I am geek. Hear me squeek.

So, this shall officially mark a landmark in the slow yet continued updates to this, my little blog away from blogs.

I am posting from work.

It’s about an hour past the time I should of headed home, and the building is well and truly deserted. But I had to post this little gem of geek ingenuity.

Shawn and I have found a temporary use for all the old iMacs that are getting moved around this summer.

Behold, the ultimate iLamp workstation!

This setup took a little time and planning to put together, but is actually quite fun to use. To the left and right are two 700MHz G4 15 inch iMacs, and the center machine is a 800MHz G4 17 inch iMac. They aren’t the fastest machines, but they get the job done, and being able to balance Office, web surfing, and general administration between three machines means things are a little snappier all in all. Plus it’s fantastic for being able to manage large amounts of information at once. In the photo above you can see me monitoring network traffic on the left machine using Cacti, or as I like to call it, “MRTG on steroids”. On the center machine I have Apple Remote Desktop running, with views into four separate workstations, nicely tiled using Exposé. And on the right I have an Excel spreadsheet up with assorted information on all of the switches used here at work.

Screen switching is made painless with a little piece of software called Synergy. It allows you to move the mouse to the edge of one screen and have it magically appear on the next, just as if you were simply using a system with multiple monitors. An especially nifty bonus is that the software is multi-platform, meaning you can combine Windows, Linux and OS X machines all into one huge logical desktop, complete with clipboard synchronization. The Mac version is a little buggy, however. It doesn’t handle going to sleep very well, and has some logistic problems if you want to install the software so that it launches on start-up. It’s worked beautifully for me in this demonstration, though… and if I ever do get an iMac like I want to, it will be handy in being able to have my PC and Mac side by side and simply move from one to the other flawlessly.

I can almost say that I’ve been more productive today than I have been in a long time.

I know. I am uber geek.

It’s only temporary, of course. These machines will get repurposed and are only in the office for maintenance and software imaging as it is. They are sure fun to play with though.

And now, it’s time for me to go home. Good bye work week, hello weekend.