The home of the good life

The hunt for a good URL is a strange one. It has to be catchy - in spite of the ".blogspot" at the end. It has to be easy to spell. It has to say something about the blog. Most importantly of all, it has to make people go "ooohhh...".

Of course the URL I finally settled on ticks few, if any, of those boxes. Bearing that in mind, let's just move right along, shall we?

The subject of this inaugaral blog post is, fittingly, the place where I write my blog posts. I want to set the scene, allow you to learn a little (but only a little) about me before we set off on the wonderful adventure we'll undoubtedly take. So...

The whole workplace is much as you might imagine an aspiring techie's to be - all wires and books, some optical media, old thumb drives, discarded bits and bobs of all shapes and mostly fairly small size. Most importantly is what's at the centre of this menagerie of exotic technological relics - a Dell E6400 (specs to follow) and a 22" Acer screen whose model number, according the box in the corner, is P223W (we'll have a word some other time about the futility of remembering the model number of every piece of technology in your life).

The laptop is a Dell for two equally good reasons, both of which may well draw scorn in certain circles. Number one is that Dell make really nice laptops - the brother, who lives across the landing somewhere, has a Studio 15 which is also stylish, well made and well priced, and I've had several very satisfactory encounters with the XPS m1530 too. The second is that no other manufacturer makes it so easy to get exactly what you want. If you want to get a Toshiba specced exactly as you desire you have to trawl through all the different configurations on, say, komplett.ie. Similarly for just about any other name you care to throw out, with perhaps one or two exceptions (the original story of The Laptop Hunt will appear somewhere down the line, I feel). So anyway, it's a Dell, and you can just deal with that (as I too have had to - don't think I enjoy supprting the Empire).

On the whole, I can't really complain about it too much. True, every graphics driver I've tried has caused it to present a BSOD at startup four out of every five times, but that's a small price to pay for rock-solid reliability the rest of the time, and who shuts down their laptop anyway? Mine goes on standby but is rarely, if ever, actually switched off. A full review will probably follow, in the fullness of time, but for the Irish-speakers amongst you there should be a little something by yours truly about it in the next issue of nós* - the rest of you shouldn't panic, however, as I may very well have a little something about it right here before nós* hits the news stands in mid January. 

To give you something to get your spatial relations going, the laptop sits just to my left on the desk, with a few impossibly thick and heavy college textbooks directly behind, and the left-side speaker to their left. There's a rather nice photo of myself and some friends in a frame just in front of all that waiting to find a nice home on a wall somewhere, while, appropriately enough, there's an old 24x CD-Rom unit doing duty as a book-end on the right of that particular section of reading material, and then to the right of that is the centre-piece of the setup - the brand-new-for-Christmas'08 and aforementioned Acer 22" monitor.

As the newest addition to the lineup, it has so far avoided being tested too exhaustively. Some promised Christmas LAN partying may call it into service, but thus far it has had a charmed existence. It is connected to the laptop, unfortunately, by old-school VGA. While I make a habit of encouraging the adoption of open technologies like DisplayPort, its inclusion in the E6400 has left me without a digital path between source and screen. Needless to say, sorting this is towards the top of my never-ending list of tech-jobs. The decision-making process behind the monitor's choosing was rather less scientific than that which weeded out the laptop, but nevertheless it might warrant inclusion in a posting at some later date. Stay tuned.

To the right of the centre-piece are some more books, this time (slightly) less unwieldy in both physical girth and in content. The other speaker is to their right, in a vain attempt at achieving real stereo sound, while the source, an aging Philips micro system, sits on top. This is usually connected back to the audio-out on the laptop via the auxilliary input, but the cable for this mysteriously vanished recently. The US-style power adapter and a DVI cable sit on top of the books, while the defunct AM aerial for the micro system sits just behind the books alongside a rarely used mag-lite (the two cell D version). 

Out in front I have another newish addition, a Logitech V470 bluetoothe mouse upon which the jury is still out, while on my head sit a set Sennheiser HD202s headphones, upon which the jury has returned a very favourable verdict.

Above all this there are three uncomfortably-heavily laden shelves, which were recently reconstructed using slightly chunkier parts after their predeccesors collapsed. These are responsible for the safe holding an assortment of books, DVDs, folders, papers and general doodads. There's a box of those impossibly smooth Lindor balls up their too, awaiting my attention.

Finally, there are some shelves built into the desk, and they contain mountains of PC Zones, PC Formats, and a smattering of PC Pros, Personal Computer Worlds and other magazines like Stuff, T3, Hot Press, Digital Home and so on.

So their you have it. I've always been told that you can tell a lot about someone by where they call home, and this room and this desk are nothing if not home to me. If a man's home is his castle, after all, his desk is the keep, or perhaps even the top room in the keep. Certainly somewhere pretty important. And where to next for this little slice of heaven in a world gone mad? I'd love to add a third screen at some point. Maybe a desktop with obscene processing power, when the wallet allows. An external keyboard is sorely missed, and should soon be sourced.

And where next for this little corner of the net, in which we will endeavour to create a little bubble of sanity in a world gone totally loony? Well, I have some very important words to say about Apple - but not the ones you're expecting. Pencil in January 1st (just don't hate me if I'm a little tardy).