setting up shop

Having my work desk in my bedroom just isn't sitting right with me, so today, I decided to start clearing out some of the things I have laying around in the garage of where I'm living. I set up a fan to keep the temperature at a reasonable level, moved a few things around and made enough space to set up a small work table I haven't been using, and plopped a few piles of books that have been sitting in boxes for months onto it, along with my laptop with a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10 (Ubuntu 12.04 just rubs me the wrong way), got the wifi going, and started putting some things up on Amazon Marketplace.

A significant portion of the books I've gone through so far either had some redeeming quality about them (being about a geeky subject that I don't know much about helps), or would actually end up costing me more money to sell through Amazon than I could possibly hope to earn. The books in the latter category will probably end up going to Goodwill or a public library. The geeky books might just go back into boxes, because honestly I have enough books in my reading queue as it is to keep me busy for at least a year or two. It may turn out to be the prudent thing to just sell them now to someone who could put them to better use and then, if I need the information down the road, just purchase another copy, possibly a newer edition of them. Some of the books in my collection that I would honestly tell you are completely useless turn out to have pretty decent selling prices (read: > $10) on Amazon Marketplace. I suppose there are other people out there who value them more than I do, and that, I suppose, is a good thing.

The aim of all this, of course, is not merely to make money selling books. The money from this is really secondary. It's really more about clearing out enough space in the garage to bring in my work desk and get a proper office space going. I am thinking that it is important to be able to fully engage in work at work, and to fully disengage from work at home. Be fully productive at work, and fully relaxing at home. Having a big desk and a bunch of computer in the bedroom is not exactly conducive to this.

I also made a decision to finish my “work” day around 6pm and then go into chill-out-and-make-dinner mode. The computer I do all my games work on is still in my bedroom, so in a sense, right now it's kind of something I'm only doing in my spare time, of which I do not have very much of. I'm trying that on for size. I'm finding myself trying to sneak in a few lines of code while I'm doing this other thing that I told myself I'd do before the day is done. It's interesting to zero in on my passion like that.

Hopefully, with some more organizing of things and maybe even some books and other things going off to other places in the next few days, enough space in the garage will clear up that I can start to really bring the games work into this garage/office space that I'm setting up, and some really cool shit will start to happen.