Day Six: Dwarven Battle Desk

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days and I, foolishly, have decided to take up this most daunting task because clearly my schedule is not full enough.


DAY SIX: THE DWARVEN BATTLE DESK

My office space is exceptional, and is my oasis from the hectic world.  I raid in the private luxury of my own computer room that is a good size, with a magnificent, winged desk that takes up a whopping thirty-six square feet.  I have two large bookshelves behind me that keeps my library of books and CDs within easy reach.  My chair is huge and incredibly comfortable, with both heaters and massage functions.  This room is my own personal version of a security blanket.

Or rather, that's how my office used to be.  Before the Dwarfling.

Along with virtually every other aspect of my life, my computer arrangement needed to change to accommodate a baby.  My office became the Dwarfling's room, and I had to give up my office nirvana shortly before the she arrived.  In it's place I got a new desk, new chair, and a new location in the house.  I honestly think that the change of my office space has been the hardest adjustment that I've had to deal with since the Dwarfling was born.

My new desk space is actually quite good, and I customized the IKEA bought unit a fair bit to suit my needs. It's nice, but it's not the same.  I had my old desk for about fifteen years, and as you can imagine I got pretty used to it.  It felt absolutely perfect - custom moulded like a really great ass-grove in a nicely broken-in couch.  It was comfortable and familiar.

This is my new setup.  As I said, it's nice, but not nirvana.  I custom built the monitor shelf with spare parts from the desk, which came with an upper hutch that was beyond useless.  My wife has a matching desk in the opposite corner, and both corner desks are connected by a long, skinny, straight desk with drawers.  The desk is located in our family room, which is where our TV is and where we spend the majority of our time while at home, so there is very little privacy.  I use headphones when I play now so I don't disturb my wife or the baby.

The Dwarven Battle Desk:  Click to Embiggen!

1.  My Logitech G15 keyboard.  The keys glow orange, which is just cool since it goes with the colour scheme on my blog.  Also, the six extra keys on the left side are very useful for keybinding cooldowns.

2.  A coffee mug from work.  It's not my desk if there isn't a coffee mug on it.

3.  A stack of unused CDRs.  I don't even know why these are on my desk any more, let alone why I have three stacks.  Who uses blank CDs any more?  Do I even have burning software installed?

4.  A stack of games that I'm not really playing any more but can't bring myself to actually put away.

5.  A baseball signed by the 1999 Montreal Expos.

6.  Altec Lansing 4.1 Surround Sound speakers. They sound gorgeous, but with the baby and the wife in the room most of the time they seldom get used anymore.

7.  Dwarven Battle Mouse.  I'm looking to get a new one and considering either the WoW Gaming Mouse or the Naga Razer 17 button one.  I'm having a tough time deciding which, but it's irrelevant since I can't afford either of them at the moment anyway.

8.  A baseball signed by the 2000 Montreal Expos.  I used to be a huge Expos fan, and was devastated when the team moved to Washington.  Since then I have lost my passion for baseball, but I still display these as a reminder of a long lost love.

9.  My wallet and cell phone.  I desperately need a new phone.  I have a Samsung Blackjack phone that works perfectly well, but I have a festering case of iPhone envy.  I would really love the extra capability that the iPhone would provide, especially the better internet experience.  Reading the web on a Windows Smartphone is brutal, to say the least.

10.  This is the monitor stand that I fashioned for my new desk.  I'm actually really quite proud of it.  Which is kind of sad considering it represents the most elaborate thing I've ever built.  Still, it's sturdy as hell.

11.  Atramedes killing me.

12.  The Dwarfling and both of my beagles doing something so incredibly, epicly cute that words simply fail to describe it.  I can't believe how lucky I was to capture this adorable - and completely indescribable - moment in this shot.  It makes me tear up just thinking about it.  It is... just wow... look at the photo, because I can't begin to do justice with words how precious this is.

13.  My second monitor.  It's an 18" LCD monitor that is insanely old.  It's refresh rate is slow enough that it's impractical to play games or watch movies on it.  I use it while I'm gaming to have boss fight strategies visible while I'm playing.  I also keep Ventrilo, Twitter and my website stats up at all times while gaming.  I love multitasking.

14.  My blog stats page.  I am so bloody addicted to watching my stats that I almost never turn them off.  They got washed out in this photo, sadly.

15.  My main monitor.  It's a 24 inch Acer monitor with a 2ms response time.  It's sexy and fairly new and I love it.  Previously I had a Viewsonic 19" CRT monitor that was as big and heavy as a barrel full of really heavy things.  This one is much better, and I love the widescreen format, but the colour reproduction of the old Viewsonic was better.

16.  Rottingham.  My only WoW figurine of any kind, and the one thing that lets people know that this is desk belongs to a hardcore geek.

17.  A Hasselblad 500 C/M circa the 1960s.  I bought this camera secondhand about 15 years ago.  It was my primary camera when I was running my Photography Studio.  It no longer works, sadly; it seized up after a photo shoot that was done on a wet, rainy evening.  I really miss shooting in a square format - the rectangular format of my Digital SLR just doesn't really get my creative juices bubbling quite the same.  I loved the simplicity of that camera; in fact this new-fangled Digital SLR is the first camera that I've ever owned that actually needed a battery.  All the buttons and blinky things just make me nervous.

18.  A picture of my beagle, Milo.  As of right now it's the only framed photo on my desk, but once I get around to printing up some Dwarfling photos, I'm certain that will change.  I really adore that photo of Milo, though.  It really shows off his sad, sweet eyes.

19.  A stack of crap, on top of which is my notebook that I carry with me where ever I go.  I use it to jot down blog ideas and post outlines when I'm at work.  It's so full of scraps of paper with ideas on them that I need to hold it together with an elastic band.

20.  A drawer full of crap.  Really, I need to clean that out.  It's got a lot of junk in there that doesn't need to be in there.

21.  All my important papers.  Note the complete lack of a filing system.

22.  My Metz flash.  I hate on-camera flashes, and so I use that bulky thing when I need to photograph the Dwarfling at night.  It's a pain in the neck to use, but is much more flexible than the flash built into my camera - I can easily bounce it off the ceiling for much softer light.  The only bad thing about it is that I haven't used the batteries in a number of years and they don't really hold a charge very well anymore.

23.  A chess set that my wife bought in Europe.  I love chess, although I'm not very good at it.  I have six or seven different chess sets in the house.  This particular one is notable because it's made of a beautiful green and white stone, and is completely impossible to play with because, aside from the Knight, all the pieces look virtually identical.  The only think that distinguishes the pawn, rook, bishop, queen and king is either height or a small, hard to notice detail.  It's like looking at a room full of Blood Elves and trying to decide which one is using a different hair gel than the rest of them.

24.  My computer. It's an Alienware system.  I won't bore you with the specs, but this is the first computer system that I bought prebuilt since high-school.  I've always built my computers myself, but this time I just said the hell with it and picked this one up refurbished.  It's been weird not having a personally built system, but the insides of this thing are spotless as hell - not the jumbled mess of wires and cables that I normally leave when I build my own.

25.  Way, way too many pens.  Really.  I have two pen holders that are absolutely jammed with pens.  Why do I need so many?  I type everything!

26.  My subwoofer.  Also makes a great footrest!

27.  A mess of cables that really look hideously ugly in a photo, don't they?


Yesterday, DAY FIVE:  FAVOURITE ITEMS
Tomorrow, DAY SEVEN:  THE REASONING BEHIND DWARVEN BATTLE MEDIC