Our Home Office (as of February 2022)
Tag Archives: home office
Blessed Be The Coffee Bean
BLESSED BE THE COFFEE BEAN ☕✌
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking,
The shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
— “Coffee Mentat Mantra” (a coffee variation on the Mentat Mantra from David Lynch’s Dune)
Evolution of our Home Office
EVOLUTION OF A HOME OFFICE
1) I have a coffee bar now.
2) I have a subwoofer underneath the desk and cabled the room for 5.1 DTS Surround Sound and Dolby Atmos.
3) The workstation is an AMD Ryzen 9 3850X with Nvidia RTX 3080 with 10GB GDDR6X, 64GB DDR4, 2TB SSD, 12TB HDD.
4) The NAS is a 4x12TB RAID-10 for 24TB storage.
5) I have bonded 10GbE running to the workstation, NAS, and router so I’m getting 11.3 Gigabits/sec to everything in the house
6) I have a 49″ curved 5K DQHD with HDR10 monitor as my primary display, with a MacBook Pro and a Razer Blade Studio as my side displays.
7) Both my development and gaming have been ridiculously fun and quick now!
The Cost of running an Enterprise-Class Home Office
I’ve run datacenters and enterprise-class servers out of our house before. Using my earlier metrics, I figured a single HP Proliant, Dell PowerEdge, SunFire T1000, or an Apple XServe cost about $35/mo in electricity alone… and this was back in 2005-2006.
Running an enterprise-class home office with bonded gigabit ethernet, fiber, several servers (Apple, Ubuntu, Windows), two NAS, and a 49″ 5K monitor is soaking up 7kWh/week and producing 3.666 kg of CO2.
I’m going to have to budget for electrical bills now, hopefully I can either expense it or write it off as business expenses?
I’ll need to seriously investigate solar panels, a Tesla PowerWall, or buying “carbon credits” to offset my footprint.
Solar as an option is growing in Sterling, Loudoun County, and in Northern Virginia. I know I’ve seen several Solar City installs where our HOA installed panels and PowerWalls on the roof and in the garage.
Since the house is nearly paid off, getting a Line-of-Credit to replace the 22yo 2.5T HVAC with a new 3T HVAC and going solar will very quickly pay for itself.
“Welcome to my World”
As noted in Finally, the Home Office I Always Wanted!, this is my world and my home office, where you can usually find me for 60-80 hours of every week (a 7-day week contains 168 hours).
Finally, the Home Office I Always Wanted!
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After the past two months of ordering hardware and waiting for equipment to arrive, I was finally able to build out and configure my home office to be the workspace I always wanted!
My workstation is now a liquid-cooled 4.7Ghz AMD Ryzen 9 with 16-cores (32-processors/threads) and a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. It has a 2TB SSD for the Windows drive and a 12TB HDD for applications, games, and data. Our Network Attached Storage (NAS) is now a 48TB RAID configured as 4x12TB in a RAID-10 configuration giving me 24TB of addressable space with 4x Read and 2x Write. Using a bonded NIC over two CAT-6 ethernet cables, throughput has been fantastic. I use it to back up everything in the house as well as hosting Applications, Movies, Music, and Data. For latency-sensitive applications and games, I still run them locally on my gaming rig/workstation rather than from the NAS.
The display is 49″ 5K (5120×1440) DQHD monitor with HDR10 and 120Hz refresh rate. All of my apps and games have been running at 96-120fps now! My older HDMI and USB-C cables weren’t rated and certified beyond 4K/60fps, so I upgraded to USB 3.2 and DisplayPort 1.4 to drive the monitor at 8K/120fps. I never realized that cable certifications could make such a difference, but the resolution and performance has been obvious!
So, while Vicky has been enjoying her new home office, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying mine as well! I can finally develop for and host all the Docker, Kubernetes, Containers, and VMs I need for my job during the day while also do some serious gaming on the nights and weekends.
As much as I enjoy the recent news about the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox One Series X, I’m really in no hurry to upgrade from my PlayStation 4 Pro and my Xbox One X right now. With the new gaming rig and RTX 3080, my home gaming rig runs at much higher resolutions, frame rates, and detail than either. It would take a serious, exclusive game (like the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn) that I couldn’t play on a PC to get me to consider either gaming console just yet.
Victoria’s New Home Office, and Soon a Baby Sister
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With me working and playing all the time from my new home office, we cleaned up the guest room and I moved all my old equipment into it turning it into an office for Victoria. She now has my old MacBook Pro and my old 37″ 21:9 4K monitor for her work and schooling. She completed her Masters in Nursing Education (MSNE) from Western Governors University (WGU) earlier this year, so now she’s pursuing a second Master’s Degree in Nursing Informatics.
Victoria and I are planning to have our family grow this Spring. Kiyomi and Toshiro (our two Shetland Sheepdogs) will be getting a baby sister from Carol Howell at Jade Mist Shetland Sheepdogs. Both Kiyomi and Toshiro are Jade Mist Shelties, so their baby sister will be related. We’re still deciding on what to name her and which Kanji to use to represent her name.
One of the names we’ve been considering is Ayumi. Ayumi (あゆみ, アユミ) is a feminine Japanese given name. It is rarely used as a surname.
