New Writing Workstation

If you don't frequent my other blog you might have missed this post. And, even if you started reading that post, you might have given up before you got down to the part about my new computer workstation.

So, since I cross-posted about Dark Cloud Press on the regular blog, I'm posting the pertinent workstation info here.

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[Phil and I went] to Fred Meyer for an hour of unsupervised playtime ... I mean an hour of Phil being supervised by someone other than myself, while I roam free tipping 20 oz. Diet Pepsi bottles to find the winning iTunes caps. I moseyed over to the furniture department where I've been speculating on the notion of an idea of buying a computer workstation for the past month or so. For the past month my laptop has been on a catch-all card table in the computer room. It's worked okay, except for the fact that everything got piled on the table and staking claim to two square feet of it was a daily chore. When the purpose of the table is to catch everything, you can hardly fault it for doing its job; still it wasn't a very good working relationship. That arrangement also meant that I had to do my proofreading over on the couch, balancing loose pages and notebooks in my lap, and then clear another square foot of space to key the changes in. So, in the spirit of new adventures, I bought the table and managed to set it up last night without expressing myself with colorful metaphors (although I'm going to be keeping an eye out for an allen-wrench attachment for my socket set).

Here are a couple pictures:

• Laptop View
  
  
• Editing View
  (the laptop and mouse are below the desktop on the keyboard tray)
  
  

As the second photo shows, the keyboard tray makes a handy space for the laptop when I'm dealing with paper. There are two small shelves on the outside of the the desk legs that are designed for CPU and printer storage, but I've got books and magazines on them. I'm thinking of rigging some hooks to the metal honeycomb grid on the legs and back of the desk store camera and PDA cables when they're not in use. The only disadvantages I've seen so far are that a) the glass desktop was not sprayed with a fingerprint/smudge resistant chemical before it left the warehouse (note to self: buy stock in Windex) and b) the optical mouse doesn't track on glass, so I'm using an old Dell mousepad which clashes with the Apple Powerbook. The glass does dissapate the heat generated by the laptop, so I suppose that's a good tradeoff.