Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the great-titles-from-non-native-english-speakers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "On the german Thinknerd-website i found some funny pictures from rooms where geeks and nerds are at home (hardware, hardware, hardware). Check out the pictures and tell us how your room looks like. :-)"
Yay slashdot, i guess i'll just look around my apartment for a while
-- ------------
Internet?
Is that thing still around?
H.J. Simpson
Re:Second post and...
by
killthiskid
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· Score: 5, Funny
Agreed. Crap... we'll I guess I'll look around: beer cans, laptop, Seinfeld on the TV, unassemble stepper motor assembly, beer cans, random power supplies, clothes, candles, stereo, dishwasher, cat, cat, cat, cat toy, fishing rod, window, couch, chair, desk, desk, desk, VCR parts, motors, power supply, wires, soldering iron, solder, canned air...
Ack...
I need to clean.
I don't like to look around. I am now going back into introvert mode. Ahhh, yeah.... only the laptop screen exists... ahh... much better.
Re:Second post and...
by
killthiskid
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Or on top of a warm laptop.
Side note, and definately OT... we currently have 3 cats in the house. Two are a few years old, but this year we adopted a kitten... and my girlfriend taught the damn cat how to fetch. I'm doing this as I type... with pipe-cleaners. Toss the pipe cleaner (I wrap it into a helix around my finger so I can get more distance) and the cat runs, graps it, and immediately comes back. A fetching cat. I'd be curious to see if anyone else has a cat that will fetch?
Anyone? Hello? Fetching cats?
Re:Second post and...
by
grytpype
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· Score: 4, Funny
Actually, that game is not called "fetch." It's called "throw."
I will not be posting any new pictures of my geek pad, as it is currently ablaze in a three alarm fire after my website was slashdotted the AMD without heatsink that I was running spontaneously combusted.
They should really release those things with a Slashdot warning. -_^
Just a few weeks ago I just moved all of my non-desktop/notebook PC equipment out of my room and into the hallway. Before the move, my room was well, very loud -- about equal to a small car engine actually, and very hot -- 15 degrees hotter then the rest of the house.
Since the move, I can hear myself think, and the whole level of the house is comfortably heated thanks to my server "farm" in the hall.
I consider it a interior decorating success story of the geeky kind!
this is an act(s) (orgy?) of geek masturbation.. as there is nothing they like more then stroking their own egos.. especially in a collective such as this one =)
dislcaimer: the preceding is the expression of opinion based on observations as a life long member.
dust is essential
by
h2odragon
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· Score: 5, Funny
Re:dust is essential
by
frozenray
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· Score: 4, Funny
Nnnnnnice cabling! You are truly a master of the art, props to you.
BTW, good thing your dog seems to rather largish: small pets and 10" AC case fans don't mix well. Actually they do mix, but in a rather unexpected and unpleasant (for the pet) way.:-(
-- "There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
What we need are pictures of non-geek rooms so we can get some inspiration on how to decorate our place in the hopes that the next time a female comes over, they don't run in terror from the sheer volume of Star Wars memorabilia.
Whew! Thank god I don't have any Star Wars stuff clogging my room, only a few shelves full of Gundams and Transformers. I'm safe.
I used to have a geek room...
by
RobertB-DC
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· Score: 5, Interesting
... then I got married. It was an efficiency apartment, and all available horizontal areas were covered either with clothes (the floor and dresser), dishes (the kitchen), or breadboards, chips, and discrete components. My last project was a little quickie 555 circuit. I hooked it up to a counter and some LED's to make a simple bounce back-and-forth effect.
My new wife wanted me to make something blinky that would go around a license plate frame. I started getting nervous... that would be a Real World design! Then, we needed the table for dinner (what was wrong with sitting on the bed, I wondered?). And within a couple of weeks, I realized that having more than one room is a Good Thing... when we moved to a one-bedroom apartment, the Geek Room was no more.
But there's hope for the next generation... my 12-year-old daughter just wrote her first Visual Basic program today. You click the button and a MsgBox pops up that says "THIS IS BORING".
-- Stressed? Me?
Of course not.
Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
You have to speak up to be heard over the blower noise.
there are burn marks on the walls from electrical fires.
When people ask about heating in the winter, I just laugh.
six printers
two cisco switches
four routers
six servers
two racks
11 monitors
three workstations
two kvm switches
toeknring
and all the cables to with them
30 amps and not one mA available
carpet? I have a carpet?
girlfriend? no such luck:P
Let's do the math...
by
BiOFH
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· Score: 5, Insightful
10 concurrent users is all this site will handle, now it's/.ed and......
OK I'll check back on this one in a week.
slashcache slashcache slashcache come ON you guys.......!!!
-- -
I am made of meat.
Geeks grow up...
by
kzinti
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· Score: 5, Interesting
A room full of computers and related stuff is a lot of fun... for a while. I got tired of the clutter, the boxes of CDs, the old disk drives, tape drives, power supplies, all the crap lying around all the time. All the junk just got in the way. But above and beyond all that, I got tired of my room looking like a geek's room - I wanted something a little bit more... tasteful.
(When did I get a sense of "taste"? I don't know it just happened to me - I didn't mean for it to... honest.)
