Blog entries from August, 2005

After taking some photos a few weeks ago I have finally uploaded the ones for my Sun SPARCstation 5.

As the hard rubbish collection for my area starts tomorrow I spent the afternoon sorting through my collection to find anything that I could part with.

I only ended up parting with a couple of items, all of which were not unique in my collection and were also missing a signifigant component such as a power supply or drive cage. I also pulled out any cards or memory as they are much easier to store…

I have just arrived home from an evening of Texas hold ’em poker with some friends from school, most of whom I haven’t seen for over four years. In a sense it was bizzare seeing how much they had changed and how much they had stayed the same…

While I was waiting for a meeting to start today I started reading through my copy of Perl Best Practices and found that I was mentioned in the acknowledgements as I had reviewed the book back in March. It was a nice surprise as I wasn’t expecting it…

My copy of Perl Best Practices arrived today. Excellent…

For some unknown reason I thought that an open plan office was different to a cubicle farm. I was picturing some marvellous utopia where everyone was comforable and, most importantly of all, productive. What was I thinking?

This has come up today because in the weekly team meeting at work we were shown the basic layout for the promised refurbishment of the space we moved into two and a half months ago and we are getting cubicles. Half of the area will contain fourty four brand new modular corner desks separated by 1500mm partitions…

For the past two hours I have been trying to find anything on the internet that isn’t trying to sell cubicles and says that they make for a happy productive office. The closest I found were lists of rules that may make it tolerable. Two of these are:

• Seven Ways to Get Along in an Open Office; and
• Cube and cubicle etiquette

One humourous page that I found was in response to company cubicle guidelines:

• Practicing Cubicle Etiquette

Joking aside I did find a series of construction technology updates from the Institute for Research in Construction which is part of the Canadian National Research Council:

• Making the Open-Plan Office a Better Place to Work;
• Workstation Design for the Open-Plan Office;
• Lighting Design for Open-Plan Offices; and
• Acoustical Design for Open-Plan Offices

I only skimmed through these updates but I understand that their research found that variations in job function and working style negated the benefit of giving everyone the same identical workspace and that there was a lot that could be done to customise the individual environments that typically was not done…

One good thing about the plan that we were shown is that they have moved the main meeting room into the centre of the building. The room that the previous occupants used as their meeting room required thick blackout curtains on all the windows (two sides) in order to use the projectors…