nerdology.org

I have a few components that will be included in my home for my future utopian family and me to enjoy. These are only temporal components, mind you, not spiritual ones:

1. No television antennae. There will definitely be a plenitude of large and wondrous LCD (or rather LED) screens. Instead of allowing the streams of garbage into the Room of Lethargic Entertainment (AKA the Family Room AKA the room containing the “entertainment center”), I will build a media center PC equipped with a DVD (or whatever the medium is in those day) player and a spiffy graphics card. This works as the family computer for browsing the Internet as well. Certainly there is much worse crap online than there usually is on public television, but one usually has to actually seek for the garbage online whereas you’re at the mercy of the company who runs the station you’re watching with public and especially paid television.  I will also employ many safeguards to both block unwanted sites and monitor the time spent and the content viewed of users of the computer (computers– there are bound to be several in my household). Establishing this form of entertainment with these safeguards up, I eliminate both time wastefully spent watching television and the garbage brought into the minds of those who would have utilized the television. I provide a much more useful form of entertainment that not only plays the videos we love to rest and watch together and the games we love to play but that also doubles as one of the most useful tools ever invented for research and learning, and it’s put out in an open area of the house so as to not let it be in secret and have those using it be tempted to things of lesser nobility, honor, and virtue, even though those things will be hard to access even when trying to find them because of the safeguards I put up. Since the time will be monitored on said entertainment/research tool, lethargy shouldn’t be too much of an issue especially if the children are brought up not desiring to waste much time on things of the less useful nature. I hope to eventually not even need to have time restrictions enabled on their accounts because they will know how to use the tool wisely.
2. Speakers in every room that are all connected– probably wirelessly– to both a central media station in the server room of my home as well as individual media stations in each room. The central media station will have thousands upon thousands of songs stored on its hard drive arrays so that music can be played universally throughout the house to inspire, uplift, and teach the household members, as well as to utilize during large gatherings such as shin-digs. I’m toying with the idea of making them intercoms as well, though I think I’d rather not have that so that we all still have (have?) to walk into a room to actually talk to the person face to face. The individual local media stations installed in each room will have its own storage so that the person who occupies that room can have the music of his or her choice saved there. These individual media stations will have their own controls probably as a touch panel embedded into the wall somewhere. I don’t think I’d have them be full-fledged computers installed into each room unless they had little or no Internet capabilities, and I’m toying with the idea of the central media station being able to override local ones because on one hand I want to be able to eliminate garbage music from my household, but I also want to give my children freedom. I think it would be wise to have the ability but to use it on a case-by-case basis. I for sure will simply not allow rap, scream-o, nor the kind of music that a certain Mister Shaw blasts in his car. Sorry, sir Shaw, if you read this, but I despise that music with all the faculty of my soul. It’s nothing against you as a person. Just against that horrid music of discord and mayhem.
3. Ethernet cables installed naturally (no cables hanging anywhere or trailing across the room) in each room (or most) as well as a wireless N (or better– assuming we have something new by that point) network connection available in all (or most) areas of the house as well as in other areas such as in the backyard depending on the set-up and the final decision made by that point. ‘Nough said (most people say “’nuff said,” but that makes no sense because it is not spelled “enuff.” It’s spelled “enough”).
4. A room devoted to both knowledge and light and LAN shin-digs! This will be a glorious room set up with perhaps sixteen or more desktop computers, each with at least two of its own glorious LCD (or LED, if possible, or OLED, if those have advanced enough by that point and are actually better than the alternatives) monitor and plenty of deskspace for papers and action figures and speakers and paperweights and USB rocket launchers and other necessary desktop items. There will also be either several massive screens on the walls allowing each terminal the ability to show its display on one of them for group collaboration purposes. These large screens may instead be projectors, or the wall may just be lined with whiteboards with projector screens that can be taken down in front of them. Again, this room will be mainly used for research and learning, collaborative group projects, and LAN shin-digs.
5. A server room. This room will be the central hub of all network activity in the house. A large and glorious server will be situated there– perhaps in a rack, but probably as just a large tower (or several large towers). The central media station will be installed there, the main wired and wireless routers will be situated there, and all three of my T-1 lines will be routed to the network through that room. There will be a web server so that I and my family can host our own web pages if so desired, a storage server with as many terabytes of hard drive space as the operating system that I choose then will allow, and who knows what else that I can’t think of that would be useful.
6. A library. A beautifully large and spacious library adorned in 19th-century style complete with brass roving ladders, leather couches and reading chairs, and a grand chandelier hanging from a dome with stained glass windows.

That about covers the necessities for now. More possibly to come.