So last year, when we bought a new house, I claimed the large upstairs bedroom and turned it into my study/library/computer room. I put up shelves to neatly store all my books - not just the computer manuals, but also the sci-fi novels, the old textbooks, the old albums, the artsy-fartsy books, the Edward Gorey books, and all the other books in my "collection".
I put a black leather couch by the windows, with a nice wood-and-glass coffee table set in front. I bought a bunch of Ikea bookshelf modules with internal lighting, some glass doors, some opaque doors, and built a wall of cubbies to hold the stuff I need near me. I set out a bunch of knick-knacks, plants, vases, even a couple of antique radios. I painted the walls a warm brown color. I bought and set out a couple of nice lamps. I even bought an on-stage stand for my Ibanez six-string.
Best of all: the room has a big walk-in closet. In there I put the nasty old bookshelves that used to sit out in the room. On them are all the computer manuals, the archive CDs, the stuff I don't need on a daily basis. On the other shelves are all the office supplies: printer paper, spare ink cartridges, backup tapes, and all that kind of stuff. In there I keep the crappy old stuff I don't use any more, but can't bring myself to throw away: old video cards, old disk drives, old cables, wires, etc., etc. The closet contains the ancient 233-MHz pentium system that serves as my Internet gateway. It also has the two filing cabinets that keep all the family papers. In short: all the ugly stuff is hidden away in the closet.
I still have some computer stuff in the room, but it's just what I need and as neatly arranged as I can get it. The full tower PC sits pretty much hidden behind the antique library table that serves as my desk. My trusty old HP 5L printer sits by it on the Ikea modules. On the desk are just the monitor, mouse, keyboard, and telephone. I have enough room to open up a couple of books without having to move a bunch of computer crap out of the way.
The clutter and crap that I do need on a daily basis is hidden behind the opaque doors of the Ikea modules, so I can close the doors and hide it most of the time. I have to make an effort not to let the Dr Pepper cans stack up, but aside from that it's pretty easy to keep my room neat and clutter-free. I know this is the opposite of the geek ideal, but I like it much better than piles of computer crap and clutter. My study is a pleasant, even peaceful, place to sit and hack, watch TV, listen to music, strum the guitar, or just sit and read. Highly recommended, if you've got the room for it.
--Jim
Real Men Have Racks
by
gnetwerker
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· Score: 5, Funny
Real geeks don't brag about how much of a mess their Geek Room is --
Real Men Have Racks(tm).
I got tired having 10 PCs lying around on the floor. For real MIPS per square foot, you need a rack. I now have 4 dual P3 servers, 2 Cobalt servers, 2 480Gb NAS servers, and another 720Gb of RAID drives (along with the obligatory UPS, network routers/switches, KVM switch, etc) in 6 sq. ft. of floor space in a closet.
they don't run in terror from the sheer volume of Star Wars memorabilia.
I always wanted a Trek motif. Doors that slide open automatically when you walk near, a big-screen TV that turns on when I shout "Engage!", a captains chair, a young female Volcan communications officer in a short skirt. No, make that Klingon.
Then again, such tends to conflict with empty Domino pizza containers and Mtn. Dew cans.
Re:Beam me up!
by
Stinking+Pig
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· Score: 5, Funny
what's the point of the doors? A true geek never leaves the room any way:-)
-- "Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
here's my room in QTVR
by
adpowers
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Forget pictures, real geeks use QuickTime VR! Anyway, here is my room. It is a fairly old picture, but not too much has changed.
Re:Apparently I'm not a true geek...
by
Jacer
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· Score: 4, Funny
Don't feel too bad. I was mocked for drinking diet soda. I kept getting the maxim quote, "Diet Pepsi doesn't make you gay, it just makes you look gay!" at least as a girl you can drink diet soda, it's ok if you've got tits, but if you're diabetic, you still look like a fag!
-- --fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Re:Apparently I'm not a true geek...
by
iCEBaLM
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· Score: 5, Funny
You're disqualified, they're not real computers, they're macs.
-- iCEBaLM
Why do we do this?
by
Average
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It's in me to be this kind of packrat. It runs in the family. But I've fought it like no other. Life ruled by your stuff is no way to live. You have to think about it, store it, fix it, trip over it... etc. MINIMIZE!
Computing is pretty central to my life, so it's reasonable that it's front and center in my space. BUT, it doesn't overwhelm everything else in life, so it doesn't overwhelm my space.
I had the 10 monitors, 20 cases, 286 in the corner life. Eventually, I said "WHY??". Couldn't quite throw it out, but I stuck the approx 100 kilos of crap in the basement of my office building with a note saying "FREE. TAKE.".
Down to one desktop PC (dual-boots) and a BSD nat and filestorehouse server. That's it. Not keeping and buying crud means I can have good components. I don't need 5 keyboards "just in case". I have a Kinesis, and it's bulletproof. I don't have a parallel printer. Don't think I'll ever have another. Well then, I don't need to keep parallel cables, do I?
I think a lot of people, geeks and non geeks, could learn a lot from backpacking or bicycle touring. 25 pounds of stuff is usually enough. Really. Buy less junk, live smaller, and be happier, guaranteed!
