For completeness, one more post on my new office setup.

“The Grid.” A fair amount of real estate. I feel I have plenty of room and more importantly, I love to look at these things which makes me want to sit down and work!

The star of this post is this “Ray” chair from RFM Seating. mattly (in #caboose) says it’s overkill, but I totally disagree. I guess I could live without the head rest, but it’s nice to have when reclining. Order your own from Steve Alexander – ergoguy.com.

The chair is fully adjustable and the best part is that all adjustments are easy to do while sitting in the chair. This, along with the adjustable keyboard tray in my earlier post, make it so you can find just the right position, or better yet, change positions through out the day.

Here’s a great view of the chair’s saddle:

I think that it for my ergo posts. I’m officially “dialed in.” Now, off to work…

Since I opted out of my full-time O’Reilly gig, I’ve really been able to focus on just a handful of projects. Actually, twice as many as I had at O’Reilly, so the key word must be focus.

Focus is used for what I call “going deep.” You have to go deep to really understand new concepts. Once you’ve learned something well, you abstract things with something like a mental DSL. Then, unless you’re lazy, you move on to the next thing to learn.

Without focus, this doesn’t happen at all for me. Or I learn things but they almost feel like bad habits.

Not that there’s anything wrong with O’Reilly, but part of why I left was because I was starting to feel lazy there. It didn’t matter how hard I worked, the tasks were just too small. Continually interrupted with short tasks, I was never able to really focus on something and go deep.

Another issue is something that I call “two gigantic interruptions, twice a day” or what is normally referred to as a commute. Even if you have a simple commute, you aren’t going deep when you know you have to pack up in an hour. (Now I’m blending into what a guy I call “the Tony Robbins of hackers” said the other day.)

Anyway, contracting let’s me focus. I feel smarter and get more work done because it’s more fun. And working smarter inevitably leads to better gigs, in my experience.

I just fired up this new office (spending 8-10 hours in it at a time) and had to get my ergo issues hashed out quickly and on the cheap.

I dismantled an old oak desk that O'Reilly gave away and just used the wood. The keyboard slider was about $170 from my father-in-law who sells ergo stuff (steve@ergoguy.com).

The keyboard is great. I've always though that Microsoft should throw in the towel on operating systems and focus on what they do well.

The trackball is just good enough. I especially like the hand position. I really do like the track ball, but it needs to be optical instead of based on 10 year old roller tech that breaks often. Unfortunately, there aren't many good mouse options for left handed people. I also like this one because I switch mouse hands every couple of years.