I got this idea from my former office mate (or cabin-mate).  However, when we shared an office I never followed his advice with creating a shelf on a workstation desk for the computer monitor(s).

After we got moved I decided to try this system out.  At work I blatantly copied what Roger (my former office mate) had in place.  He used a shelf from one of our hanging shelf units (all MS in Redmond has the same hanging shelf units) and raised it by using two reams of paper.  On top of this I put my speakers and my 24″ Dell monitor.

At my house I put off trying this configuration even longer.  It was not until yesterday when I realized that my docking station has both a VGA and a DVI output.  I had only been using the DVI output to one of my Dell monitors and using the screen on my laptop as my other desktop.  This was inconvenient because my laptop’s 1900×1200 resolution was difficult to see when the laptop was placed next to the monitor.

So I decided to attempt shelf at home, with both my monitors in the mix.  I found a plank of wood from my garage (long story how it got there) and found some VHS movies for height raising.  After a couple hours of re-arranging furniture, reorganizing all my wiring I finally had the shelf, monitors, and machine in order.

The benefits I experienced by this setup at work were immediately evident to me at home as well.  This small and subtle modification has had a dramatic improvement on my posture, productivity, and usefulness of my desk.

The benefits:

• Doubles as a reading area (or an area to eat lunch) by sliding keyboard under the shelf (notice the space is left deliberately empty)
• Speakers and knick-knacks always dominated the entire desk, getting pushed around with other items on the desk.  Now they do not impact anything since they are raised and untouched
• Inability to spill coffee or other liquids on the monitor or speakers (or rather, much much more difficult)
• Aesthetically more pleasing workspace (even with a ghetto shelf like the one I am using at home)
• People can see the skin applied to my laptop

Try this at your home or work and let me know if you find it beneficial.  Roger and I both believe there is a market for high quality desk-shelf material like this.

I finally wrote up posts and uploaded pictures for the last six months’ activities. Since this will go unnoticed for those using an RSS reader to keep in touch - I decided to write a post that lists these updates. I will try my best to keep my posts more current in the future.

Travel and Hiking posts, oldest to newest:

1. Hiking Mt. Pilchuck - Pictures, August 19, 2006
2. Tool Concert at the Gorge - Pictures, August 27, 2006
3. Vancouver BC - Labor Day - Pictures, September 1, 2006
4. Oktoberfest - Pictures, September 22, 2006
5. Frank weds Stephanie - Pictures, October 21, 2006
6. Philadelphia, Doylestown, and New York - Pictures, November 6, 2006
7. India December Trip - Pictures - December 2006

Recent readings (again oldest to newest):

1. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail
2. Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories
3. Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
4. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference
5. Haunted
6. Gandhi
7. Spouse
8. The Inheritance of Loss
9. Freakonomics: A Rogue Scientist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
10. Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
11. The Kite Runner
12. Transmission

Read in February 2007 (actually on the flight home from India on February 24, 2007).

This is a fast-paced modern technologically savvy story about how we are all connected, whether we like it or not. Kunzru writes authoritatively enough to be a certified geek; nothing even remotely evident to that in his first novel - The Impressionist (see my post about that here). His use of technical terms and connecting complex technical concepts leave the reader questioning how much of his knowledge is research and how much is a hidden geek coming out.

The story also captures a modern view of Bollywood cinema, with one of the three storylines being an up-and-coming Bollywood star. There is a reasonable amount of hinglish thrown into the story as the Indian characters in the story communicate to themselves.

The story has an Indian hacker software getting outsourced into the US as a consultant, the modern-day, financial equivalent of colonialism. As he struggles to make any money at all (between his contract employer taking its large cut of his earnings) he works as a tester at a virus protection company. In company downsizing, he fights hard to keep his job.

The final character is a slick 33 year old London marketeer who lives his life on the edge - whether between his girlfriend, his work, his company, or himself. He is about face adversity from all angles, and is spurned into sinking or swimming - quite literally.

Kunzru’s writing stlye is impeccably youth-oriented and fast-paced. Each major and minor character is described in a way that makes him/her seem realistic and tangible. The story unfolds reasonably quickly, and none of the characters are prone to emotions so Kunzru doesn’t spend a great deal of time talking about feelings - which keeps the story moving. The ending is somewhat unexpected, but the build up to it is quite a treat. Three stories getting cris-crossed and eventually colliding in every reasonable way.

Read The Impressionist first for a high quality historical fictional story. Read this afterwards for an equally high-quality modern-day story. Highly recommended.

Read more about it on Amazon.com.

Funny sometimes how you forget to read documentation when everything up to this point has been point and click. So far with WordPress, I’ve essentially used Fantastico to install and upgrade the WordPress installation. Then using the elaborate UI from Wordpress I’ve installed/configured all the plugins being used on the site.

This system worked great, until I upgraded to WordPress 2.1. Suddenly, to my surprise, my entire website started failing due to some obscure (or so it seemed to me) error. I did my fair share of searching, and finally realized that wp-cache is what is causing the problem.

I disabled wp-cache (the hard way, by commenting out lines in wp-settings.php that worked with it) and then my site came back to life. However, I really liked the performance boost of using wp-cache (it was a visible boost in performance when I had it going on WordPress 2.07).

A few days more passed, and finally tonight I went looking for an updated wp-cache plugin. Sure enough, there was one. This time I installed it and again my site fell apart. Instead of the quick and easy remove route I went through before, I decided to read some more docs on this updated plugin.

Sure enough, there was a missing symbolic link that was described in the documentation. Until now I had not read each plugin’s documentation, so this was a bit of a shock to me - but it was clearly defined and easy to implement.

After getting wp-cache installed using the plugin’s documentation - my site came back to life, I re-enabled wp-cache, and ever since I’ve seen that noticeable improvement in performance.

So, go me for reading the documentation - finally.

Read from Janauary to February 2007. This is a sweet and emotionally charged story of a man coming to terms with mistakes in his youth while describing Kabul pre Russian invasion. This story has several themes that are wound together through the fabric of a man reflrecting on his youth. Each theme is completed in one way or another, even if some cheesiness ensues in the process. Hosseini uses a clever technique of writing as a child when flashing back to his the main character’s childhood.

The story itself takes one too many familiar twists, and leaves the reader feeling like he is reading the story to an upcoming Bollywood film (though not nearly as over-acted). The ending can be predicted about 100 pages from the ending, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but makes it clear that the predictable becomes reality in the story.

The story also describes the Russian invasion through the eyes of the main character, as a child. As the main character goes back to Kabul in the early 1990s and witnesses the Taliban’s effect on his childhood home, the story describes the Taliban in a very real and terrifying way.

I would recommend this if you are interested in having a story with anecdotal knowledge about an Afghani immigrant to San Francisco in the early 1990s.

Read more about it from Amazon.com.