A Couple of Updates…
Well, it’s been a while since there was a post to this blog. We haven’t forgotten about it: many other things have simply been vying for our time recently. One of which, was a big move to new offices.
The New Office
Last week we completed our move to our new office, and the change has been for the better (I’m very pleased with how things have turned out). We had been planning the move for some time, but it wasn’t until mid September that we finalized the lease and set the wheels in motion (and once those wheels started turning, any illusions of free time went right out the window). Since then, we spent a great deal of effort designing how we wanted our new working space to look. A lot of the choices were obvious, some no so (for instance, what kind of coffee maker to get, where to put a book case, which way we want to arrange our conference table, etc). But the part I’m most proud of? Our desks.
As any programmer or IT professional will tell you, the desk is the most important piece of furniture in an office (well, the chair may be just as important, but you get the idea). We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what desks we would like to use – but couldn’t decide on ones that felt comfortable, looked elegant, and were sized/shaped appropriately. Personally, I’m a big fan of “corner” desks (where the desk makes an L shape and is setup in the corner of a wall. So, we decided to custom build our new desks.
If you haven’t been following it, you’ve got to check our O’Reilly’s Make magazine (and blog) – at some point I should do a writeup on how we custom built our desks for them. It’s quite a process, and much less expensive than you might imagine (though talk about time-consuming!).
Our Phone System
As I mentioned in a previous post, we’ve been using the Asterisk PBX as our phone system with some great results. Well, I’m quite pleased to announce more great news: during our move, the phone system was the last to go (as we wanted to receive calls with the most minor of interruptions possible). We finally moved our PBX machine (an aging Sun system running Ubuntu Linux) and our phones to the new office, plugged it in, and … it worked! A couple of firewall tweaks and we were up and running (perhaps a total of 1 minute of sysadmin work to get the phones going). Now that’s impressive, especially in light of what happened with our Verizon installation.
For our new office, we decided to have a single telephone line put in to serve as our fax and a DSL line, for which we contacted Verizon to do the install. I setup an appointment in mid September (a good two weeks before the installation date) for the day after we took occupancy of the space. And, from my understanding, all the wiring was already in place – a Verizon tech just needed to flick a switch or otherwise “turn on” service to our line. Well, unfortunately, the tech didn’t show up and, after repeated calls to Verizon (promising they’d be there), I had to schedule a new appointment for two days later. Very frustrating.
But, the bottom line is we now have phone service to our new space, plus a new dedicated fax line and fast Internet access, and I’m quite pleased with how it came out.
So, by means of explanation, that’s why the blog has been so quiet lately. Hopefully, now that things are starting to settle down again, more posts will be forthcoming.
