For today’s installment I figured I’d give you guys an idea of where I work.  And if you’re someone from work, don’t worry—I have blurred out anything that might possibly be confidential.

Above you can see a pretty wide shot of my desk.

• Airplane:  This is a promotional poster that they gave us, one of a set of four, showing something that a customer has actually designed using our software.

• Rubik’s Tetrahedron:  I think this is actually a knock-off, not made by Rubik’s.  I picked it up at Stephanie’s family’s yard sale for a quarter.  It is pretty simple to solve, I can do it in like five minutes and I never had to look up any “strategy” to figure it out.

• Decoy pen:  I am very protective of my pens.  It seems that whatever pen is located on the edge of my desk is always the one that is borrowed “for just a second” and never returned.  So I keep a cheap pen there as a decoy.  Even though both types of pen are available in the supply room.. they might stop stocking the good ones right when I need one.

• Post-it notes:  Post-it notes with Unix commands I use frequently enough that I need to keep them handy, but infrequently enough that I haven’t memorized them.

• vi cheat sheets:  The vi cheat sheets that I have mentioned before.

• Chair:  My chair.  Not much to it.

• Three boxen:  Three out of four computers I manage.  The fourth is actually in the corner, under the desk.  You can see it behind the chair but I didn’t label it.  One is my main workstation, two are only used to run test scripts overnight, and one is used for collection and overnight builds of our team’s code.

Here you have the other side of my cube.

• Trash can:  I think that is self-explanatory.

• Good pens:  This is where I keep the non-decoy pens.

• Chess board:  The chessboard I mentioned in my second blog post.

• Simpsons quotes:  These quotes from a Simpsons calendar were once on my dorm room door.  Some of them are very politically incorrect, but no one has said anything in two years.

• White board:  I have blurred out the only information that could get me into trouble for putting on the web, the rest is just notes from two different conversations.  Oh, it is sitting sideways because I have nothing to hang it from the wall with.

Last but not least, we have a closer view of what I am looking at for eight hours a day.

• Watch:  I cannot use a keyboard with my watch on, so as soon as I get to work it comes off.

• Wedding photo:  A picture from our wedding that is not on this site because I have never gotten around to scanning the pictures that we got from the photographer.  It is Stephanie next to our getaway car.  The other picture (obscured by an apple juice bottle) is one that Meredith took on the day we got engaged.

• Double-pen:  A double-headed pen that makes me uneasy.  Highlighter end is neon-greenish-yellow, pen end is black.

• Binary clock:  The binary clock that my mother-in-law gave me at a wedding shower.  Ten points to the first person who can correctly tell me what time it reads.
  Hint:  it is in BCD mode, and the MSB is the top-most light in each column.
  Update:  Jonah gets the ten points for correctly identifying the time as 08:21:50.

• Black keyboard:  I spray painted my keyboard black four years ago (an idea I have to admit I copied from Garrison… imitation is the sincerest form of flattery though, right?).  I decided I’d bring it in to work.  If you work for a software company and need to see the labels on the keys, I don’t want you anywhere near my computer.

• Rear-view mirror:  I hate it when people sneak up behind me.  There was an episode of Seinfeld about this.  I got this two dollar mirror, which I think is more effective than giving all my sidling coworkers boxes of Tic-Tacs.

• telnet session:  I spend a lot of time in telnet.  I think my orange on black color scheme is easy on the eyes, and delightfully old school.

• “Curly”:  You can’t see him very well (in fact, you can see him better in the first picture), but there is this little alien-like figurine with a magnet on his head that holds paperclips (like this, only in red).  I got this in Fort Lauderdale when we were visiting Stephanie’s sister last spring.

• Apple juice:  Coke products (including Minute Maid juices) are provided for us for free.  I always drink a bottle of apple juice in the morning.  Each bottle contains 250% of your daily requirement of Vitamin C!

• Calendar:  A calendar layout I came up with.  There are no breaks between the months except an extra-bold line, and no weekends, but there is the week number.  On the left side of my monitor I also have a one-inch-wide version of the calendar that is invaluable.

Well that’s my crib!  Goodbye, MTV!

It’s a “Jump To Conclusions” mat.