Home Office

Version 8.4 (Last update: April, 9th 2012)

Famous office

Our office is shown or mentioned on a lot of different places on the web. Here is an overview of some of these sites :)

Related Home Office posts on Figure FM:

Other stuff:

Introduction

In June 2011, we decided to give the home office a radical change. Previously, we had black & orange vlees wallpapers. But those are colors you get rid off way too fast. On flickr, we saw a great home office photo with a grey wall and white furnitures. We looked at it pretty often and liked the idea. So we went to the next IKEA and bought some new white furnitures and some grey color and started to remove the wallpaper the next day. Of course, we had to paint the complete room in white before we started to paint the main parts grey.

 

Present time

When I saw the incoming link from ApartmentTherapy, I was flattered that our office is presented there. This was the beginning of a long time surfing this website. This blog is awesome and I can highly recommend everyone who is interested in home offices to browse through it.

Maybe the most inspiring setup I’ve seen is this one.

However – by browsing their blog and sorting out stuff (creating the Hackintoshes, creating a Linux Fileserver from some ESXi spare parts etc), I noticed that this room got too messy. Seriously. For 2 weeks, PC parts have cluttered the carpet in the middle of the room and the racks didn’t look much better. I admit, I tend to be a bit chaotic. “Creative chaot” I was always called. Looking at all these awesome, clean and following the “less is more” principles photos increased the wish inside of me not only to clean up, but also to rethink what and especially how I use my stuff here. In the last update (8.3), I’ve written about moving along to Linux when I sold the Mac Pro. Not that I regret it, but I’m a Mac user. Trying again and again to work on Windows, but still disliked it.

My own company is running for more than 2 years now, and I have some spare jobs to do, but it wasn’t enough to live from that income. Luckily, a company around the corner was looking for someone to do web development. The funny fact is, that I have applied for jobs in an area of 100km or so and this job is just a 10min walk away ;) What a luck!

When I was there for the second interview, the boss asked me which kind of PC I want. Wow – that was new! I was never asked that before. I’m sure he has read my blog and is a Mac user himself – so he asked me if a 27″ iMac is fine. OH YEAH!

Knowing that and having a long chat some night with Bryan, he told me that I have all stuff to build a Hackintosh, except a good mainboard. My SuperMicro board that I had bought for the ESXi server is great and I guess it would work somehow, but it did not come with a PCIe x16 slot, so I bought Asus board that Bryan has recommended. I’ve blogged about this and if you’re interested in the whole story, feel free to read it over here!

So, I was back on Mac – somehow – and I like it! Ready for whatever will happen, I had my first day at the company on April 2nd. This was an awesome day! I was excited like hell – the last time I was working in an office that is not my home office was back in 2009, when I was working for Cisco.

After 4 days working there I can say: I love my new job! It’s exactly what I wanted – even if I did my certificates in system administration (Linux & Microsoft). The mixture of doing web development with nice colleagues and a nice boss is the way I like to work. While working there, I work on this 27″ iMac and I work very well with “just one screen”. Here’s a photo of my desk at work.

So one screen works for me. On Saturday, April 7th, I decided to clean up the whole office – and this included to remove ALL STUFF from every shelf, desk and rack. The result is great. My wife and I love it a lot and for the next months, I’m sure, we will keep this arrangement.


Office tour

 

The tour begins with a view from my desk to the right. You can see the world map and the clocks above, which are set to: San Francisco, New York, Moers (this is where we live), Hyderabad and Tokyo. Below this decorative elements, we’ve put our wireless printer/scanner combo device and a place for both MacBooks to get powered. The two IKEA lamps putting this area into a warm color when we are here in the evening. The black shadow is our cat Willow.

This wall has not changed much. There are still the three wallscrolls from Elfen Lied, K-On! and Oh! My goddess and some figures on the EXPEDITs below it. The content of these racks were completely re-sorted by my wife ;)

A first look on our desks – my wifes desk is the one in front while mine is the one in the back. You will notice, that the cables are not tied very well. I admit, sorting cables is really something I’m not very good in. However, this position allows us to sit in the middle of the room in a “face to face” combination with enough sunlight, but not too much, thanks to the blinds. When we will switch to bigger screens (maybe 2x Thunderbolt 27″), we will see if this works with the glossy glass. By the way: This blue “H” on the wall is nothing more than the LED of my Hackintosh – I’ve no idea why it paints an “H”.

