My Office



The Pretty

I work late nights from home and I wanted my office to be feminine and modern, but it had to be functional for my very expensive captioning equipment - this room is actually a home studio.  I wasn't a fan of the traditional wainscoting in the room, but I reluctantly worked with it.  This room reflects one of my favourite colour combinations - warm beige, black, pure white, and walnut accents.  The desk was a splurge, but I couldn't be happier with it.  

The Pretty Techie

To show you that techie can be pretty, I am attaching a picture of the adjacent wall with all of my equipment exposed, cords and all.  This is a rather complicated setup - I need two TVs - one with captions and one without, so I can see if I'm blocking any graphics with my caption placement.  I use two computers to view webcasts for shows that are not available on my channel lineup.  And that's my blue stenography machine - "the Passport" from Advantage Software.  I caption live shows, and this machine is amazing.  The light touch of the black keys gives me incredible speed and accuracy, and it was well worth the investment!  The black box on top of the computer is a 56-K modem from the '80s!  I had to buy it off eBay, as all captioners do.  It's the industry standard, believe it or not, and that's how all live captioning is done (well, some stations use IP-based captioning).  It goes from my steno machine to the software through the modem and out a landline, to the station's encoder, where it appears on the screen four to five seconds after I first heard it.  We now have to use special phone lines to cut down on this delay, as per the CRTC.  So this means I hear the audio seconds before it goes to air, and the delay is cut in half, which is a big deal in an industry where every second counts.

In the closet, I decided to use the wallspace to display some odds and ends I had from other projects, as I found a lot of it fit nicely into the design of this room.


desk - BDI Furniture; lacquer console and round mirror - Urban Barn; lamps - Kartell; sofa - Henry's Purveyor of Fine Things; flower mirror and artwork- Finesse Home Living; cushions - Pike's Market, Seatte; bird - Jonathan Adler; cloud art - online retailer; sputnik fixture - Festoon; white cubbies - IKEA Expedit

closet - cubes, West Elm; wood accessories and tin boxes - Urban Barn; vintage car art - Salted; orb - Antique Mall

My most patient, loyal viewer <3