Ayumi can be written using different kanji characters and can mean:
歩み, “course” “walking” “progress”
as a given name
歩, “progress”, “walking”, “a step”
歩美, “walking, beauty”
歩実, “walking, truth”
鮎己, “sweetfish, oneself”
亜由美, “Asia, reason, beauty”
安愉海, “peaceful, pleasure, sea”
明征魅, “bright, conquer, fascination”
充裕実, “provide, abundant, truth”
歩未, “walking”, “not yet”
The given name can also be written in hiragana and katakana.
あゆみ, in hiragana
アユミ, in katakana
あゆ美, mixture of hiragana and kanji
The Joys of an Enterprise NAS
I wish I migrated to a 4x12TB RAID-10 with bonded NIC ages ago. I’m able to transfer hundreds of GB in seconds and TB of data in minutes.
The performance on the NAS has been fantastic, actually quite decent for hosting containers, media, apps, and games. I’m averaging 220-300MB/s using bonded Cat-6 with RAID-10 (4x Read, 2x Write).
I’ll be so happy once the AMD Ryzen 9 with RTX 3080 arrives in November. My Razer Blade Pro (i7/GTX 1080) is being relegated to a workstation laptop while I’ll keep the Razer Blade Studio (i9/RTX 2080) for both gaming and work.
Most everything (gaming, servers, workstations) will run off the new workhorse/beast, keeping the laptops for terminals and portable gaming.
Latest: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
So this is my new 4.7Ghz 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 3950X with Nvidia RTX 3080 that is going to be my office workstation and gaming rig driving the Samsung CRG9 49″ curved 5K DQHD 120Hz HDR10 monitor, Samsung Odyssey+ 3K VR/HMD, and Dolby Atmos sound.
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Sixteen Core Processor (64MB Cache, 3.5GHz-4.7GHz) 105W (Liquid Cooled)
- RAM: 64GB DDR4 3200MHz
- Hard Drive: 2TB NVMe Solid State Drive + 12TB 7200rpm Hard Disk Drive
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB GDDR6X
- Motherboard: X570 Chipset
- Power Supply: 750W Platinum PSU
- Operating System: Windows 10 Professional x64
- Features: Dual Side Panel Doors, Addressable RGB Control via Remote
- Accessories: Wired LED Backlit USB Gaming Keyboard and Mouse Included
- 3-Year CUK Limited Warranty
I’m hoping to run all my VMs for hosting Ubuntu, Docker, SaltStack, and Ansible for my daytime/weekday development while playing games during the evenings and weekends.
As much as I like the RGB keyboard and mouse that comes from Computer Upgrade King (CUK), I like my Razer BlackWidow V3 Pro and Razer Gaming Mouse better.
Gradual Evolution of our Home Office
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With Victoria and I both having home offices, Vicky has her Mac for school and work set up in one of our guest rooms while I took over a corner of our master bedroom. Over the past decade, both of our home offices have continued to evolve to match our needs and style. With my interests in systems engineering (automated server deployments/administration), programming/scripting, gaming, learning to play the keyboard, and 3D printing, this is how my office looks now.
My cable management has continued to improve since these pictures were taken. I cleaned up and ran the cables through conduits so it looks more organized and less cluttered.
I still need to drastically clean and re-organize our bedroom so that it’s professional/presentable on video conference calls. Right now I’ve been relying on Virtual Backgrounds to mask the mess in the background. Since I don’t want to put a massive 12’x6′ greenscreen in our bedroom, I figure I really need to clean our bedroom this week before I begin my new job in two weeks.
Using my home office itself as my virtual background worked really well so far for the purposes of my technical interviews. It allowed directors, managers, and other engineers to look over my office while they interviewed me, and I could use objects in it either as ice-breakers or discussion subjects. I talked about the unicorn and it’s meaning from Peter S. Beagle’s “The Last Unicorn”, how it helped me through cancer and chemo, and how the IT industry is rife with “unicorns” (indispensable magical creatures who make everything possible, and immediately missed when out sick or on vacation). I talked about the Apple XServe that the unicorn sits on, and how I have a 12TB Apple Xserve with 96GB memory for the purpose of hosting VMware ESXi for my virtual servers, development, and orchestration/automation of Infrastructure-as-Code.
And so it goes… this is my office, and lately the entirety of my world… since I can’t leave the house between the Coronavirus Pandemic and my own immunocompromised health due to my cancer treatment for Mantle Cell Lymphoma.
As an Aside, the Home Office I Always Wanted (Phase 2 of 2)
SIMPLY GLORIOUS (finally “living the dream!”) 
I’m running 120fps 5K (5120×1440@120Hz) with HDR10 on an Nvidia RTX 2080 as our home office and gaming workstation!
Working from home and gaming will never feel the same again!! 
As an Aside, Upgrading our Home Office (Phase 1 of 2)
HOME OFFICE – PHASE 1 (of 2)
* Installing laptop and monitor armatures,
* Replacing the 21:9 QHD with a 32:9 DQHD for a 49″ 5K display (tomorrow).
…as of tomorrow afternoon, this will FINALLY be the home office I’ve wanted for a decade or more. I am going to LOVE working from home now. 😁👍