Two detailed views on wifeys desk, who shares the hobby to collect figures with me!

And a few views of my desk. I tried to put as less stuff on my desk as possible (Less is more), but in the end, it’s a bit more as planned. I couldn’t leave the desk without my two figures ;)


Some detailed Animé figure photos

 

Steel Angel Kurumi. Kurumi, Saki & Karinka. Very hard to find – took them 4 weeks to ship from Australia to Germany and better don’t ask for the price we paid!

K-On! A huge Mio and 3 Nendoroid Petit in front – so cute!

A-Channel. Tooru & Run. Got them both for christmas last year from my wife – what a great present :D

Seitokai no Ichizon (most left & most right), Hatsune Miku Nendoroid on the drums and Toko Amano Nendoroid.

To Heart 2. Nanako-Chan Sukumize. I saw this cute figure on eBay and again and again I watched the auction and I knew I HAD to buy her. She’s 1/5 – much bigger than our other figures, but well – she’s so cute that she got a special place. The calendar you can see is self collected and edit by my wife – a lot kawaii images are inside :)


To-Love-Ru. Sairenji Haruna came in two different christmas versions. Very nice for the living room in the pre-christmas time. And of course you see Belldandy “Fighting Wings” and my other Kurumi figure in the background.


Computers

My Hackintosh

Name Kurumi くるみ
Model Self Build
CPU Intel Xeon E3-1230
Mainboard Asus P8B WS
Memory 16GB DDR3 ECC Unbuffered RAM
Graphics GT120 (GeForce 9500GT) 512MB
Screen 24″ HP ZR24w @ 1920×1200
Storage 240GB OCZ SSD + 1TB Hitachi HD
OS Lion
Accessories Logitech 2.1 Speakers


Sojas MacBook

Name Miku 初音ミク
Model MacBook white “Late 2009″
CPU Intel Core2Duo 2,26GHz
Memory 8GB DDR3 RAM
Graphics nVidia GeForce 9400M
Screen 13.3″ LED display @ 1280×800
SSD 80GB Intel X25-M SSD
OS Mac OS X Lion
Accessories Fujitsu ScanSnap
Logitech 2.1 Speakers


My wifes Hackintosh

Name Keiichi
Model Self Build
CPU Intel Core i5 2380P
Mainboard Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3
Memory 8GB DDR3 RAM
Graphics AMD Radeon HD6850
Screen 24″ HP ZR24w @ 1920×1200
Storage 80GB Intel SSD + 1TB Hitachi HD
OS Lion
Accessories Logitech 2.1 Speakers


My MacBook

Name Nyu にゅう
Model MacBook Air “mid 2011″
CPU Intel Core i5 1,7GHz + HT
Memory 4GB DDR3 RAM
Graphics Intel HD3000
Screen 13.3″ LED display @ 1440×900
SSD 128GB Apple SSD
OS Mac OS X Lion


Computers in the basement

Fileserver

Name Risu
Model Self build
Case Chieftec Bravo Big Tower (black)
CPU AMD Athlon II 245e
Memory 6GB DDR3 ECC Unbuffered RAM
Mainboard Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3
Graphics PCI S3 Virge
Controller LSI 3081E-R (Intel SASUC8i brand)
Network 2x Intel PCI-X Dual Port GBit Cards
PSU CoolerMaster GX 550W
Storage 640GB Caviar Blue (System)
8x 1.5TB Samsung/WD in RAID6 (8,9TB available)
OS Debian
Accessories APC UPS RS800
NETIO LAN power bar


In the basement, the Linux Fileserver is working – no longer 24/7, as this was getting too expensive. I will install a “network idle sleep” script, that I’ve already found. The system will continue his work via WOL (Wake On LAN).

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