My business partner Josh and I have started a new venture, Busted Loop. As part of that venture, we are making stuff and blogging about it. Today was my turn and I blogged about a tool I created, The RackspaceCloud Command Line Tool.
There will be more stuff in the coming weeks. I hope some of you will follow along… It won’t all be as geeky as this post… well.. pretty geeky, but not quite this geeky.
I work from home 4 out of 5 days. For the last few years I have spent the majority of my working hours on the couch in front of the TV. About 2 months ago I decided I was going to stand up to do my work. Here is how I was set up when I started standing:
And here is how I ended up:
To help with scale… the first picture is my old 15″ Mac Book Pro and a 19″ CRT. The second picture is my new 17″ Mac Book Pro and a 24″ LCD.
The entire setup is sitting on a standard cheapo corner desk from Staples.
The laptop is on a Plexiglas shelf. The LCD is mounted on the copper stand, not the wall. The keyboard and mouse stand is not attached to the laptop/monitor stand.
The laptop is very accessible so it’s quick and easy for me to yank it off the stand and go to the office or back to the couch for a movie.
The whiteboard I affixed to the tilted area in front of the keyboard has come in extremely handy a number of times.
I had planned on doing a detailed write up on how I built this thing…. but, it’s been a month now and the mojo is gone. I’ll just bust out some “highlights”… I’m happy to answer any questions you have.
I built the structure entirely out of copper pipe and rivets and I made the shelves from Plexiglas. It took me about 30ish hours to complete… Much of that time was spent experimenting and wasting materials.
The monitor is about 2-3 inches higher than my initial design (the top of the laptop and LCD should be flush) because I ordered the wrong mount and was too impatient to wait for a new one… so I “fabricated” an “adapter” out of some random junk… and two Isaac Asimov novels… really. I’ll get around to fixing that.
You may not have noticed the mood lighting… I added a small lamp behind the whiteboard which gives me decent light at night without having the overheads on.
Here’s a shot from during construction:
I stuck with stock plumbing parts from Home Depot… Which means I basically have elbows, t-joints and straight bits to work with… this led to lots of joints and some interesting angles for stability.
The End.
I’m moving all my stuff from my godaddy dedicated server to a small group of slicehost slices. This is going to save me about 50% on my hosting bill, but still allow me some scalability when I need it. I really like what I’ve seen of slicehost so far… you can pick your flavor of linux, create new slices that look just like the ones you’ve already set up, or start completely fresh. You get full root access and it’s hard to beat the $20/month starting price. I’m going to start out with 3 slices.. Apache, Tomcat and DB. I’ve had this move on the back burner since mid February and I finally took the plunge over the last few days and finished it up. I’ve moved all my sites and apps and I think I’ve made all the old URLs line up with the new URLs… so it should be “seamless”.
I am also switching off roller, and on to wordpress for this blog… wordpress is much more feature rich than roller. Hopefully it will inspire me to blog more than once a quarter.
In other news… you should check out the clark island boat works blog, my friend Mac does the boat and blog building and it’s pretty interesting to see what goes into one of these boats…. even if you don’t really care about boats. At least give him a click or two.. he watches the damn traffic stats like some kind of junkie.