The home office

Three reasons for this post:

1. Finally got pictures hung on the wall behind the computers
   
2. The room is about as picked up and clean as it ever gets
   
3. Might soon be my only office.
   

After a very long time sitting in the closet I finally just hung up the pictures for this wall. Mostly from my travels in 2007.

• Top left is a piece of aboriginal art from Australia purchased on my first trip to Sydney
  
• Top middle is a shot of the Eiffel Tower purchased in a little shop in Monte Martre on my second trip to Paris.
  
• Top right is a triptych of iconic Sydney sights purchased at a street market on my second trip to Sydney
  
• Bottom left is a panorama of the Seattle skyline purchased at a shop in Pike's Market on our Vancouver/Victoria/Seattle vacation trip.
  
• Bottom middle is a photo of the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall of China. Not the section I visited, that was Mutianyu. Purchased from the photographer at a flea market in Beijing.
  
• Bottom right is a Paris skyline with one of the Notre Dame gargoyles in the foreground. Purchased at the same time as the other Paris picture.
  

The room is in decent shape for a change. I tend to pile stuff on the footstool, a bad habit I'm trying to break. My shiny big 26-inch wide screen monitor is paired with the older 19-inch wide screen in a dual-monitor setup. That's where I spend 8 to 10 hours a day. I've taken to using RDP to the laptop so I don't have to change between the two keyboards. The solo monitor to the left is for our home computer, Alice's laptop, which happened to be gone when I shot this.

And finally, the office situation. My employer is going to compress more people into cubicles to save on office rent. Our Houston space has shrunk from occupying our own campus of four buildings to selling the campus and compressing into 3 then 2 and soon to be 1 building. For the moment there are still more employees than can fit even in cubicles. So the solution is to convert some people to office-at-home with a few cubes fitted for "hoteling" (i.e., empty with a phone and network port). Since I work about 9 days out of 10 at home anyway, I've volunteered. The main upshot for me is I'd lose my office phone. I tap into that via some magic software that causes my office extension to ring my work Blackberry and, more importantly, lets me make calls that originate at the office. We'll see how this proceeds.