Taken on October 15, 2004.

Five years ago today: Well, not really. I haven’t been keeping up with my “five years ago today posts” and so this one is a bit late. Switching to the Macintosh was a fairly long process for me due to the work I was doing at the time. My having the iMac up and on my desk, as my main computer at the time, was sort of a big deal for me.

The desk I had at the time was an old library table. It wasn’t very fashionable but it was sturdy and did its job until I switched to the IKEA desk that I have now.

The Microsoft Wireless keyboard and mouse, which came with a USB dongle that I despised, wasn’t a bad setup at the time. I miss the ergonomics of the keyboard, actually. The new, slim keyboards from Apple are incredibly nice to type on but are not as nice on the wrists as that keyboard was.

You’ll notice that a really old version of TheUberGeeks.net (a site that has since gone the way of the dinosaur) is loaded on the iMac. The good old days indeed.

This is my blog and I can post as many ‘hey my cat is cute and is sleeping’ videos that I want to, b’okay?

Part reason to play with 15 second videos again, part quick way to document that my office is clean at the moment, here is a 15 second video tour of my cleaned up office!

Inspired by Chris Masto’s Workspace shot on Flickr – here is my way-too-messy desk. Made with Pano for iPhone.

Here are a few videos that I have seen on Viddler recently to help those of us that work at an office, or at least at our desks, and would like to do something to help ourselves during the day.

The office workout

Jennifer DiDonato, whom I interviewed on the Viddler blog several months ago about her Brides Made Fit show, has an excellent episode of Made Fit TV that relates to this very problem. The office workout, as she calls it, involves a few exercises that you can do without leaving your desk and – even better – without the need of special equipment.

Fat loss tips with Marc Lebert

Even though Viddler Adam Toohey calls this a Fat Loss Tips video I think these are more just great exercises you can do with or without The Equalizer. I use chairs to do these exercises (until I can afford an Equalizer because I think it looks like a really simple and great piece of workout equipment).

However, Marc makes a great point in the video that I think many people are really, really confused about that try to lose weight. Eating. Your metabolism is the #1 weapon against weight gain and your #1 solution for losing weight. It is, in a sense, the silver bullet for dieters. Anything you can do to restore your metabolism and to keep your metabolism working at a high rate will both help you lose weight and help you keep it off. (More on this in a future post.)

So there are two quick videos that I think will help all of you office workers. Like me.

Date taken: July 15, 2008 | Gary Vaynerchuk at his desk in Springfield, New Jersey.

Simultaneously testing out cross posting to my site, Flickr, and now Brightkite (just for fun) and showing off my wine barrel trash can.

Pookers is “working” with me today.

Here is a short video tour of my current office setup. It consists of a Macbook, a Dell 21-inch widescreen monitor, some external hard drives, and a few iPods all on a desk from IKEA. I’ve also got my art desk (which I need to use much more often than I am currently). And don’t forget, my new office used to be filled with blue elephants.

If you can’t do video – perhaps you can take a few snapshots and post those. Whatever works best!

[tags]office, desk, ikea, viddler, 9rules, video, tour, macintosh, apple, macbook, dell, monitor, ipod, external hard drive, watercolor, art, colin devroe[/tags]
[slug]office-tour-video[/slug]

My chair as of this morning

Why did I let it get this bad? About one week after I got my chair, the thing started to literally fall apart. The arm rests chipped away, the mesh began to deteriorate, etc. I can’t believe how fast it began to break down.

Broken wheel

That was 1 year and almost 10 months ago. And finally this morning one of the 5 wheels keeping me from sitting on the ground broke. Now some of you out there, you know who you are, blamed my weight as the culprit. Oh? Where are you now people? Hmm? I weigh 40(some) pounds less and this thing finally bites the dust.

Needless to say I was trying to make this chair last as long as possible. I figure that I’ve finally got my moneys worth out of it, so I’ll have to do some looking around to see what is available in my price-range.

Oh, if any of you reading this have an Aeron chair that you’d like to just give me. You may send me an email and I’ll give you my shipping address.

[tags]chair, office, aeron, photo[/tags]

See, the tenants that lived here prior had a few kids and a few dogs. I’m not sure on the number of kids, but I am sure on the number of dogs, two. And not your run of the mill puppies either – a pit bull and a rotwilier. From what I’ve been told the two dogs wreaked havoc in the apartment all day long tearing apart wood and such. Our landlord had done a very good job of repairing the damage by the dogs.

But, did he do just as good of a job repairing “the damage” from the children? My current office is the old kids-bedroom. Here is what the bedroom looked like prior to us moving in.

The office before we moved in
Complete with elephant border

Yellow and ?turquoise? with an elephant border. Not exactly the image I had planned on projecting with ChanceCube, so it had to go.

Over the few weeks preceding our move-in, we stripped off the wallpaper, put down a coat of primer, two coats of paint, one coat of trim color, and generally cleaned it up. Here are a few photos showing that progression.

Scoring the border

Border = scored

See ya elephants

Removing outlet covers

Fixing holes and trim

One primer coat

 
Nearly done

Painting the office

For whatever reason my other two helpers on this project are not in any of the photos – probably because they were the ones taking the photos. Eliza and Mike helped me through each and every step of the process, so thank you both for helping me out.

The completed office

You can see the end result and it was truly worth the effort as I now have a place, free of elephants, that I can get my work done.