Even in 2001 I prefer to work up against the corner, though that corner was in a two-bedroom apartment above the garage in my home. The more cave-like of the two bedrooms was converted into my writing office, though the whole apartment was used as an office, with storage and computers and a kitchenette where I made various snacks to keep me going. I modified the bedroom by first putting down hardwood floors, adding a bunch of shelving and painting the walls and ceiling with a star field. Stained glass windows were added in 1998 and the office was completed with built-in work station tables in 2000. After that, the office looked like what you see below until I moved out in the Spring of 2002.

1. Unnamed Unix Computer Oricinally this was BigGeek, who ran the DriveWay cam. But one morning, after a power outage, BigGeek failed to come back on-line (he didn't have a UPS). So I replaced him with the eMachines box I bought for testing Windows Me. After the test, I reformatted the system and installed BSD Unix. Oh, and yes, I bought the Unix computer a UPS. 2. Nemo. This is my G4 Macintosh with the swanky 22"-diagonal LCD Cinema display. Nemo was my Internet and graphic design computer. It has the most peripherals in the office, all of which are either Firewire or USB. This was where I answered my email, but I also write some fiction here and my newsletter columns. The monitor was beautiful, by the way. Nothing compared to it. For all the stupid stuff Apple computer does, they really design beautiful computers. 3. DrivewayCam. This was where the Driveway Cam sat. You can kind of see the USB extension cord crossing over the trim just below and to the right of the number 3. That cable was connected to BigGeek (#1), and eventually to another Windows 98 computer as the Driveway Cam software was only Windows 98 compatible. 4. TV/VCR. The TV was hooked up to a Direct TV satellite dish, where I watched news and sometimes videos. It was originally hooked into a large "multimedia" computer and I did make a few videos using that hookup. But the software was primitive and clunky, so nothing ever came of it. 5. Looking up. You can get an idea of how the ceiling was painted. There were stars, comets and the planet Saturn (visible in the image). There were also moons, all painted on a deep blue background. The ceiling extended upward at a 45-degree angle to a 15-foot peak near the back of the room (The office was a four-sided pyramid as seen from the outside.) 6. Ming. Ming was my writing computer, a cheapy IBM NetVista, but with a large hard drive and a (then) screaming Pentium 800MHz. I added an 18-inch Mitsubishi LCD monitor, mostly because I enjoyed the Mac's Cinema display but at the time could not find anything that sexy for a PC. The beautiful thing about Ming was that it never crashed. I used it from 1999 through 2007 and it still worked when it was retired. I probably wrote more books on Ming than any other computer I've owned. 7. Vishnu. The most complex computer in the office was my test system. It had several hard drives, DVD, CD-R/RW, Zip, you name it. I used System Commander 2000 to give that system multiple faces (ala Vishnu). So it can boot into MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11, Windows Me, Windows XP and SuSE Linux. (Windows Me is on the screen in the image.) 8. The GeoChron My X gave me this graphical wall clock for my 37th birthday. It shows where the sun doth shine. Since moving north of the 45th parallel, I've become obsessed with sunshine. My outer office was filled with suns of all types. 9. Ogre. This was our Windows 2000 Server, a Dell system, though I forget the exact model. It's purpose was to run our T1 connection and act as our in-house mail server. Unfortunatley, T1 service never came at that location, but I did eventually reformat Ogre with FreeBSD and used it as my gookin.com server for spell. 10. State-of-the-art ergonomic Areon chair. An anniversary present, this is the best thing I ever did to my back. Though expensive, this chair was wonderful to sit in. I got the wide-bottom version to fix my ever-expanding ass. All told. There were five computers in my writing office, each of which I used every day. There awerere also three printers (not visible in the image). The storage room contained four additional computers, plus six computers/laptops in the Gulag. In the front room was another computer and printer (for financial stuff), and there was an old NeXT computer stored away in my closet. That made for 17 computers total. Then there were five computers in my x-wife's office (three PCs, one Mac and one laptop). Plus two iMacs that the kids used. That made for 24 working computers in the house. Oh, yeah! And one old computer in the garage. That's 25. Updated 2008.