Tag: office

After

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

There are seven differences between this picture and “Before“! Can you find them all?

Almost there

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

No pictures yet, because I still have a jangle and a tangle of cords and mess all over everything, and I think at least one piece of wall art still needs to be moved, but I think it’s fair to say that 80% of the work I alluded to in the “Before” post a couple of days ago is done. What’s left isn’t difficult so much as annoying, and I also need to get an adapter that I hadn’t counted on to make something new work.

Yes, I’m being cagey. No, I don’t care. I have to have my fun somehow, Goddammit, and pretending you guys are chewing your nails wondering what I could possibly be doing in my office is what I do for fun.

In the meantime, I am sweaty and tired, and my office is a mess, and I have far too much to do tomorrow. Whee!

Before

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

I have a Project ahead of me this weekend. I have taken tomorrow off for several reasons, chief among which is that Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty comes out tonight at midnight. But also because there’s a Big Goddamn Job coming and I’m only looking forward to it a little.

More to come, of course.

In which I rearrange

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Teaching7 Comments

Supposedly the governor is going to be releasing some sort of plan on what’s going to be happening with the schools this fall on July 1, which is– Jesus— next week. I expect two things from this plan: first, that it will, in some way, have us returning to our buildings as scheduled in August, and second, that it will be thrown overboard as things continue to get worse– because one of the iron-clad rules of the last several years is nothing ever gets better— and we will not, in fact, return. Disney World just cancelled plans to reopen, y’all; we’re going nowhere.

This means that I need to start thinking about taking virtual education a bit more seriously than I did last grading period, because we got thrown into that with no planning. I have the rest of the summer to get set up properly for this, and one of the first things I needed to do was set up my office better for recording lots of videos. The desk used to be against the wall that has the diplomas on it, right under the diplomas; as a result it showed the entire rest of the room whenever I was on camera, and I got into the habit of starting any video I recorded for the kids with the words “Welcome back to my filthy office!”

I spent the morning shoving furniture around. The white table behind the desk used to be against the low window to the right of my desk, and used to be against it the long way; in addition, the small file cabinet with the printer on it used to be basically where my chair is and there was a taller file cabinet in the corner. That tall file cabinet is basically immediately to the right of the picture, off-screen.

Advantages of the new layout:

  • It gives me more work space. Even if I don’t have to shoot a lot of videos next fall, all that desk area behind me is going to make things like organizing papers for grading a lot easier. I need to keep it clean, granted, but I’m sure I can do that. Really.
  • The image the camera on my desktop now sees is this:
  • That’s a lot cleaner, and the other advantage of the desk is if I end up using something like a green screen or a stand-up whiteboard to explain things I have the table space for it. Right now the camera is pointed a little lower than I want it to be, but that’s literally just a matter of reaching my arm out to my desktop and tilting it upward. Huge improvement.
  • I can actually reach my Goddamned printer now; with where it was before, the white table and the file cabinets were really tight, and getting to my printer to turn it on or get paper off of it was actually a pain in the ass. So was getting stuff out of the file cabinets. Access to all of those things is now much better.
  • Speaking of access to things, I can actually open the low window now. It was behind the table before; I couldn’t reach it to open it.
  • I could do this before, but I just learned about it: I can stream the PS4 to my desktop. It appears to work pretty damn well, too, which means if I want to I can play games in here without taking over what is basically the only TV in the house. It also means that when I want to play the occasional game that I don’t want the boy exposed to I can do it without waiting for him to go to bed. Again, I could do this before I rearranged, but I just learned about it so it feels like a new thing.

So that’s all a lot better. There are a few disadvantages, but they’re not a huge deal:

