Office Décor
 

In stark contrast to the "Why I hate my job thread".....


After a long stint as a lone wolf consultant I've been lured into a semi-full time position at a posh establishment with my own windowed office.

Given the time I'll be spending there I think it's worth putting some effort into swanking the place up a bit. As the IT guy of course the inclanation is to go all trekish with chrome and hard lines but I'm thinking of bucking the trend (with one exception) and going with an "antiuqities" theme. I have a really nice replica of the rosetta stone to start with but I need some more ideas. Should I stick with with Ancient Egypt or perhaps try for a very subtile Indiana Jones theme? Of course I'll have to find a way to weave in a hidden Mickey or two...

Trend bucker ;)

Go British Raj - then you can fill your space with classic furniture with odd antiquities. You'll certainly need an animal skin of some sort.

I've got this mental picture of a mental picture Anne Rice created for me in "The Vampire Lestat". There was a tobm where Marius kept the ancient Egyptian vampires that always sounded so very pretty and peaceful.

If you can't do that, just buy a giant sarcoghagus to store your office supplies in. ;)

Well, what do you expect at 1:30 am?

I was talking about this with a coworker not too long ago. We seemed to agree that whatever we put on our office walls made a huge statement about us. So, if I put up a picture of Shakespeare, then I'm a Shakespeare worshipper. If I put up a picture of Allen Ginsberg, I'm a beatnik. If I put up a picture of a flower, I'm boring. If I put up Disney-related anything, I'm a nerd and/or immediately identified as a non-native Floridian. If I don't put anything up, then I work at the place I work, and I'm too busy working to bother with decorating my office.

In reality, I'm just too lazy to care. I've been in my apartment for over 2 years. I just last month put pictures over my couch. I just earlier this summer bought a desk to put my computer on. (I still use a chair from my kitchen table at the desk.) I have not yet purchased a bedspread for my bed (doesn't get cold enough to need it).

So, tell me why I should decorate my office? ;)

But Moonliner--antiques are very cool. I just have random old office furniture.

Drat Drat Drat buggers!

Since I'm kinda new to the place I decided to take a walkabout today while nobody else was here and see what type of style the other office have. Just my stinking luck, the office RIGHT next to mine, that happens to belong to the overall top dog, is done up with an Egyptian theme. :mad:

So I guess I'll leave the Rosetta stone etc.. at home for now and go a different route. I thought about a series of historic document reproductions but they look bland on the wall. Sports ain't really my thing, Animals are not the way, guess I'm back to square one. Perhaps I'll go with maps...

But no matter what I do, these look way cool!

So why decorate at all? Several reasons:

1. I have to be here 8-hours a day. I might as well make the best of it.
2. Reputation - Co-workers judge you in part by your office. Is it a cubie, windowless, small, big etc? I negotiated a nice office during the hiring phase and now I really want to keep up the I'm not staff I'm management vibe. I need all the help I can get since I still have to occasionally crawl under peoples desks to install a PC or printer...

I had no clue people were going with actual themeing when decorating offices.

If I hadn't just paid a decent penny to frame a large reprint from my Bora Bora vacation for my office (which I haven't seen for a month :( ) I'd be VERY tempted to do have that company print and frame it, Moonliner.

Pick a city you love and go with it. The big Euro cities (and countryside) have plenty of iconography to choose from. I have a Parisean bathroom. But, Rome, Athens, Stonehenge, London, all have colors, icons, etc you could draw from.

Hummm, if I picked LA I could perhaps sneak in a satellite view to include a certain bermed park... :)

There you go!

What's wrong with some good ol' art deco?

OK, I have the perfect mix of tech, geek and sophistication..

Using Terraserver I'm building a 23x23 hires satellite photo centered on my new building. In the picture I'm going to hide ~50 different objects such as hidden Mickey’s, ET, Arc of the convent, etc... All carefully blended in so as not to be immediately recognized (hopefully). I'll then get it printed and framed in the photoglow frame.


Ohh work is so much fun…

You will have to share photos (including close-ups) of the final product - sounds tres tres cool.

I would want to spend WAAAAY too much time in your office! ;)

Well this is turing into quite the labor of love. I've stiched together the main image and added about 25 of my target 50 goodies. Some items like the zebra and the pentagon are fitting in great, others like the hurricane are a little more trouble to get blended. It's funny, already as I walk or drive around the town I find myself thinking: "Oh! That's where space Mtn. is, or here is the intersection with the baseball.... I'll definitly have to find a way to post this rather large (20 meg I think...) file when I finish...

