By the way ...

I am now

0x40

years old

First up, does the Lab need another name?

So when Kris was kindly constructing my home office, it clearly wasn't going to be an ordinary home office. I'm very proud of the results, including the way it's been wired up. (though I have to find the wires for the rear speakers which are routed to behind the big TV screen, and I need to get them to the fine Denon 3803 amp). All just in time for a pandemic to reduce us all to working from home.

What troubled me for a while, was what to call it. When I first got kicked out of the fourth bedroom
in Winsford Close, I moved into the rear of the garage. Most people have a garage which is never darkened with a car in the UK - ordinary folks, if they are lucky enough to have a garage don't have one where you can drive in and open the doors without dents. They fill up with gardening stuff, bits of old bikes, your fishing gear and golf clubs, and several incomplete sets of drain rods. (the missing sections having been left in drains in former residences).

So anyway, I partitioned off a half of the garage, and set up some work benches, a few computers and a modest sound system. Wired to the rest of the house via thin ethernet (gasp!) I could leave a server in there running the house file system and so on. And that's where the handle "niksgarage" came from. It replaced the name I used before, which was "niks42", which I used a lot when I was single again, as a short cut to those first questions on a bulletin board a/s/l ?

I wired the house for internet, shared out through a smoothwall box with a frog modem on it:-

The famed Alcatel Speedtouch USB ADSL modem, running at a cool 500K bits/second (a huge leap up from the 56k modem).

So that's why this, my new location, being all posh, custom designed and made is not my garage - besides, there is also a garage. And a shed, for Trish's stuff and garden tools.

Studio sounds too pretentious. (though I do have a machine called studio, which runs the music software).

Also, an office sounds too square.

stu·di·o

Noun:

A room where an artist, photographer, sculptor, etc., works

of·fice

Noun:

A room, set of rooms, or building used as a place for commercial, professional, or bureaucratic work.

So, in due deference to both the company name of Hayling Island Laboratories Ltd - itself a pun on IBM UK Laboratories Ltd at Hursley Park, my alma mater, this is now my lab. 

lab

Noun:

A laboratory: "a science lab" So, come up to the lab,  and see what's on the slab. I see you shiver with antici ... pation.