Just a friendly word or two. Now imagine for a moment that room, cleaned up, only a desktop or two, and a single monitor. No networking hardware, no rackmount shit, no cables strewn all over the floor. And imagine that you bring your domicile up to the relevant fire codes, and repaint the burned walls, and put in some carpeting, or at least an area rug. Now imagine that you shower and shave (I know, it's tough going, but just bear with me here), and maybe even go to the gym a few times a week.
Now imagine a gorgeous woman having sex with you every night in your new, socially acceptable domicile. See what I'm talking about? That could be you. Just something to think about.
I know living in a geek-o-rama pigsty is cool and everything when you wanna have a Counter-Strike LAN party on your bare concrete floor, but you can be a geek and still have hygiene and a relatively normal residence, and those girlfriends will start banging down on your door. Then you won't need the 11 monitors and surround-sound pr0n.
You know you're a geek when...
by
coene
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· Score: 5, Funny
...your house has a bigger power generation & backup system than your ISP.
Re:Yip! Geek Decore
by
Tablizer
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· Score: 5, Funny
The ol' slashdotted motif.
I'm serious. Paint the whole room white. Everything would have to be white.
Then paint something like "404: Server Busy" on the wall.
Inside my geekroom...
by
jht
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I have an old 3-bedroom house, but with 200 amp electrical service. Which is good, because 1 bedroom is for my wife and I, one is for our baby, and the third is my geekroom. I used to put photos of it on my website, but they're really out-of-date. Guests to our house either get a fold-out sofa or go to a hotel nearby that a friend of ours manages - they get a real cheap rate. We used to have a guest room but that's where the baby lives now.
The geekroom has two desks, two bookcases (tech stuff only - other bookcases in the house handle "real" books), and a big old metal shelving unit that holds a 16-port switch, three UPS units, a monitor, my Epson Stylus Photo, my current server (a little FlexATX box running e-Smith), a monitor, and a second PC that runs Mandrake and usually sits open because I'm always swapping stuff in and out of it. There's also a third PC on the rack that I just got - a Mini-ITX box that I'm going to run my server on because it's even smaller and quieter than the existing server. They're all on a 4-port KVM switch.
Then on the first desk, next to the rack, I keep my PowerBook G4, along with all it's gadgets (Palm cradle, Griffin powerMate, CF/Smartmedia reader, Keyspan serial port, iPod). I've got a Newton 2100 on the desk, too - I'm turning it into a web server soon and when I do it goes on the rack. My HP laser is on a stand next to the desk.
The next desk over holds my P4 system - I run XP on it and use it for gaming. I built this one over the summer. Wedged between the two desks are about 200 CD's that contain either software or backups of some sort or another.
In the corner of the room is an Athlon 700 that's currently semi-disassembled (I had to grab a couple of parts out of it for the P4), but used to be my gaming rig. Finally, the geekroom has some space allocated for short-term comic book storage. My workbench is in the cellar, along with virtually all my tools and the bulk of my comics (I built a moisture-controlled storage closet down there).
Geeky, but non-tech items in the geekroom include all my photo gear and slides, a small collection of stuffed toys, a 30-year-old (but still working) shortwave receiver, and a bass guitar.
Currently out on loan to my office is my Athlon 650 that I run Solaris X86 on. I'm testing some stuff for work on it, and it was handy to grab. We also have two other computers in the house - my wife has an iMac widescreen that she keeps on a small desk in our bedroom, and I have a hacked iOpener that we keep in the basement. Also in the basement are the DSL modem and my router.
This sounds worse than it is, though - my one geekroom is a disaster, admittedly, but the rest of the house looks like Martha freaking Stewart had her way with it. It's a good arrangement. I don't interfere with the rest of the house, and I'm allowed my one room to do as I see fit.
Unless, of course, we have another child, in which case my butt is banished to the basement. Good thing we had it finished this past winter...
--
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Be careful... Computers are a deadly fire hazard!
by
SexyKellyOsbourne
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· Score: 5, Interesting
One of my computer science professors, whom I will not name, had a collection much similar to that in his shed -- it was something like 30 lousy computers with monitors, all from the 386/486 era, that he had absolutely no use for and just had to have.
Then, on a stormy night, the ungrounded shed was hit by lightning, and it caught fire. While he was asleep, the computers began melting under the heat and released some very toxic gas -- which blew through the neighborhood, and killed the professor's dog along with a few other animals, and made a few residents hospital-bound.
Because of it, he was sued for quite a hefty bit, though he avoided jail -- so rethink stockpiling all those useless computers for itself, and give them away to charity.
Linked to before...
by
singularity
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I linked to my bedroom before, but this is probably the best place for me to post the link again.
Harware in the bedroom: G4/933 hooked up to a 17" Studio Display, a 15" NEC LCD, and a 14" VGA CRT. Apple PowerBook Duo 2300c with DuoDock II. Headless at the moment. These two are hooked into a 5 port 100Base-T switch. The G4 is hooked (via another port) to a 100Base-T Internet connection. Also hooked up to the G4: CompactFlash drive, MemoryStick drive, Cambridge Soundworks speaker system, a Sony Clie T665c, a Canon S200 digital camera, and a Keyspan Digital Remote Control.
In the closet, I have an Apple//gs with monitor. At one time I had a UMAX S900/200DP hooked up as well That is loaned out, as is a Macintosh Centris 610.