It is Finished!
 

I've finished my office art. A 23x23 image file...

The jpg version is posted here:

http://moonliner.smugmug.com/gallery/868892

Please set the image size to large and see how many you can find before you cheat and set it to origional size (which is huge on a monitor...)

I thought it would be in poor form to in-line link it. There are 25 hidden images. A prize to whoever can correctly identify the most.

Yeah, I was going to do 50 but things were getting a bit crowded so I decided to stop at 25.

Very cool. I think that should look very appropriate for a tech-guy's office.

I saw one Tiki idol - is there a kind of Tiki-ish mask in the upper right area, or am I imagining it just because of the way that the roof-line of the house plays with the shadows?

Ya got the one real tiki. I see what you saw in the upper right, but it's just roof line as you say....

What fun - I've spotted Space Mountain, a paada, a zebra, what I think might be the Matterhorn, a dog, a hurricane, a tiki, what might be a Korean flag, and the Moon.

Arg! I dreamed about this last night! Seriously, at one point in some dream or another I was looking for hidden images in the file on a computer screen that is much larger than the one on my laptop. I found lots in my dream. Does that count?

Ohh you found my favorite. The Zebra. He seems to blend in well then once you see it, you can't see how you missed it in the first place (or at least I hope that's the case..)

There is no Korean flag so I'm not sure what you are seeing there. The rest are correct.

Still no confirmed sightings of what to my eyes is the most glaring object although that might be because you are are just not sure what the heck it is.

Sorry but no. Unless of course you dreamed of the items I actually placed in the photo in which case you would be a very spooky person. :)

Well, there were lots of zoo animals (probably because the zebra was the first thing I spotted yesterday.)

I found something and, even enlarged, I don't know what it is.


I don't wanna play anymore. ;)

Is that a hidden mickey lower center? There are several things that I know "are" something, but I don't recognize the something.

Oh, and a baseball, a soccer ball, the pentagon, and I think the statue of liberty and the eiffel tower (not totally sure).

And the ace of spades.

After closer inspection, the Korean flag turns out to be the Ace of Spades

Saw the Hub.

Granted several are hard to identify, Towards the lower left you will find the grand canyon. There is a kind of oval looking thing that's Dodger Stadium. But there are still several easy ones like the Starship Enterprise.

The Eiffel tower is probably the Washington Monument, Yes that is a hidden Mickey (of course I HAD to do that!) There is one tall radio tower that is really there but looks odd.

Kudos on finding the hub. That's the one that really stood out for me. I've since revised it to be all of Disneyland and it matches much better in it's new location. If anyone can find the Arc of the Covenant or Crater lake I'll be very impressed.

I will post a complete list of items tomorrow if you like...

Disneyland hub, Space Mountain, Tiki, Ace of Spades, Zebra, Moon Rock (?), Hurricane, Lobster, Something yellow on stairs - (the baby carriage scene from Battleship Potempkin perhaps?, A cross - or is that just the building? Liberty Island, frustrating building near Tiki, Puppy, and a few other things I can't see what they are, but I know they are there.

But, where's the Moonliner????????

Egads! A Moonliner! Of course Doh! Glad I did not go to print yet.

The "Something yellow" is the Arc of the Covenent. I'm very intersted to know what the yellow lines on top of that building are...

Near the Tiki is a Cray Supercomputer.

If anyone is interested, I've posted the cheat sheet for my office art....

I should have the final version back next week.

I'm amazed that no one seems to have spotted the Starship Enterprise!

Oh and for anyone keeping score, I replaced the hub with all of Disneyland for the final edit.

Oh yeah, we saw the Enterprise as well, forgot about that.

Congrats!

For the first time in my life, I've decorated my area. I work in a sun-filled room. We rarely use the overhead neon light. (Hurrah!). I've got a stuffed Fraggle (Wembley) by my speakers. A small framed picture of the Raiders of the Lost Arc poster. Taped to my wall is a Goon comic, a postcard from an art show I loved (Corinne May Botz's photos, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death) and a picture that Rena's daughter drew for my birthday of Snape and the Weasley twins. I've also got my He-Man Battlecat toy and a copy of a new comic, Burning Sandwiches by Rob Soto. Fun desk! Open-minded employers!