Welcome to Atomic Tangerine room (my new office)

Here is a sneak peak of my new office, still under construction. Hope you’re thoroughly bothered by it.

Below is my desk and my Aeron throne. Two VoIP phones just in case. This will eventually have some artwork and foam padding (for recording purposes, wood floors + empty walls = lots of echo)

This is sort of the area they dumped the leftover supplies when they started to put in floors in the other rooms. Of only interest might be the two steel racks, one flat on the ground, one on wheels. These are called “bread racks” and we use this stuff in our data centers to house non-rackmount servers. In the back is my little “Daro” desk from IKEA, if you’re sick of your laptop making an omlet in your lap (I am not sure what the inappropriate translation of that is if you’re a girl) you’ve got to get one of these. I think mine cost $30 in Dallas.

Slightly different angle, this is what my wife affectionately called “the casting couch”; The main motivation behind the color is for video purposes, this is more of a studio than an office so the futon fits. In the back are two 8–core Xeon’s that combined cost less than that Aeron chair you saw up top – go ahead and hate, Dell rules. Next to it is the swiffer, the broom for the lazy.

And yes, what you see to the right of the 16 cores of computing power is a Mac. It’s a long term lease so we figured there may one day be kids around and one of the reasons I chose downtown as a location has to do a little with community service and helping teach the kids network infrastructure essentials, so if we ever have mentally disabled or computer illiterate around I wanted to let them play with a user interface that was designed for a 3 year old. Again, hate if you must, you know I’m right.

Finally, the color. The choice was a conscious one and the color is Behr’s Atomic Tangerine, high gloss finish. No, it’s not a tribute to Chris Rue, Phil Fullmer fan club president. And no, it’s got nothing to do with Gators bleeding blue and orange. I wanted something from our corporate color scheme but I also wanted something that would outright shock people. Mission accomplished, everyone that has come in to this place has said “Holy Sh..” — sans the Orlando Development Commission girls that asked “Was this ever a prison?” after they saw previous tenants paint (“metalic silver”).

So why orange? Well, the major purpose for this room is to produce video content. When you encode video for online viewing the edges tend to blur under high compression so anything out of the regular color scheme seemed unlikely. Nothing dark, nothing bluish… and there was no way I would ever sit and look at a green wall. So, yellow/orange it was. Then I looked for something that dulled a little when illuminated (if I picked something that would get brighter with lights on it I’d come out way too dark and.. well… believe it or not, no danger of falling asleep or losing concentration in a bright orange room!

Finally, the location. Downtown Orlando. I am surrounded by three churches, ten lawyers and Lake Eola on one side. I think I’ve perfectly stacked my heaven vs. hell odds with that combo.

So, there is a little preview of the new office. Obviously looks quite naked and under construction and I’m inhaling a lot of sawdust from the new floors but I’m pretty happy with what this will allow me to do.

Welcome to the Atomic Tangerine room!