I am looking to add a Athlon-based PC to the mix (via KVM switch to the keyboard and the NEC monitor) to learn FreeBSD on. I am also looking at buying one of the new iBooks to replace the very aging PowerBook Duo.
-- - (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Re:Be careful... Computers are a deadly fire hazar
by
isorox
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· Score: 5, Insightful
he was sued for quite a hefty bit
ahh, todays society. If your computer gets fried by lightning - you get sued. If your house gets fried, the insurance company say "It's an act of god".
Why must people sue at every possible thing? It ends up with everyone suing everyone, and the only winners are lawyers.
Hang on, my S.O. is a lawyer - well will be in august. Forget that, sue everyone!
Re:List of my stuff & gratuitous link to bikin
by
KarmaBitch
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· Score: 5, Funny
Good luck to your Raq..
It's midnight on a Friday and you have a modded up post that has the words "aspiring model" in it.
I will send a priest over to give your server the last rites. And you can bring your "friend" over I'll let her cry on my shoulder about the death of her website.
Aren't most geeks cat people?
by
bluethundr
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Many in this community are dog people, but is it my imagination that a higher percentage of geeks are cat people? It's either a startling coincidence or my life represents a real Nielsen-style rating as to the percentage of computer volken who like the furry little beasts...
This observation began for me when once I lived in an apartment complex with an exclusive population of nerds. It was the mid 90s at that time. Before I got there it was just a couple of Mac II-Ci's with phone-net (!!!) flowing out of the windows. I'm pretty sure we had the first network in the little beach-town of Seaside Park, NJ.
Eventually, there were 7 units each with Ethernet dangling from window-sill to window-sill. And only 500 feet from the beach! With a tremendous view of the Ocean from a kickin' deck upon which we would regularly grill mahi-mahi and the like whilst imbibing on food-breaks from endless network gaming and hacken (and more imbibing). It was bloody Nirvana!...but I digress.
All were tiny little cracker box apartments (we were beginning our tech careers at that point) that at the peak of geek occupancy housed a motley collection of Macintoshen, NT boxen, 1 NeXT machine (mine, a slab serving a 400dpi laser printer and also playing the part of a shuh-WEETNIS server), a couple of Linux box0rz and an Amiga 2000. PowerBooks galore. All nic'd and sharing the the love.
Nearly every apartment was populated with at least one cat, and in one case at least a bloody-stinkin' (emphasis on the "stinkin'" pheeeyew!) cat colony! I, resident mac-geek with a love of code and 3-d, had two...Lumpy and Jake. Neighbor James, who was an NT tech with a penchant for work-related travels to Kazakhstan on occasion, had two as well...Simba (a 22 pound orange basketball with legs and a tail) and Mim (tiny little fucker, even as a full-grown feline).
My friend Ian had a cat named Mr. Beau... Mr. Beau's special talent was vomiting on technology. Yup. If the thing flipped bits in some manner, and it was in Ian's apartment, that shit was getting vomited on. No negotiations. Also, beer was likely to have been spilled on said equipment at some point, but that I believe was (mostly)the fault of the humans about the place.
My friend Mark who also lived there was a 300lb pro wrestler who could lift full grown men over his head in addition to his impressive geek abilities. Adding to those formidable(and imposing)wrestling talents was a steady gig as Mac/NT/Network tech. The guy was also a 3-d rendering guru who made valuable additions to the old Ambrosia game Escape Velocity. He and his (then pre-) wife housed the afore mentioned (sHt1nKeN!) colony of kitties who (despite their numbers...and lovely odor!) managed to not vomit on the tech nearly so often. All the other guys had cats too. Not nearly as smelly.
Since those days, I've worked with a fair number of techs and the sampling of overlap between the cat-ownership and tech communities seemed to grow larger with the more tech-geeks I've met as time passed.
If I might posit a guess, I'd say it had something to do with the independant nature of both beasties. Here I speak of techie cr3tins (myself included) the race of kitt33z. Both seem to have a strongly independant sense of self. The solitary nature of bit-dribbling andromorphs is evinced most strongly by the the noticeable high percentage of said who also play musical instruments. When you think about it, in order to develop ability in either (music or tech), you have to spend a lot of time with yourself thinking, playing, experimenting. Cats, while not much on the thinking or tip seem to be quite competent at being on their own. Far more than dogs anyway in that respect...
-- Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Hiding this stuff -- real-world solutions
by
gregwbrooks
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· Score: 4, Insightful
:::tossing his pittance of geek cred out the window...:::
OK, here in the real (i.e., married with non-geek friends) world, we have to hide this stuff. We do this because:
There is a direct correlation between the visible amount of free-range Cat-5 wiring and the frequency of spousal sex.
It's ok to have stuff lying about when you're tinkering with it (and there's always one deconstructed boxen lying around), but the stuff that's up and running needs to be protected from dust, pets and people with large feet who trip over things.
I pay too much for my mortgage to have the house look like my old dorm room.:)
Here are the mantras in our house:
KVM is your friend. You saw some of these photos -- a one-to-one computer/monitor ratio is just silly unless you're herding iMacs.
