I was a dyed-in-the-wool film user for a long time. My favorite camera was the Nikon FM3A, an all-manual classic. I had the suite of Nikon glass to go with it. That all changed around 2003 with the introduction of the Canon 10D. I was floored by the quality, and being a computer geek, I was blown away by what was possible in the retouching world with Photoshop. I sold my entire Nikon kit and picked up a Canon 10D with good zoom lens and never looked back at film.

My photography, and photography in general, are going through another revolution now. But rather than film-to-digital, the new transformation is camera-to-smartphone. I picked up an iPhone 4S in October last year. While only an incremental overall jump from my 3GS, the integrated camera was an incredible leap. In a world of Facebook, Instagram and blogs, the 4S is capable of taking better pictures than a dedicated pocket digital camera from a few years ago.

This has really had a huge impact on me as a photographer. I’m taking more pictures now, because my phone is always in my pocket. And while I still use Photoshop for some things, there is now a whole suite of easy-to-use image improvement tools available that produce outstanding results. The experience is as revolutionary as my jump to digital eight years ago.

Here are a few recent pictures with my 4S. The first is a shot of my daughter at Starbucks.

This is from an event at the Park Place Jaguar dealer this month.

Here’s a low-light shot from our company “Vegas Night” party.

And finally here is one from today at the Shops at Willow Bend.

None of these were retouched in Photoshop. While a bit soft compared to “pro” standards, they are all more than acceptable for any online use. The iPhone 4S is an extremely capable camera, even in low light conditions.

So instead of lugging around a DSLR with a big honking zoom lens, my kit now consists of an iPhone 4S and a Olloclip clip-on lens. This gives me everything from the relatively normal perspective of the stock iPhone 4S all the way to a Fisheye view.

For image manipulation on the iPhone, I use Instagram, which not only allows me to apply good lookinging effects to my photos, it is also an excellent way to share my pictures with the world.

Thanks to Photostream in iOS 5, I can also easily edit pictures on my Mac and iPad. On the iPad, Snapseed is my preferred tool. And on my Mac, I use Aperture 3 and Flare. Snapseed was just released for Mac, so I’ll be checking that out too.

None of these have the sophistication of Photoshop, but they are all very easy to use and make it possible for the casual photographer to produce outstanding results.

Photography is going through another major transformation. I expect the market for point-and-shoot digital cameras to evaporate as the cameras in smartphones continue to improve. DSLRs will still have their niche, and I’ll still lust for a Nikon D800, but few people need 20MP+ images to satisfy their photography requirements. The biggest transformation for me is the fun factor. I haven’t had this much fun with my photography in years, and I’m taking more pictures than ever.

Adam Hartung has an excellent write-up over at Forbes outlining how this is a major failure on the part of the AMR management team. I can sum up the failure in even fewer words: AMR was not playing to win, they were playing not to lose.

Playing not to lose is, unfortunately, the typical death spiral today of our corporate giants. Instead of wow’ing customers and delivering outstanding products customer want to pay for, they hunker down and try to squeeze as much cost savings as they can out of their current, failed strategies. They think they can survive until better times if they just save a few more pennies. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen. Cost cutting without innovation is a race to the bottom. You can’t out cost-cut your competitors, so you’re just racing to see who fails last. The game becomes about not losing, even though you really do lose.

Top companies play to win. I’m sure Apple controls costs, but their first priority is to delight their customers. You don’t see Apple trying to undercut Samsung and Dell to stay relavent. They build a product people want to buy, and as a consequence, can set the price point where they want, and not worry about the competitors.

Being in IT, it is incredibly easy to tell when a company isn’t playing to win. The first sign is usually having a bean counter in the IT management chain. Bean counters are usually 100% about not losing, instead of winning. Robert Crandall at AMR was a bean counter. He was proud he saved $700K for the company by not putting olives in the salad. Yet he was completely oblivious to how all those small cuts affected his company’s brand and destroyed customer loyalty, costing him 100x what he thought he saved.

