When Geeks do Interior Design
So what's the first thing that happens when someone leaves a company? The vultures move in, of course! Since my officemate had seniority over me they wound up with a lot more nice office furniture than I did. For the longest time my "desk" was an end-table. Not so posh. I know I didn't go to any great lengths to rectify things, but if I had to describe my office as recently as two weeks ago, "hovel" would about cover it.
There's another reason for re-organizing: It gives a sense of closure to things. No, let me put that more strongly: It let me expunge a lot of bad vibes and bad memories from my office so I wouldn't start frowning and get high blood pressure every time I looked up from my desk and saw my ex-officemate's old work area.
But... I'm a geek. I know it. Denial is useless. I'm also physically not what I wish I was, so the idea of shoving furniture around for an entire day, thinking, "That doesn't quite look right..." just didn't appeal.
So I took the geek's way out. With tape measure in hand, I measured every piece of furniture in the room, measured the room, measured the windows and doors, measured everything I could get my hands on. And then I stuck it all into Rhino3D.
I told you I was a geek.
It's nice. I went through about twenty layouts before I hit on the one I wanted. I was able to model the way sunlight would come in the windows, I was able to model how the lights in the ceiling lit each part of the room. Different wall switches do different things, so I stuck different lights on different layers so I could turn them on and off during rendering.
With geeky 3D model in hand, I proceeded to move all the furniture around. Four hours later, I started putting books back on shelves and really moving in. By the end of the day every surface was scrubbed, the windows were open to blow out most of the dust, and things looked good.
I made two slight changes from the way things were modeled. One of my co-workers urged me to take a second bookcase, and one of the desks wasn't the dimensions I thought it was, so it didn't fit where I thought it should. But otherwise everything was set up to the inch.
One thing I wasn't able to do with the model, and doubt I could do if I tried, was to really see how open things are now. My old officemate liked to have tall bookcases in the middle of the room, so the room felt very closed-in and confining. (I could park three cars in my office... It is NOT closed-in.) With the new arrangement, the office feels twice as big as it used to. It's nice.
But the real coup de gras was when the sunlight started to stream in the window toward late afternoon. It fell almost exactly where I thought it would. Almost. The sun splotches were long by a few inches. Luckily the sun fell on the back of a piece of furniture with a nice flat face. So out came the Starrett combination square with protractor head so I could measure the angle. It was 28 degrees. I'd guessed at 30. A quick change to the model and the light splotches came out perfectly.
Now if only geekiness translated into the ability to coordinate colors better than I do, I might have a new career lined up... NAAAAAH!
-- Pencil
There's another reason for re-organizing: It gives a sense of closure to things. No, let me put that more strongly: It let me expunge a lot of bad vibes and bad memories from my office so I wouldn't start frowning and get high blood pressure every time I looked up from my desk and saw my ex-officemate's old work area.
But... I'm a geek. I know it. Denial is useless. I'm also physically not what I wish I was, so the idea of shoving furniture around for an entire day, thinking, "That doesn't quite look right..." just didn't appeal.
So I took the geek's way out. With tape measure in hand, I measured every piece of furniture in the room, measured the room, measured the windows and doors, measured everything I could get my hands on. And then I stuck it all into Rhino3D.
I told you I was a geek.
It's nice. I went through about twenty layouts before I hit on the one I wanted. I was able to model the way sunlight would come in the windows, I was able to model how the lights in the ceiling lit each part of the room. Different wall switches do different things, so I stuck different lights on different layers so I could turn them on and off during rendering.
With geeky 3D model in hand, I proceeded to move all the furniture around. Four hours later, I started putting books back on shelves and really moving in. By the end of the day every surface was scrubbed, the windows were open to blow out most of the dust, and things looked good.
I made two slight changes from the way things were modeled. One of my co-workers urged me to take a second bookcase, and one of the desks wasn't the dimensions I thought it was, so it didn't fit where I thought it should. But otherwise everything was set up to the inch.
One thing I wasn't able to do with the model, and doubt I could do if I tried, was to really see how open things are now. My old officemate liked to have tall bookcases in the middle of the room, so the room felt very closed-in and confining. (I could park three cars in my office... It is NOT closed-in.) With the new arrangement, the office feels twice as big as it used to. It's nice.
But the real coup de gras was when the sunlight started to stream in the window toward late afternoon. It fell almost exactly where I thought it would. Almost. The sun splotches were long by a few inches. Luckily the sun fell on the back of a piece of furniture with a nice flat face. So out came the Starrett combination square with protractor head so I could measure the angle. It was 28 degrees. I'd guessed at 30. A quick change to the model and the light splotches came out perfectly.
Now if only geekiness translated into the ability to coordinate colors better than I do, I might have a new career lined up... NAAAAAH!
-- Pencil
posted by pencil at 2:07 PM
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