Bitchin' furniture often equals bitchin' rack space.We're in an old house and we have some antiques. We've found that a lot of old furniture (amoires, buffets, etc.) that can be picked up on the cheap does a great job of holding the equipment and keeping it out of sight. Remember: WAY back in the day (i.e., turn of the century), most rooms didn't have closets, so they were always thinking in terms of "where can I put this stuff?"
Spend a minute or two thinking about ergonomics, dammit. Nearly every photo on the original post is going to screw someone's back or wrists up.
The minute you own your own place, ditch the wires. OK, so you can't start running cable through the walls in your dorm or apartment. But once you actually OWN the walls, you sure can -- and life suddenly becomes a helluva lot more clutter-free. Wireless? Yeah, if you can live with the lower bandwidth.
--
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Re:What about the Neat Geek?
by
johnrpenner
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· Score: 5, Insightful
why is there this stereotype that a 'geek room' has to be messy and fully of crap?
what about the 'neat geek' ?
i spend endless time at this desk tinkering and working on the computer. i use a soldering-iron, i've etched my own circuit boards, disassembled computers and CRTs (replacing analogue boards on a Mac+), and soldered together with resin-core solder and built a theramin, written code, built web-sites, ripped tunes, made mixes, read slashdot faithfully, spent endless hours downloading, archiving, and organising data; and in every manner possible, have tried to fully integrate technology in a fully artistic way into my living - there is not a single component that hasn't had thought put into it -- all here:
the apparent simplicity and cleanliness of this space belies the inordinate amount of work that goes into making a well-used geek-room so spare and uncluttered. there's several hundred CD's, a firewire hard drive, burner, audio-amplifiers, with USB hubs and surge-protected powerbar hidden behind the desk (with cables bound together with elastics). there's a high-power HeNe Laser power supply, coils of wire, soldering iron, toolkit, VOM and DMM, a scanner, boxes of data CDs and ZIP disks. the hard drive and burner are neatly stacked in the left and right flanking drawers under the desk. and to either side are a pair of loudspeakers for audio work and listening to MP3s. when i undertake to dissassemble a machine, and get the parts all spread over the desk - the whole METHOD of doing so is well thought-out, and done with care, so that even in the procedure, everything is done neatly.
so once again, just because its messy, doesn't make it geek.
there are neat geeks too, which are just as devoted to technology, and do just as much tinkering as any of you.
Slashdot Mirror
...Link is dead
Yay slashdot, i guess i'll just look around my apartment for a while
------------ Internet? Is that thing still around? H.J. Simpson
Pah-leeze... when they can compete with my basement, then maybe they can be linked to on slashdot... :-)
I will not be posting any new pictures of my geek pad, as it is currently ablaze in a three alarm fire after my website was slashdotted the AMD without heatsink that I was running spontaneously combusted.
They should really release those things with a Slashdot warning. -_^
How Looks Your Geekroom?
How correct is Slashdot editor?
Oops... This is Slashdot. Move along, move along.
No current pix, but here's my old one, or the exploded diagram. ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Just a few weeks ago I just moved all of my non-desktop/notebook PC equipment out of my room and into the hallway. Before the move, my room was well, very loud -- about equal to a small car engine actually, and very hot -- 15 degrees hotter then the rest of the house.
Since the move, I can hear myself think, and the whole level of the house is comfortably heated thanks to my server "farm" in the hall.
I consider it a interior decorating success story of the geeky kind!
this is an act(s) (orgy?) of geek masturbation .. as there is nothing they like more then stroking their own egos.. especially in a collective such as this one =)
dislcaimer: the preceding is the expression of opinion based on observations as a life long member.
dog hair, too
What we need are pictures of non-geek rooms so we can get some inspiration on how to decorate our place in the hopes that the next time a female comes over, they don't run in terror from the sheer volume of Star Wars memorabilia.
... then I got married. It was an efficiency apartment, and all available horizontal areas were covered either with clothes (the floor and dresser), dishes (the kitchen), or breadboards, chips, and discrete components. My last project was a little quickie 555 circuit. I hooked it up to a counter and some LED's to make a simple bounce back-and-forth effect.
My new wife wanted me to make something blinky that would go around a license plate frame. I started getting nervous... that would be a Real World design! Then, we needed the table for dinner (what was wrong with sitting on the bed, I wondered?). And within a couple of weeks, I realized that having more than one room is a Good Thing... when we moved to a one-bedroom apartment, the Geek Room was no more.
But there's hope for the next generation... my 12-year-old daughter just wrote her first Visual Basic program today. You click the button and a MsgBox pops up that says "THIS IS BORING".
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
You have to speak up to be heard over the blower noise. :P
there are burn marks on the walls from electrical fires.
When people ask about heating in the winter, I just laugh.
six printers
two cisco switches
four routers
six servers
two racks
11 monitors
three workstations
two kvm switches
toeknring
and all the cables to with them
30 amps and not one mA available
carpet? I have a carpet?
girlfriend? no such luck
10 concurrent users is all this site will handle, now it's /.ed and......
OK I'll check back on this one in a week.
slashcache
slashcache
slashcache
come ON you guys.......!!!
- I am made of meat.
A room full of computers and related stuff is a lot of fun... for a while. I got tired of the clutter, the boxes of CDs, the old disk drives, tape drives, power supplies, all the crap lying around all the time. All the junk just got in the way. But above and beyond all that, I got tired of my room looking like a geek's room - I wanted something a little bit more... tasteful.