  • Lighting. As you can see from the webcam picture, even with the light on in the room and both the windows open, in broad daylight, my current webcam (which is the internal one on the computer) makes it look really dark in the room. I’m not sure what’s triggering this, but it definitely looks darker in here now than it did with the desk on the other wall. Possible fixes for this include a better webcam and a ring light behind the desktop. Possibly both. We’ll see.
  • Putting the white table perpendicular to the wall eats up a lot of floor space in the room. This is not necessarily a big deal, though, as the room is the office and it doesn’t really need to be super spacious. I have plenty of access to the closet you can see back there, and there’s enough room for me to move my chair around comfortably without feeling trapped here.
  • Related to that, though: my wife and I talked yesterday about setting up a small desk as a homework space for the boy, particularly if we’re in a situation where he and I are both at home this fall. Putting that table where it is makes the most logical location for his desk (behind me, on the wall where the flag is now) a little too tight. There’s more room than it looks like in the picture but there’s still not a ton, even for what is just a kid’s desk. Then again, if I do something different with the boxes of comic books that are everywhere right now (that’s what all those white boxes are) I can always rotate the table out when I need it or something.
  • I assume I’ll get over this, but my secondary monitor is now to the left of my desktop, not the right, and that feels really weird.

Yay for accomplishments!

12:41 PM, Thursday, June 25: 2,388,865 confirmed infections and 122,071 Americans dead.

So here’s a fun thing that I hate

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

When you open a file in Excel that someone has sent you through Outlook, hitting “save” doesn’t actually do anything unless you’ve first saved a copy locally using the Save As function. It doesn’t warn you that it’s not doing anything, either; it just assumes that button is there because it’s pretty and that you’re hitting it because you’re bored.

An hour of formatting and data collection, saved THREE TIMES during the process, lost, with no temp file to go back to. Fucking idiotic way to design software.

In which I provide too much information

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy10 Comments

IMG_1907I would like to complain about an aspect of my job, if you don’t mind.

I have certain issues with public bathrooms.  For example, I do not understand how anyone can talk to anyone else while… uh… performing in a stall.  It is literally the creepiest thing ever when people try to talk to me when I’m in a stall– particularly if they begin the conversation by making it clear that they don’t actually know who it is in there.  This is the one way in which I will declare as a broad statement that I don’t understand women; my understanding is that it’s a social hall in there and y’all go to the bathroom in packs.  Sometimes there are couches in your bathrooms?  Is this true?  I don’t get it.  It’s weird and y’all should stop being weird.

My dislike of communication in the bathroom extends to basically creating any sounds of any kind, honestly.  My preferred pooing atmosphere, if you will, is in a completely empty (other than the stall, which should be lockable even though there’s only one) and entirely soundproofed room.  I don’t mind people theoretically being able to hear me pee, but damn if my nethers don’t clamp up involuntarily upon someone else entering the bathroom.  I have to force myself to continue taking care of business if I know someone else is in there, even if that person is in another stall and actively making the noises that I’m trying not to make.

Yes, I know.  I’m messed up.  I admit it.

There are two adult bathrooms at my new place of business.  One of them is a one-seater and is effectively a private men’s room for the office.  That bathroom has two problems:  1) it is directly outside the principal’s office and 2) I am one of only three men who might ever use it, and one of the other two is frequently not in the office, so not only is there a theoretical chance that my boss might hear me in there but if I power bomb the place everyone is going to know it was me.  This cannot stand.

Allow me to continue.  The picture attached to this post is of the two stalls in the other staff men’s room in my building.  Take a look at it for a moment and see if you can see the problem.

Yes?  No?

Okay, let’s be more specific: look at how tall the doors are, and then look at how tall the partition between the stalls is.

I am five feet ten inches tall.  That puts me at just about exactly the average height for a white American male my age.  When I am standing up, which I will be doing when, uh, completing the process of the… uh… process, my entire head is above that partition.  And if there happens to be another man in the stall next to me, and that man finishes at the same time I do, we can look at each other and make eye contact.

There is nothing more horrifying in the entire universe, except for the possibility of an exceptionally tall person (they’d need about six to eight inches on me, I estimate) walking into that stall, because that person would be tall enough to see me just by looking down.  And that would cause horror enough to kill me on the spot and force me to haunt the bathroom for the rest of eternity.

There is nowhere safe to poo in this building.  I need to either massively adjust my diet or get a new job.

In which that’s a real thing

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

You may have a serious barn-burner of a movie review coming later tonight, assuming I find the time and the energy to write it; I find myself in the odd position of being impressively tired from my first day back to work (in the job I still can’t write about) and simultaneously not entirely sure what the hell I did all day.  Which is impressive and new.  This was part of my day:

photo

Mental note: there are files in that file.