My Workstation, and a new toy!

If you remember seeing my desk last time (The CIS rant blog post) it was in ruins, with crap thrown everywhere and hardly a place to stick a coffee cup. I decided to do some spring cleaning, rerouting all the cables and organizing all the peripherals.





Much better, no? All of this was preempted by my birthday gift: A Wacom Bamboo Pen tablet! For those of you not in the know, graphics tablets work like a giant touch-pad, replacing your mouse, and receiving inputs from a pen shaped device called a stylus.




The pad is mapped to correspond to your monitor; tap the stylus to the top right hand corner of the tablet, and your cursor flies to that location. This eliminates the typical click and drag operation with a mouse. It takes some getting used to, but after just three days, I'm beginning to forget about my electro-rodent. It's like driving a school bus, then trading that in for an Audi R8. Twitchy at first, but you never want to go back.
The tablet is pressure sensitive, and you can set this to adjust your brush size, opacity, color, etc. It also gives you a much more natural method to lasso, dodge and burn, erase, and all the other tools requiring more finesse than allowed by bulldozing with a mouse. I'll post updates as I learn this great new tool!