The second sign you’re company is only playing not to lose is when you hear IT management start talking about “running IT like a business”. This means your senior managers failed to run the business like a business, and now they’re just looking to trim corners to stay alive. Unless you’re in the IT business, you can’t run IT like a business. IT is cost center. Can IT implement a chargeback model and increase billable hours to the business? Or increase rates? Maybe even increase production support costs and start charging per deployment to create extra revenue? Of course not! You would only be a paper profit center, robbing from Peter to pay Paul while having a zero-sum impact on the company’s bottom line.

So “running IT like a business,” when IT is a cost center, is a fancy way of saying “we’re going to cut costs in IT to try and hide our inability to run the business like a business.” It means they’re playing not to lose. But you can’t win by playing not to lose.

I spent 10 years in the United States Air Force, including 5+ years on flight status flying missions aboard various specialized reconnaissance aircraft as a Russian linguist. I enjoyed my time, but I also got to see things that no sane American would ever want to see for real.

After language and intel training, the next step to aircrew status was survival training in Spokane, Washington. I attended the basic wilderness and water survival courses, but also less pleasant courses including POW training and another classified survival course which no attendee will ever forget in their life.

There should be no aircrew member who has gone through the training at Spokane who should not say, unequivocally, that waterboarding is torture. Yet last night, nearly a stage full of men and women seeking this nation’s highest office failed this simple question.

This should absolutely outrage any American, and every veteran, as it does me. Throughout history, there has never been a doubt waterboarding was torture. We prosecuted Nazi’s during the Nuremberg Trials for waterboarding. We hung Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs. We prosecuted our own soldiers for waterboarding during the Vietnam War.

Yet when given the chance to demonstrate moral clarity, all but two of the Republican candidates failed the test. Even more appalling is that these same candidates have somehow deluded themselves into believing waterboarding is acceptable even though they profess to be good Christians. You cannot be a Christian and believe waterboarding is acceptable.

If a candidate cannot pass such a simple test of morality, they unworthy of our nation’s highest office and are a stain on the honor of America’s veterans and our forefathers.

I read two very interesting articles recently which synergized nicely with one of the books of I’ve been reading. The book is Seth Godin’s Linchpin, which preaches creating a career that is a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom. The two articles are Forbe’s Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle in the USA and Mark Cuban’s blog post What Business is Wall Street In?

The relationship between these three became apparent when HP announced they were ditching PC’s and becoming a “services company”. That’s a nice way of saying “we failed in our race to the bottom and are going to become bullshit artists”. With the exception of a few awesome cases, most publicly traded-companies have slavishly pursued quarterly earnings at the expense of long term viability. A few rich bastards have essentially screwed over several future generations to line their own pockets today.

The key is to make things, which is what we are rapidly losing the ability to do. I was shocked to learn from the Forbes article that we can’t make numerous electronic devices or even rechargeable batteries without China. Given the next world war will be the USA + World vs China (or China + World vs USA), it is ludicrous from a national security standpoint to have eliminated such basic competence from our repertoire.

Germany is the anchor of Europe, and it is because they kept the ability to create things. There are still excellent manufacturers in this county making things, but they tend to be niche and expensive products. Some of my favorites include Goruck, Wilson Combat, Harley-Davidson, Lum-Tec, Bark River Knives, Randolph Engineering and Timbuk2. The Goruck blog is a pretty entertaining read on the pursuit of made-in-America excellence. But none of these together can come close to counterbalancing America’s lost ability to produce stuff. Your typical American CEO would happily whore out their own wives and daughters to improve quarterly earnings, and care even less about the long-term viability of our country.

We need to get back to making things. And the way to make it happen is to vote with your wallet. Look at that label the next time you make a non-trivial purchase. Why aren’t you buying that watch, or sun glasses, or anything, that wasn’t made in the USA? We didn’t win two world wars being a service economy, and your spending will decide whether we become a nation that creates things, or a nation of Bullshit Artists.

