{"id":34007,"date":"2023-03-21T14:57:15","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T19:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=34007"},"modified":"2025-10-05T18:25:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T23:25:20","slug":"office-space-three-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=34007","title":{"rendered":"Office Space, Three Years On"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Last week, Diamond entered the fourth year of work-from-home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Today&#39;s the fourth anniversary of Diamond going work-from-home.<br><br>Andy: &quot;See you in two weeks,&quot; he said heading out the door on the 17th.<br><br>I saw him again in July when he turned in his laptop. He was leaving for another company, and I was the only one in the office that afternoon.<\/p>&mdash; Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/allyngibson\/status\/1637092568457510912?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 18, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I work out of the offices two or three days a week &#8212; it depends on the kind of work I&#8217;m doing and the projects I&#8217;m working on &#8212; and have, honestly, since the end of March 2020, but full time in the office, for most people, isn&#8217;t happening and isn&#8217;t going to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is the new normal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I wanted to revisit, as we enter year four of the world COVID wrought, to revisit my home office set-up, which I wrote about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=32527\">here<\/a> at the time, and see what&#8217;s changed about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is how the office &#8212; which should be a spare bedroom but I use as a storage room &#8212; looked in 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-fullwidth\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" src=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/20200323_090258-1200x900.jpg\" alt=\"My home office, 2020.\" class=\"wp-image-34004\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Office 2020!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s wholly unremarkable.  My computer.  Some photos, some artwork, my diploma.  A poster of &#8220;The Day of the Doctor.&#8221;  A TARDIS bluetooth speaker in the window, and a TARDIS USB hub.  Some coffee mugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, in 2023!<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-fullwidth\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" src=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/IMG_20230320_151246-1200x900.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-34005\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Office 2023!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s virtually the same!  Almost all the same photos and artwork.  The same coffee mugs.  The same table lamp, though I was looking at new lamps at the store over the weekend.  The TARDIS bluetooth speaker and USB hub are gone; the speaker was never great, and the hub developed a short and didn&#8217;t always function.   The computer hardware, except for the subwoofer, are all new, and the subwoofer isn&#8217;t even connected to anything &#8212; it makes a buzzing sound half the time &#8212; but it makes a good monitor stand.  There&#8217;s a fan; I need to unplug it and dust it outside now that spring&#8217;s here.  Larger monitor, bigger tower, illuminated mouse, speakers, and keyboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My home office might as well be frozen in amber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The desktop showing in 2020 is Linux Mint.  At the time, I was trying to figure out how to get connected to the office network from Linux, something I would not succeed at doing for two and a half years.  While this isn&#8217;t an actual screenshot from 2020 &#8212; I created it yesterday, using an old Mint live DVD &#8212; it&#8217;s what I would have seen and used at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-fullwidth\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"750\" src=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Screenshot_20230320_200908-1200x750.jpg\" alt=\"Linux Mint desktop, circa 2020, with Edward Sachse's painting of Baltimore, 1872, looking south from the Washington Monument, as the wallpaper\" class=\"wp-image-34006\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/item\/2012648855\/\">Edward Sachse&#8217;s painting of Baltimore, 1872<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Compare that to today, which I talked about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=33995\">a few weeks ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-fullwidth\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"675\" src=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/mint-desktop-1200x675.jpg\" alt=\"Mint desktop, showing the Lewis Chessmen\" class=\"wp-image-33994\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>Wait, do I not use Windows?  Well, yes, I do.  Most of the time, in fact.  But there&#8217;s far less change there than you&#8217;d expect.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-fullwidth\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"675\" src=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/20200322_110445-1200x675.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-34003\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s 2020.  Windows 7.  Lots of icons.  A <em>Lord of the Rings: War in the North<\/em> wallpaper of Rivendell.  (<em>War in the North<\/em> was Warner Bros.&#8217; 2011 video game for the Xbox 360 and PS3 about a mission in the north of Middle-earth during the War of the Ring.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The only different today?  I&#8217;m on Windows 10, and there are far fewer desktop icons because I&#8217;ve really gone for desktop minimalism.  (At the office, I have more desktop icons than I would like, because they&#8217;re the icons I cannot get rid of due to insufficient permissions.)  I use the same <em>War in the North<\/em> wallpaper.  Three years ago, it was a nine-year-old wallpaper.  Three years later, the wallpaper is three years older. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This spring, I&#8217;m going to see if I can get my living room clean enough to put a desk in there so I can work from the brighter and roomier living room.  I started on it over the weekend, but the last few days my arthritis has been acting up and I&#8217;ve been in excruciating pain.  I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;m going to move my computer there, rehab a computer I pulled from the dumpster a few years ago as a secondary machine, buy something refurbed, or just use the living room with my laptop.  I haven&#8217;t gotten so far along that I need to think about that yet, and there&#8217;s still a good ways to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Man, that Baltimore screenshot is making me salivate. It&#8217;s just so <em>pretty<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, Diamond entered the fourth year of work-from-home. I work out of the offices two or three days a week &#8212; it depends on the kind of work I&#8217;m doing and the projects I&#8217;m working on &#8212; and have, honestly, since the end of March 2020, but full time in the office, for most<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=34007\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Office Space, Three Years On&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[4846,5140,4860,4124,5127],"class_list":["post-34007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-diamond-comic-distributors","tag-linux","tag-linux-mint","tag-work","tag-work-from-home","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}