Thursday, November 20, 2008

A Standing Joke

Readers of the AnalogMix will remember (readers? I have readers?) that I've been pining away for a standing desk solution. My pal Greg has a standing desk, and so does his hero Donald Rumsfeld. [That's a test to see if Greg reads this.]

TEST RESULTS: Greg does read this, and if anything, Rumsfeld is Greg's anti-hero; Greg is a researcher with my former union, the MEA, and one of the world's really, really good guys. Among other things, Greg works to unmask the Mackinac Center's anti-union, anti-teacher bull puckey. He does that here.

At any rate, I have about 95% of my standing desk solution put together. It started with an adjustable, ergonomic, gas-filled monitor arm. This thing is cool, and at $180 it's made me the envy of every geek that's entered my office. I use it a great deal while seated.

The other part of the solution is really funny. Marty, a researcher in our IR office, brought me a keyboard arm that had been pitched in the garbage (she also brought me stories of other things she'd picked from the garbage, all of which had the office in stitches). At any rate, I made a small stand for part of the keyboard tray; I used a $3.00 pine board from Home Depot. I laminated several sections of the board together and cut them to the right size--it's sturdy and heavy, just what I wanted. Coated them with some hammered-finish spray paint and put a felt liner on the bottom (all stuff I had lying around from previous projects). Et voila! An ergonomic keyboard stand at the custom height of 9.5 inches.

It works great. After I get used to it, I might construct something more attractive and permanent. But this is pretty cool.

P.S. Yes, that's me, and yes, that's my office, and yes the walls are purple.

6 comments:

GregSteimel said...

I do read it. But I've been unable to summon a response to the endless series of playlists, not recognizing more than a couple of bands. Besides, I've been blogging here: http://eagtruth.blogspot.com/

Unknown said...

Purple walls? Are you Prince? Do you work at ePrize? I wish either were true.

GregSteimel said...

Thanks for the promo Steveo. Did you see I got slammed by the EAGuy? You'll notice that the only fact he disagrees with refers to a sentence where I pointed out that his twin brother Ryan was the Mackinac Center's education director. This was an unfortunate typo that I apologize for. I meant to type 'twit.'

Eljay said...

As someone who's been slammed by the Mack Center (although a while ago now), I appreciate Greg's work.

And now that I know you get to crack jokes with Marti all day, I can understand the decision to switch a little better. :)

Cool biz on the DIY furniture. Will be by for a tour... some day. :-p

GregSteimel said...

Hey steveo, do you know a way of tracking how many times this blog gets a hit?

I'm prmoting the EAGTruth blog in a few different ways, and i'd love to figgur out how many hits it gets.

Eljay said...

Greg, code the free stats counter into your blog from GoStats. All of the free features in the "detailed report" view are enough to get a really good sense of who's coming from where.