I read The 4-Hour Work Week last year, and in spite of the slacker title, it was pretty good on ideas to improve your work/life balance. It also kicked off my interest in reading this genre of book.

I started the year with Tribal Leadership. One of my ExtJS Twitter friends spoke pretty highly of it, so I gave it a read. I followed it up with Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, about the Zappos culture. I found the sequencing of my reading ironic in that Tribal Leadership talks about the stages of an organization and Delivering Happiness covers what an organization working at the top of its game looks like.

The third book was one I just stumbled upon. I’ve started going to the Social Media Club of Dallas meetings to expand my horizons. I’ve always been interested in social media, and this club allows me to meet the people who make a living at it. Last month’s presentation was by Tim Sanders, who wrote a book called Today We Are Rich.

I really didn’t know what to expect from the presentation, but Tim turned out to be an incredibly talented speaker. The book is mostly about his grandmother, who raised him, intertwined with some rules on living better. His presentation was a mix of excerpts from the book with additional commentary. I liked the presentation enough that I bought the book for my Kindle that night.

The book was fast read, but a powerful read. Tim lays out seven essential principles for a better life:

1. Feed Your Mind Good Stuff: learn how to identify and filter out the negativity that surrounds us
2. Move The Conversation Forward: learn to break free from the negative thought cycle and communicate positivity and confidence
3. Exercise Your Gratitude Muscle: learn to practice thankfulness to build a positive outlook
4. Give To Be Rich: learn how generosity of self can combat feelings of inadequacy
5. Prepare Your Self: learn how to fully commit yourself to your goals and be ready for anything
6. Balance Your Confidence: learn to temper your self-confidence by trusting in others and believing in something greater than yourself
7. Promise Made, Promise Kept: learn the value of integrity by being accountable for your promises

Each chapter digs in to these in greater depth. Whereas Tribal Leadership and Delivering Happiness started to get a bit too repetitive halfway through, this book stayed fresh to the end. The book’s only fault is that Tim would occasionally drift in too spiritual a direction for my taste.

I’ve started trying to apply a few of these and I can honestly say I’ve felt an improvement in my attitude and perspective. I would have never intentionally read this book if I hadn’t seen Tim speak, yet it has turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read this year. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.

Tim’s first principle is to feed you mind good stuff. I’ve embraced this and am using it as encouragement to get through a lot more books. My current reading list is:

• Linchpin (Seth Godin)
• Anything You Want (Derek Sivers)
• Enchantment (Guy Kawasaki)
• The Thank You Economy (Gary Vaynerchuk)

All are loaded up on my trusty Kindle and I want to finish at least one a month.

So checkout Today We Are Rich, and if you have any other suggestions on books I might like, please leave a comment.

The parade was a great time. I was really surprised to see the streets so packed. It was a small town parade; nothing fancy. But everyone was having a great time and I learned straight-laced Plano even hosts a bunch of Boba Fett bounty hunters. I wish the city would put them to use for the red light runners.

So everyone had fun and my daughter was thrilled. We’ll definitely add this to the agenda, and it even gives me a desire to get more involved with Plano.

In December of 1990, I was a Sergeant in the US Air Force stationed at Eielson AFB outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. I was an airborne Russian linguist, flying aboard various RC-135 aircraft, including the Rivet Joint, Cobra Ball and Cobra Eye. Since I was also a computer geek at heart, my secondary job was as a Computer System Operation (CSO) where I ran the antiquated HP1000 mainframe used by our system on the ground.

We had been watching the build-up in the gulf for Desert Shield, but it didn’t mean much to us half-way around the world. That all changed when my boss, Spud Webster, said they were looking for a volunteer to be a CSO in Riyadh to support the RC-135’s deployed there. Being young and bullet-proof, I readily volunteered. I joined the Air Force to see new things, and this was a shot I wasn’t going to pass up.

