Where I Work

I don’t do that much blogging that’s personal. I mostly do opinion stuff. So heres a picture of my work area a couple of days ago and I’m going to say a bit about it.

I work in a 12×24 portable building that I had finished inside. It’s well insulated and it’s air conditioned. The walls are largely occupied by book cases, but I have three work spaces. The first is a desk, also covered with books and papers. Here’s where I do reading and stuff. The second is a small computer stand that I use to work on computer systems. For those who may not know, I do two types of work. First, I publish books, and second I do IT support work. While I work most of my time at publishing, I still make more money working on computers.

The third area is the one in the picture. It’s a large table that I use both for publishing work and for programming. I do some custom programming for businesses, though in most cases I’ll point people to existing applications that can handle their needs. I also do my web work here. At the time I took this picture I had just finished editing and formatting work on Finding God in Suffering. For that book I had a marked PDF on the laptop to the left in the picture. I kept up with my business e-mail on the monitor to the right, and I was remote controlling a separate computer in order to do page layout on the center monitor.

The reason it is remote control is that my main desktop computer, which is also the Energion Publications file server, runs Ubuntu. It has two monitors. I also use an old laptop when I want an additional document visible. At the time I took this picture I was preparing to switch to working on Aprenda a Leer el Griego del Nuevo Testamento, which required me to have three different documents visible. On this one I used the laptop to display the original manuscript so I could consult it for anything that changed accidentally in the process of conversion. On the main monitor I’d be working in InDesign on the page layout. On the monitor on the right would be an annotated PDF containing corrections needed.

As I noted, I remote control another computer in the main monitor. This is a full Windows 7 system. I used to work with InDesign in a Virtual Box window on the Ubuntu machine, and it did work. In fact, it worked fairly well, but the remote control works better. In fact, it’s nearly indistinguishable from sitting in front of the actual computer.

You may wonder why I’m sitting in front of an Ubuntu system if I want to use some Windows only software. The answer is that other than Adobe Creative Cloud and occasional use of Microsoft Office to do some VBA work, all of my preferred applications are on the Ubuntu machine. I’m especially happy with web development on it. Also, while one could simply get another monitor rather than using the old laptop, I haven’t moved that direction yet.

All of the equipment here is either used or something I refurbished, with the exception of the monitor in the center, which I bought new for its specific purpose. That’s an advantage in doing computer work as well. All of the hardware I described above cost me less than $200.

OK, back to your regular programming … if you lasted this long, which I doubt!