(When did I get a sense of "taste"? I don't know it just happened to me - I didn't mean for it to... honest.)
So last year, when we bought a new house, I claimed the large upstairs bedroom and turned it into my study/library/computer room. I put up shelves to neatly store all my books - not just the computer manuals, but also the sci-fi novels, the old textbooks, the old albums, the artsy-fartsy books, the Edward Gorey books, and all the other books in my "collection".
I put a black leather couch by the windows, with a nice wood-and-glass coffee table set in front. I bought a bunch of Ikea bookshelf modules with internal lighting, some glass doors, some opaque doors, and built a wall of cubbies to hold the stuff I need near me. I set out a bunch of knick-knacks, plants, vases, even a couple of antique radios. I painted the walls a warm brown color. I bought and set out a couple of nice lamps. I even bought an on-stage stand for my Ibanez six-string.
Best of all: the room has a big walk-in closet. In there I put the nasty old bookshelves that used to sit out in the room. On them are all the computer manuals, the archive CDs, the stuff I don't need on a daily basis. On the other shelves are all the office supplies: printer paper, spare ink cartridges, backup tapes, and all that kind of stuff. In there I keep the crappy old stuff I don't use any more, but can't bring myself to throw away: old video cards, old disk drives, old cables, wires, etc., etc. The closet contains the ancient 233-MHz pentium system that serves as my Internet gateway. It also has the two filing cabinets that keep all the family papers. In short: all the ugly stuff is hidden away in the closet.
I still have some computer stuff in the room, but it's just what I need and as neatly arranged as I can get it. The full tower PC sits pretty much hidden behind the antique library table that serves as my desk. My trusty old HP 5L printer sits by it on the Ikea modules. On the desk are just the monitor, mouse, keyboard, and telephone. I have enough room to open up a couple of books without having to move a bunch of computer crap out of the way.
The clutter and crap that I do need on a daily basis is hidden behind the opaque doors of the Ikea modules, so I can close the doors and hide it most of the time. I have to make an effort not to let the Dr Pepper cans stack up, but aside from that it's pretty easy to keep my room neat and clutter-free. I know this is the opposite of the geek ideal, but I like it much better than piles of computer crap and clutter. My study is a pleasant, even peaceful, place to sit and hack, watch TV, listen to music, strum the guitar, or just sit and read. Highly recommended, if you've got the room for it.
--Jim
Real geeks don't brag about how much of a mess their Geek Room is -- Real Men Have Racks(tm).
I got tired having 10 PCs lying around on the floor. For real MIPS per square foot, you need a rack. I now have 4 dual P3 servers, 2 Cobalt servers, 2 480Gb NAS servers, and another 720Gb of RAID drives (along with the obligatory UPS, network routers/switches, KVM switch, etc) in 6 sq. ft. of floor space in a closet.
So there. See it here.
gnetwerker
they don't run in terror from the sheer volume of Star Wars memorabilia.
I always wanted a Trek motif. Doors that slide open automatically when you walk near, a big-screen TV that turns on when I shout "Engage!", a captains chair, a young female Volcan communications officer in a short skirt. No, make that Klingon.
Then again, such tends to conflict with empty Domino pizza containers and Mtn. Dew cans.
Table-ized A.I.
Forget pictures, real geeks use QuickTime VR! Anyway, here is my room. It is a fairly old picture, but not too much has changed.
Don't feel too bad. I was mocked for drinking diet soda. I kept getting the maxim quote, "Diet Pepsi doesn't make you gay, it just makes you look gay!" at least as a girl you can drink diet soda, it's ok if you've got tits, but if you're diabetic, you still look like a fag!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
You're disqualified, they're not real computers, they're macs.
-- iCEBaLM
It's in me to be this kind of packrat. It runs in the family. But I've fought it like no other. Life ruled by your stuff is no way to live. You have to think about it, store it, fix it, trip over it... etc. MINIMIZE!
Computing is pretty central to my life, so it's reasonable that it's front and center in my space. BUT, it doesn't overwhelm everything else in life, so it doesn't overwhelm my space.
I had the 10 monitors, 20 cases, 286 in the corner life. Eventually, I said "WHY??". Couldn't quite throw it out, but I stuck the approx 100 kilos of crap in the basement of my office building with a note saying "FREE. TAKE.".
Down to one desktop PC (dual-boots) and a BSD nat and filestorehouse server. That's it. Not keeping and buying crud means I can have good components. I don't need 5 keyboards "just in case". I have a Kinesis, and it's bulletproof. I don't have a parallel printer. Don't think I'll ever have another. Well then, I don't need to keep parallel cables, do I?
I think a lot of people, geeks and non geeks, could learn a lot from backpacking or bicycle touring. 25 pounds of stuff is usually enough. Really. Buy less junk, live smaller, and be happier, guaranteed!
I have three VAXen - mv3100, MV4000/200 and an 11/750 with TU81 and a few RAxx disks, an SGI Iris Indigo, a few Sun Sparcs and a PDP-11.
In my Uni dorm room.
And I get laid occasionally. I win!
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
Now imagine a gorgeous woman having sex with you every night in your new, socially acceptable domicile. See what I'm talking about? That could be you. Just something to think about.