My mother didn’t share my same enthusiasm when I gave her the news I volunteered to go to war. Now, many years later, I can appreciate the heart attack I almost gave her. My father sent me the medallion of Saint Christopher that he carried with him in Vietnam.

I flew out of Eielson bound for Riyadh on Christmas Day, 1990. Master Sergeant Tom Lamb also volunteered to go, and he was going to work on the operations staff. We hitched a ride on a rotation aircraft to Offutt AFB, then tagged along on an empty RC-135 headed for Athens.

In Athens, Tom and I had to change planes and complete the final leg of the journey in a KC-135 tanker. It was a packed flight. The plane was full to the gills with equipment and support personnel. We finally got in to Riyadh and the first stark change for me was the seriousness in the air. The Air Force in the 1990s was pretty much a giant boys club, especially for aircrew. TDY (temporary duty) entailed flying to fun places and drinking with the boys. Riyadh was not going to be that.

We got our first in-brief there on flightline. The big point was to ensure we kept our chem gear handy. At the time, Saddam had some nasty stuff and a willingness to use it. We continued on at our main compound in downtown Riyadh at the US Military Training Mission (USMTM) next to the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) headquarters.

Our tents and trailers were setup on a soccer field in the compound. They had put up razor wire and sandbags around the field. Our facilities for the RC-135s were only a small part of what was going on there. The entire soccer field was covered with tents and trailers like a scene out of MASH. Each tent had a page in a plastic document protector saying what level of security clearance was required to go into the tent. The Air Force had brought out all their best toys and was going to put them to the test.

Our squadron commander was Colonel Lewis. He was one of those crufty, no-bullshit, full-bird colonels the Air Force keeps in their back pocket in case of emergency. He wasn’t there to build leaders, mentor or make spouses happy – he was there to win a war.

My primary work facility was a small, heavily air-conditioned trailer with a stripped-down version of our ground system, along with four processing stations. The job consisted of preparing missions materials for the 24-hour-a-day RC-135 coverage of the theater. It was basically a lot of copying disks and erasing old data after the missions.

Tom and I were assigned to the same empty apartment in Eskan Village, outside of Riyadh. Eskan Village was essentially an empty city the Saudis had constructed, obstinately for the Bedouins. It was all empty five-bedroom houses and apartment towers. Given the toilets were western style, and included a bidet, we all doubted the official story. It was pretty clear the Saudis anticipated someone was going to need to come save their asses at some point and they were going to need a place to live.

Each of us had a room to ourselves in the apartment, furnished with a cot. There was no other furniture. The living room consisted of a Sony TV and VCR sitting on the floor, donated by the Japanese. We eventually picked up some more roommates, but I can’t even remember what they did.

Tom was a bit hardcore, and after we moved in to the apartment, he asked me if I had written my letter. I actually had no idea what he was talking about, so he explained the final letter soldiers traditionally carried in war zones which would be sent back to the family in case they were killed. The whole thought of that struck me pretty hard, and after stewing it over for an hour, I decided I wouldn’t write the letter because I had no intention of dying there, simple as that.

Life was pretty straight forward in the lead-up to the war. Work, eat, sleep. There were five CSOs on site, led by Scott Davis, which was more than enough for the mission, so I ended up doing a lot of odd jobs. Depending on the day, I was working in the trailer, shuttling mission loads out to the airstrip, driving the bus for the crews, or riding shotgun for other people.

The last task was the most laughable. We were in Riyadh, well away from any front, but there was a lot of paranoia in the air. When out in the bus or shuttling the mission loads, I would be given an M16 and ammo pouch, “just in case”. Mind you, I had never fired a real M16 before, and the security police had to show me how to clear it, but it was the thought that counts.

Taking mission loads to the planes was the most excitement. Jay, one of our admin guys, would usually drive. We’d toss a bunch of highly classified stuff in to the bed of a pickup truck and Jay would drive like a bat out of hell through downtown Riyadh heading for our planes at the airport, with me sitting in the passenger seat with the M16. All the smart Saudis left Riyadh prior to the war, so the streets were mostly empty.

