Motorized Desk Tour

For of­fice work­er­s: If you’re among those (rel­a­tive­ly few now, I think) who haven’t had a chance to try a sit/­s­tand desk, I to­tal­ly rec­om­mend them.

Here’s mine, cranked up:

Th­ese things are be­com­ing ubiq­ui­tous in high-tech of­fices. I de­cid­ed to give one a try be­cause I have oc­ca­sion­al pain in my upper-back and neck caused by decades of look­ing down at lap­top­s. Ama­zon gave me a con­sult with an er­gonomist, who said it’s not that sit­ting is bad and stand­ing is good, it’s that you want to avoid be­ing in one po­si­tion all the time. So if you’ve been sit­ting down for 45 min­utes, stand up; and vice ver­sa.

I find I go home feel­ing bet­ter ev­ery day I use it. Your mileage may vary but my guess is that one of these would im­prove most people’s lives.

On the rare oc­ca­sions when I have a cou­ple hours un­in­ter­rupt­ed by meet­ings and I have some chal­leng­ing code or doc­u­ment to work on, I get too zoned in to raise or low­er, then even­tu­al­ly no­tice ei­ther my butt or my feet yelling for re­lief.

Desk­top tour · The sur­face ex­press­es the well-known Ama­zon door desk aes­thet­ic  —  I like it.

See all the wires? There’s a prob­lem I don’t have a good so­lu­tion for yet, in that it’s hard to find the right place to put the pow­er bars so that plugs don’t pull out when you raise the desk. One day I’ll bring some wood screws to work and fas­ten the suck­ers to its bot­tom. For the mo­men­t, I put the lit­tle drawers-on-wheels thingie un­der the desk and the power-bars sit on top of that.

As you can see, I have a Mac and a Del­l/Lin­ux box; the com­bo works well for build­ing and then test­ing cloud-infrastructure ser­vices. The Dell’s screen is (as usu­al) dark, be­cause ssh.

I’m an au­dio geek and tend to have old gear around the house, so what you see there is a nice old NAD 40WPC in­te­grat­ed amp driv­ing an an­cient pair of Totem Acous­tic Model Ones. The Mac drives the NAD via a tiny Schi­it Mo­di 2 Uber out­board DAC (rec­om­mend­ed) that you can’t see be­hind the book­s, and on the rare oc­ca­sions when I want to lis­ten to the Del­l, I route the sound out of its head­phone port.

In the blocks of time when I’m not in meet­ings, I usu­al­ly have Google Play Music’s “African Dub” ra­dio chan­nel play­ing qui­et­ly; I rec­om­mend it.

Now, those book­s; due to some com­bi­na­tion of trib­al cul­ture and Amazon-is-frugal her­itage, peo­ple prop up their lap­tops and mon­i­tors with id­iosyn­crat­ic com­bi­na­tions of pack­ages of print­ing pa­per, old ship­ping box­es, and all sorts of oth­er weird shit. I use Ja­va in a Nut­shell (al­so see here), Unix Net­work Pro­gram­ming, and the Fifth Edi­tion of The Uni­code Stan­dard. I think that any of these books would en­rich both your desk­top and your mind.

One im­por­tant fea­ture of my desk­top is the ab­sence of pa­per. I to­tal­ly suck at man­ag­ing pa­per and fi­nal­ly, all these decades in­to my ca­reer, have learned to do with­out. Yes, I reg­u­lar­ly both read and write the fa­mous Ama­zon six-pagers (rec­om­mend­ed); but then they go straight to the shred­ding bin.

Al­so in this im­age are my World Wide Web Con­sor­tium cof­fee mug, and a OnePlus One, which I don’t rec­om­mend; mine is bare­ly a year old and is fail­ing.

Fi­nal­ly, there’s a pic­ture of Lau­ren Wood (rec­om­mend­ed).

---

---

Contributions

---