rich Trouton (@rtrouton) November 1, 2016

Time has marched on and today is my last day at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. I wanted to take the opportunity to express my gratitude to the good folks who work there and to my management in particular.

Since 2011, I’ve spoken at a number of Mac IT conferences on a variety of topics. The ability to do so wouldn’t have been possible without the generous support that I received from HHMI. I’ve also had complete freedom when it comes to the writing I’ve done on this blog and elsewhere, which has been a huge boon to me both professionally and personally.

I look forward to continuing to both speak and write as part of my move to SAP, where I’m joining a great team doing amazing things. However, I’ll never forget that it was HHMI’s unstinting support that made it possible to begin with. Thank you.

Yahoo account hacked

My Yahoo email account (which had what I considered a fairly strong password, with having both letters and numbers and being longer than eight characters) got hacked today by a spammer, who then scanned my contacts and started furiously sending links to NSFW merchandise and dodgy pharmaceutical sites. The account now has a new password and the contacts list has been completely cleared out. Fortunately, I avoided spamming our ALL-WORK email lists by the grace of God and LISTSERV-required confirmation before sending (said confirmation was not granted.) The embarassment factor was high, our security officer was calling, and I’ve now gotten the chance to re-connect with some old aquaintences whom I haven’t talked with in a while.

His and Hers Pumpkins

La and I carved our pumpkins last night.

Moved to a new home.

I’ve been futzing on and off with my home-based WordPress blog for a while now, as I started having a number of speed issues with PHP. Since WordPress offers free space, I decided to make the move over to their digs. My new address (if you’re still using the old http://www.taomechworks.net/blog address) is https://derflounder.wordpress.com

My good deed of the day – re-registering the family on the National Do Not Call list.

With the news that it was time to re-up my phone numbers on the National Do Not Call list today, I decided to go ahead and re-register my immediate family as well:

Everyone’s home and mobile phone should now be taken care of, God willing.

Only time I’ve ever seen one of these….

Yup, it’s a Pringles vending machine. I’ve never seen another one, anywhere else in my travels throughout the United States and Europe.