Everything changed about three weeks later. I found out the air war was going to kick off the afternoon prior. We moved everyone to a tent city by the airport to be closer to the planes. It absolutely sucked. It was winter in Saudi Arabia, and the rainy season to boot. It was mud city with 20 cots to a tent. I spent the evening of the start of the war cleaning .38 caliber revolvers for the RC-135 aircrew to take with them. We locked the revolvers and ammo up in mission boxes with a padlock and would transfer the key to each Airborne Mission Supervisor (AMS) prior to the mission.

One big consequence of Desert Storm actually starting was they closed down the cafeteria and we had to eat MREs. I could have anything I wanted, as long as it came in a green plastic bag. Since a lot of the combinations weren’t too tasty, we had a huge box of MRE parts inside our main tent at USMTM. The crackers and peanut butter alone were enough calories for a meal.

The Iraqi’s didn’t appreciate the air war too much, and returned the favor by shooting their Scuds at us. The very next evening after the start of the campaign, I was working the night shift at USMTM and we had just gotten the evening crews launched when I decided to catch some sleep. There was a cot behind the map boards at the end of our tent we used for briefing the crews. I had just lain down to sleep when the air raid sirens went off.

Total panic erupted. I grabbed my gas mask, flak jacket and Kevlar helmet, and dived under one of the old-fashioned steel army desks we had in the tent. I put the flak jacket on my knees to close up the opening under the desk, and tried to keep from hyperventilating while I put on my gas mask and helmet. Time started standing still. I heard some enormous explosions, and the ground even shook. I thought for sure we were hit. Then, time started up again, and someone came running in to the tent. He was yelling “the patriots got the Scuds!” A dozen of us came crawling out from under our improvised hiding places. Everyone started cheering and high-fiving.

The Scuds turned out to be more a weapon of terror than war. We had a few close calls in Riyadh. Newsweek had picture of an American GI in chemical gear standing in front of a Scud on a street. That picture was taken just down the road from our compound. And one of our planes took some shrapnel damage from a Scud that hit out at the airport, but no one was injured.

Ironically, the only injury I heard of from our squadron was a tired maintenance guy who fell down the front chute of our plane.

Scubs became pretty common place after that. The Iraqis liked shooting them at night, hoping to increase the survivability of the launchers. What this meant was having air raid sirens going off in the middle of about every night at Eskan Village. The first few times, all of us would get up, put on the chem gear, plop down on the floor in front of the donated TV and watch the news to see who was getting hit. After about a week of that, we didn’t even get up anymore.

Desert Storm was really our first Nintendo war. It was the equivalent of fishing in a barrel with a hand grenade. President Bush rightly stopped the war after the Highway of Death. I remember guys out in Eskan who were selling picture albums from the Highway of Death. Lots of photos of charred corpses and guys cut in half by tank treads. It really was a slaughter of the retreating Iraqi army trying to get their asses out of Kuwait.

The most haunting memory of the first Gulf War was hearing an American pilot get captured. The crews had brought back a recording of an A10 pilot talking on his survival radio after getting shot down. He was trying to make contact with an inbound rescue helicopter but a truck full of Iraqi soldiers got to him first. His last comments were “game over, man” before they took away his radio. The pilot ended up a POW and I found out he was released after the war.

I ended up spending six months in Riyadh – all of Desert Storm and the first part of Southern Watch. I worked with a lot of very good people that I’m proud to know. The war was a major life-changing event for me. It made me appreciate that winning means coming home alive – the rest is just details.

Now, as I’ve pushed past 40 years old, it has become near impossible for me to assign the label “hero” to anyone. This is mostly because I’ve learned the world is a lot more about infinite shades of gray, rather than the crisp black & white view that hero worship tends to require. But it is also because my definition of a hero has evolved. Courage and noble qualities are still important, and all too lacking in our modern world, but a hero is someone who also makes a difference. And not just for today, but for tomorrow, or century from now. And to make it doubly tough, I think any living hero should be the kind of person you’d want to have a beer with.

