All change

[unixronin]

Yesterday's big project, from which we're now mostly recovered, was to rearrange the livingroom.  EVERYTHING in the livingroom.

Well, OK, everything except the rack.  We weren't going to casually move that, and there was no real reason to move it anyway.

Most of this amounts to swapping the positions of my desk and cymrullewes' desk.  However, my desk is an L-shaped steel-cantilever workstation desk five and a half by six and a half feet, and hers is a solid-wood desk not very much smaller, but quite a bit heavier, that came out of a bank.  Neither one is light, and moving them around each other and other furniture in a room 10'4" x 13'2" that also contains another 30"x4' desk and a 72" full-cabinet rack was interesting.  Then, of course, we had to reconnect all the machines we moved (five PCs and two Macs) to the network, recable everything, boot everything back up (well, not everything; none of the servers went down, because we didn't touch the rack), swap out a failed sound card from llioness and compile and load the correct kernel module for it, figure out how the reorganization affected where we'd put things...  During the course of all this, we determined that one of the Mac video cables we've been intermittently trying to use is definitely bad, and almost certainly has a broken core on one of its sync wires.  So we need to find another working Mac DB15-HD15 video cable from somewhere, so that we can retire the oldest and probably most power-hungry Mac monitor, a Radius 17" that uses a 5BNC cable.

Upshot:  Although the new arrangement doesn't leavea clear space in the middle of the room the way the old did, I think that (counter-intuitively, to me) it may actually give us more overall usable space.  Plus, instead of being tucked behind the corner of the wall and the basement door, I how have clear line-of-sight from my desk all the way to the kitchen window, the front door, and the bottom of the stairs, and I'm right by the glass sliders to the deck, giving me more fresh air and daylight.  Plus, I don't have to get up any more when one of the cats wants in or out¹, and we have space now to put the HP color scanner on the end of Goose's desk instead of balancing it on top of vorlon's case.  (We do, however, need to pick up a longer USB cable to connect it to vorlon.)  We also have room to open the rear door of the DeskJet 2500 without having to move it, when we need to do so to clear a paper jam (I've got it mostly behaving itself now, except that it seems to almost invariably jam on the first sheet of paper it feeds after coming out of standby).  We do have a bit of a bottleneck between Pirate's chair at the end of cymrullewes' desk extension, and the heavy square oak corner table that the DeskJet 2500 sits on, but I think we'll be able to live with it.

[1]  And in, and out, and in, and out, and in, and out....  Cats don't see the universe the same way we humans do; they perceive a door as an intriguing topological object related to a Möbius strip.  To cats, doors only have one side... and it's the wrong side.

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[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

cats are wonderful critters!