Archive for August, 2009
An Island in a Sea of Cars
When I think about the phrase morning commute, I have mixed feelings. I think back to when I had to travel in to Boston via the Franklin Line commuter rail. My trip was the entire length of the line, about an hour and fifteen minutes, not including the 20 minute car ride to the station from my hometown. At first, I looked at the time as being wasted. After all, who wants to sit on the train and in the car for 3 hours a day to get to and from work?
Eventually, it dawned on me that commuting by train was actually a blessing in disguise. I didn’t have to worry about getting off along the line and I wasn’t driving the train, so those 3 hours were basically free for me to do whatever I wanted. Over the course of that summer in 2007, I read 15 novels and finished 4 Nintendo DS titles using my train time. I had found an island in a sea of cars, some relative peace and freedom from obligation as long as my commute was in progress.
Now I live 5 minutes from work, barely long enough to finish a song on the radio before I pull in to the parking lot. While a part of me really enjoys getting to and from work so quickly (more time to spend at home!), I sometimes miss the ability to just sit back in a seat and zone out. At home, you can be distracted by all sort of things. In a train car, you’re effectively stuck until you reach your destination (and might as well make the best of it)!
Do you have an island in a sea of cars?
Ergotron LX Desk Mount Review
My desk at home is a bit cluttered (not shown: the router and gigabit switch now stuffed behind the display and the DVD burner perched on top of the server).
After reading Jeff Atwood’s review of a set of Ergotron LX Desk Mount monitor arms, I figured that ditching my monitor stand would be a good way to reclaim some desk space. The pivot and rotation enhancements provided by the arms would allow me to push the display back to the wall if I needed to do any non-computer work at my desk.
All the bits and pieces were a bit daunting at first. There are actually two different ways to install the mount; you can use the pre-attached C-clamp or opt for the more stable gromet mount (which involved a bit of drilling). In the interest of stability, I opted for the gromet mount. I have a rather large (and heavy) HP LP2475w display, and I didn’t want my investment suddenly slamming in to my desk because the C-clamp failed. It was fairly easy to get the hole drilled and the panel mounted on to the supplied frame. The Ergotron comes with VESA standard 75×75 and 100×100 mounting plates that should fit just about every monitor out there. From there, I just attached the arm base, extender, and the arm itself and slipped the panel frame on to the whole assembly.
At first, the arm just sunk down to the top of the desk. Then (having not previously read the manual), I noticed that there was a hex screw on the arm to tweak the amount of tension in the spring that holds the panel up. Two or three minutes of adjusting gave me a good balance between stability and ease-of-maneuvering.
The end result looks something like this (apologies for the terrible lighting):
Now I can push the display back to the wall and slide my keyboard underneath; perfect for doing non-computer work! I found that the rotation features have been the most useful for me so far; I can put the panel in to portrait mode for reading long PDFs and documents, then put it back to landscape for gaming. All in all, a good investment. I can see the arms being even more useful if I had two displays…(is it time for a bigger desk?)