When I hold up my yardstick to the currently living field of contenders, almost none measure up. The vast majority of modern athletes will be long forgotten in a decade and have no effect on the world. Sports isn’t about heros, it is about business. Astronauts are still cool, and most would probably be fun to have a beer with, but they’re just scientists doing their jobs. And modern “celebrities” fare even worse against the yardstick.

So who are the modern heros? Living men and women with courage, compassion, integrity and conviction, who are making a difference in the history books. And of course, they must still be down-to-earth enough that you’d slam back a pint with them any day. If we look back at the 20th century, I would put Teddy Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and Mahatma Gandhi on this list, but they don’t count for a modern hero survey since they would be hard to have a beer with.

I actually had to wrack my brain for quite a while to even come up with few names that might pass the hero test. And as that list evolved, I also added another quality to my heros: the quest for truth. I couldn’t admire anyone as a hero who wasn’t willing to pursue the truth, regardless of whether it was the popular or politically correct thing to do.

I ended up with only two names: Sebastião Salgado and Reza Deghati. Both are names most people have probably never heard of, but have probably seen their work. They are two of the top photojournalists in the world.

So how do I arrive at a pair of photojournalists for heros? If you take a look at the pictures either has produced, their courage and conviction are clear. Pick up one of their photo books some day and read the prose. You’ll understand their integrity and quest for the truth. And their work is timeless. Generations will stare in awe at their chronicle of cultures and human experience that most spoiled westerners want to conveniently forget exists.

So we’ve got the personality traits, the quest for truth and the making a difference part. Now what about the beer factor? I haven’t read anything about Sebastiao that would suggest I wouldn’t want to have a beer with him. As for Reza, I met him and his wife at a book signing in Paris in 2006. His humility and kindness were staggering. He actually spent 10 minutes talking with every person who’s book he signed.

These are the kind of people the world needs more of. I proudly claim both as my heros. Now who are yours?

I continued to play throughout my own military career, expanding out into many other games. I usually ended up being the ring leader / gamemaster and had the pleasure of running campaigns for AD&D, Shadowrun, Top Secret, Champions, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire: The Masquerade and various one-offs just for fun. I quit regular play over a decade ago after leaving the military, but I still collect the books.

Tabletop gaming is a bit of an enigma nowadays. In the era of World of Warcraft, everyone is too busy on their computers to actually sit down at the same table together to experience face to face gaming. And it is a loss. There are whole generations who will not know the joy of exploring Expedition to Barrier Peaks or the Keep on the Borderlands. Then there is the palpable terror of taking a group through Missing Blood or The Haunted House for the first time. These were the experiences of my youth that I think every imaginative kid should have have the chance to know and enjoy.

It is sad because in the age of instant gratification on the web, people miss out on actually using their imagination in a social setting. WoW is about the destination, killing monsters to get better gear; RPGs are about the journey — the roads travelled together by friends exploring the depths of their imagination.

The state of gaming is sad today compared to the heydays, but it is still going strong for some. I finally attended a GenCon last year and was awed with the quantity and quality of gaming experiences. I’ve resolved to go every year I can now and plan to take my daughter when she is big enough. Since the collapse of the big names (TSR, FASA, White Wolf), the gaming scene has changed a lot. But there are still some nuggets of awesomeness out there:

Pathfinder – Paizo is now carrying the reigns to the heart of D&D in their own RPG inspired by D&D 3.5. Their books and modules are extremely well written and bring back the excitement of what RPGs are supposed to be about. Where the current 4th edition of D&D feels like a computer game, Pathfinder is role playing gaming at it’s finest.