I know living in a geek-o-rama pigsty is cool and everything when you wanna have a Counter-Strike LAN party on your bare concrete floor, but you can be a geek and still have hygiene and a relatively normal residence, and those girlfriends will start banging down on your door. Then you won't need the 11 monitors and surround-sound pr0n.
...your house has a bigger power generation & backup system than your ISP.
The ol' slashdotted motif.
I'm serious. Paint the whole room white. Everything would have to be white.
Then paint something like "404: Server Busy" on the wall.
Table-ized A.I.
I have an old 3-bedroom house, but with 200 amp electrical service. Which is good, because 1 bedroom is for my wife and I, one is for our baby, and the third is my geekroom. I used to put photos of it on my website, but they're really out-of-date. Guests to our house either get a fold-out sofa or go to a hotel nearby that a friend of ours manages - they get a real cheap rate. We used to have a guest room but that's where the baby lives now.
The geekroom has two desks, two bookcases (tech stuff only - other bookcases in the house handle "real" books), and a big old metal shelving unit that holds a 16-port switch, three UPS units, a monitor, my Epson Stylus Photo, my current server (a little FlexATX box running e-Smith), a monitor, and a second PC that runs Mandrake and usually sits open because I'm always swapping stuff in and out of it. There's also a third PC on the rack that I just got - a Mini-ITX box that I'm going to run my server on because it's even smaller and quieter than the existing server. They're all on a 4-port KVM switch.
Then on the first desk, next to the rack, I keep my PowerBook G4, along with all it's gadgets (Palm cradle, Griffin powerMate, CF/Smartmedia reader, Keyspan serial port, iPod). I've got a Newton 2100 on the desk, too - I'm turning it into a web server soon and when I do it goes on the rack. My HP laser is on a stand next to the desk.
The next desk over holds my P4 system - I run XP on it and use it for gaming. I built this one over the summer. Wedged between the two desks are about 200 CD's that contain either software or backups of some sort or another.
In the corner of the room is an Athlon 700 that's currently semi-disassembled (I had to grab a couple of parts out of it for the P4), but used to be my gaming rig. Finally, the geekroom has some space allocated for short-term comic book storage. My workbench is in the cellar, along with virtually all my tools and the bulk of my comics (I built a moisture-controlled storage closet down there).
Geeky, but non-tech items in the geekroom include all my photo gear and slides, a small collection of stuffed toys, a 30-year-old (but still working) shortwave receiver, and a bass guitar.
Currently out on loan to my office is my Athlon 650 that I run Solaris X86 on. I'm testing some stuff for work on it, and it was handy to grab. We also have two other computers in the house - my wife has an iMac widescreen that she keeps on a small desk in our bedroom, and I have a hacked iOpener that we keep in the basement. Also in the basement are the DSL modem and my router.
This sounds worse than it is, though - my one geekroom is a disaster, admittedly, but the rest of the house looks like Martha freaking Stewart had her way with it. It's a good arrangement. I don't interfere with the rest of the house, and I'm allowed my one room to do as I see fit.
Unless, of course, we have another child, in which case my butt is banished to the basement. Good thing we had it finished this past winter...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
One of my computer science professors, whom I will not name, had a collection much similar to that in his shed -- it was something like 30 lousy computers with monitors, all from the 386/486 era, that he had absolutely no use for and just had to have.
Then, on a stormy night, the ungrounded shed was hit by lightning, and it caught fire. While he was asleep, the computers began melting under the heat and released some very toxic gas -- which blew through the neighborhood, and killed the professor's dog along with a few other animals, and made a few residents hospital-bound.
Because of it, he was sued for quite a hefty bit, though he avoided jail -- so rethink stockpiling all those useless computers for itself, and give them away to charity.
Good idea, but my parents keep scaring off all my potential girlfriends.
late night coding session.
I linked to my bedroom before, but this is probably the best place for me to post the link again.
//gs with monitor. At one time I had a UMAX S900/200DP hooked up as well That is loaned out, as is a Macintosh Centris 610.
Harware in the bedroom:
G4/933 hooked up to a 17" Studio Display, a 15" NEC LCD, and a 14" VGA CRT.
Apple PowerBook Duo 2300c with DuoDock II. Headless at the moment.
These two are hooked into a 5 port 100Base-T switch. The G4 is hooked (via another port) to a 100Base-T Internet connection.
Also hooked up to the G4:
CompactFlash drive, MemoryStick drive, Cambridge Soundworks speaker system, a Sony Clie T665c, a Canon S200 digital camera, and a Keyspan Digital Remote Control.
In the closet, I have an Apple
I am looking to add a Athlon-based PC to the mix (via KVM switch to the keyboard and the NEC monitor) to learn FreeBSD on. I am also looking at buying one of the new iBooks to replace the very aging PowerBook Duo.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
he was sued for quite a hefty bit
ahh, todays society. If your computer gets fried by lightning - you get sued. If your house gets fried, the insurance company say "It's an act of god".
Why must people sue at every possible thing? It ends up with everyone suing everyone, and the only winners are lawyers.
Hang on, my S.O. is a lawyer - well will be in august. Forget that, sue everyone!
Good luck to your Raq..