Delta Green – Pagan Publishing took the Call of Cthulhu mythos and gave it an X-Files spin. I’m a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft, and Delta Green puts a modern conspiracy theory flavor on top of it. There are a couple books of Delta Green fiction which are must-reads, and the gaming books themselves are fascinating.

Goodman Games – These guys write some of the best modules out there for D&D. They actually care about the story telling. I ran in two of their games at GenCon last year and they were a really good time.

Kobold Quarterly – This magazine reminds me of what Dragon magazine used to be like in the early days. Awesome content and a thrill to read. Every gamer should subscribe.

The Oldies – One of my favorite settings is still a combination of first edition AD&D along with some spice from the Arduin Grimoire series. You can easily find all the classics at good prices at any of the used game vendors like Noble Knight, and it will be a more satisfying gaming experience than a lot of the new crap out there.

Unfortunately, for every bright spot, there is a trail of failure — and that trail is littered with the former glory of the big names:

D&D 4th Edition – In an attempt to reboot the game, Hasbro/WOTC has created a tabletop version of World of Warcraft. While fun the first few times, it quickly loses it’s luster and doesn’t have the feel of anything I would want to run a campaign in. And it still has the wallet-sucking book-a-month bloat problem.

Shadowrun – This IP has passed through many hands. From FASA to Whiz Kids to Catalyst Labs, it has lost something along each hop. At the beginning, I was enthralled with the setting and possibilities. It was truly brilliant. But the rules are fundamentally over complicated and imbalanced, and it gets old having every adventure end in a double cross.

Champions – This was the original dream game for min-maxers. Even the early guides took a tongue-in-cheek approach to it. But the early game was concise and had a really fun combat system. The latest versions of Champions / Hero Systems are now encyclopedia-sized monstrosities of rules. I play to have fun, not to study.

White Wolf – The first version of Vampire: The Masquerade was pure brilliance. I actually had a campaign I ran for about a year set in my home town of Olympia, Washington. It was fresh and fun. Then the book bloat hit. Now I’m afraid to even look at the White Wolf bookshelf. And White Wolf literally held a contest at GenCon having people compete to see who could hold up their latest two-inch thick sourcebook the longest.

So I’ve resolved this year to try and be a more active gamer. I’ve already registered for GenCon this year, and look forward to meeting new friends and discovering new games. And anyone out there who was also a gamer should take a look at the current crop of winners and support them.

Here’s an overview of the whole desk. I’m a wide-open spaces person for desks, so my desk is a 30×60 inch commercial workbench. Simple and to the point.

My computer is a 13″ MacBook Pro with 4gb of RAM. I use a 23″ Apple Cinema Display at home. This gives me the best of both worlds. Plenty of screen real estate when I’m at the desk, while still having a small laptop for on-the-go work.

My only grief with the display is that it sits too low when I’m seated at the desk. A quick trip to my local Woodcraft store solved that problem. I bought an 8x8x2 inch block of nice hardwood and smoothed it down. I then glued a piece of thick brown leather on the top and felt feet on the bottom. It is the perfect stand for this display.

My second best investment was a BookArc for holding my MacBook vertically behind the display. It doesn’t hold the laptop completely vertical like in the picture, but it is very stable and helps save a ton of desk space.

Here you can see how the MacBook tucks in behind the screen.

For the keyboard, I picked up one of the compact Apple bluetooth keyboards. I love the compact size, and it is easy to get out of the way when I need to work on other stuff on my desk. I stuck with a Logitech mouse, the VX Nano. It is a shame Logitech quit making them. It is the best mouse I’ve ever used. It is a laptop size mouse but still works perfect for all-day work at the desk.

Finally, two of my favorite desk accessories are a Rotring 600 Series 3 .7mm mechanical pencil and ballpoint pen. These are the older models with the knurled grips. They haven’t been made for over a decade and have become collectors items on eBay. If it is good enough for Jason Bourne, it is good enough for me.

So this is the current state of my geek creation station. We’ll see how long it lasts, but a clean desk feels like a clean mind.