It's midnight on a Friday and you have a modded up post that has the words "aspiring model" in it.
I will send a priest over to give your server the last rites. And you can bring your "friend" over I'll let her cry on my shoulder about the death of her website.
Many in this community are dog people, but is it my imagination that a higher percentage of geeks are cat people? It's either a startling coincidence or my life represents a real Nielsen-style rating as to the percentage of computer volken who like the furry little beasts...
This observation began for me when once I lived in an apartment complex with an exclusive population of nerds. It was the mid 90s at that time. Before I got there it was just a couple of Mac II-Ci's with phone-net (!!!) flowing out of the windows. I'm pretty sure we had the first network in the little beach-town of Seaside Park, NJ.
Eventually, there were 7 units each with Ethernet dangling from window-sill to window-sill. And only 500 feet from the beach! With a tremendous view of the Ocean from a kickin' deck upon which we would regularly grill mahi-mahi and the like whilst imbibing on food-breaks from endless network gaming and hacken (and more imbibing). It was bloody Nirvana!...but I digress.
All were tiny little cracker box apartments (we were beginning our tech careers at that point) that at the peak of geek occupancy housed a motley collection of Macintoshen, NT boxen, 1 NeXT machine (mine, a slab serving a 400dpi laser printer and also playing the part of a shuh-WEET NIS server), a couple of Linux box0rz and an Amiga 2000. PowerBooks galore. All nic'd and sharing the the love.
Nearly every apartment was populated with at least one cat, and in one case at least a bloody-stinkin' (emphasis on the "stinkin'" pheeeyew!) cat colony! I, resident mac-geek with a love of code and 3-d, had two...Lumpy and Jake. Neighbor James, who was an NT tech with a penchant for work-related travels to Kazakhstan on occasion, had two as well...Simba (a 22 pound orange basketball with legs and a tail) and Mim (tiny little fucker, even as a full-grown feline).
My friend Ian had a cat named Mr. Beau... Mr. Beau's special talent was vomiting on technology. Yup. If the thing flipped bits in some manner, and it was in Ian's apartment, that shit was getting vomited on. No negotiations. Also, beer was likely to have been spilled on said equipment at some point, but that I believe was (mostly)the fault of the humans about the place.
My friend Mark who also lived there was a 300lb pro wrestler who could lift full grown men over his head in addition to his impressive geek abilities. Adding to those formidable(and imposing)wrestling talents was a steady gig as Mac/NT/Network tech. The guy was also a 3-d rendering guru who made valuable additions to the old Ambrosia game Escape Velocity. He and his (then pre-) wife housed the afore mentioned (sHt1nKeN!) colony of kitties who (despite their numbers...and lovely odor!) managed to not vomit on the tech nearly so often. All the other guys had cats too. Not nearly as smelly.
Since those days, I've worked with a fair number of techs and the sampling of overlap between the cat-ownership and tech communities seemed to grow larger with the more tech-geeks I've met as time passed.
If I might posit a guess, I'd say it had something to do with the independant nature of both beasties. Here I speak of techie cr3tins (myself included) the race of kitt33z. Both seem to have a strongly independant sense of self. The solitary nature of bit-dribbling andromorphs is evinced most strongly by the the noticeable high percentage of said who also play musical instruments. When you think about it, in order to develop ability in either (music or tech), you have to spend a lot of time with yourself thinking, playing, experimenting. Cats, while not much on the thinking or tip seem to be quite competent at being on their own. Far more than dogs anyway in that respect...
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
OK, here in the real (i.e., married with non-geek friends) world, we have to hide this stuff. We do this because:
Here are the mantras in our house:
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
why is there this stereotype that a 'geek room' has to
be messy and fully of crap?
what about the 'neat geek' ?
i spend endless time at this desk tinkering and working on the computer.
i use a soldering-iron, i've etched my own circuit boards, disassembled
computers and CRTs (replacing analogue boards on a Mac+), and soldered
together with resin-core solder and built a theramin, written code,
built web-sites, ripped tunes, made mixes, read slashdot faithfully,
spent endless hours downloading, archiving, and organising data;
and in every manner possible, have tried to fully integrate technology
in a fully artistic way into my living - there is not a single component that
hasn't had thought put into it -- all here:
GeekRoom-Front.jpg
GeekRoom-Side.jpg
the apparent simplicity and cleanliness of this space belies the
inordinate amount of work that goes into making a well-used geek-room
so spare and uncluttered. there's several hundred CD's, a firewire hard
drive, burner, audio-amplifiers, with USB hubs and surge-protected
powerbar hidden behind the desk (with cables bound together with elastics).
there's a high-power HeNe Laser power supply, coils of wire, soldering iron,
toolkit, VOM and DMM, a scanner, boxes of data CDs and ZIP disks. the
hard drive and burner are neatly stacked in the left and right flanking
drawers under the desk. and to either side are a pair of loudspeakers
for audio work and listening to MP3s. when i undertake to dissassemble a
machine, and get the parts all spread over the desk - the whole METHOD of
doing so is well thought-out, and done with care, so that even in the
procedure, everything is done neatly.
so once again, just because its messy, doesn't make it geek.
there are neat geeks too, which are just as devoted to technology,
and do just as much tinkering as any of you.
best regards,
john