A Loser's Rant

Dissed in the Malibu! I was crushed in the Lifehacker coolest home office contest. Let's break it down.

• The winner has four 15" LCDs, whereas I have two 20" LCDs. That gives the winner about 12% more physical display than I have. If he's running them at 1280x1024 he has about 35% more pixels. Of course, with nuances of scale hard to pick up in the pictures, he may just look like he has twice as much screen as I do.
• The winner uses a keyboard tray. Hard to tell if it is ergonomically poor from the photos, but since almost all of them are let's just assume :-)
• The winner's computers are in his kick zone stuffed directly under his desk, whereas mine are neatly squirreled away where I am insulated from their heat and noise. In this respect the winner's mundane computer configuration is probably like almost all home offices.
• We are treated to no view of the winner's office except for his desk and a plain wall with a window's night-time view of nothing.

I'm not surprised I lost, but I do think this highlights the arbitrariness of these types of popularity contests. I'd wager that if most of the voters got to dork around in both the winner's office and mine for a day, mine would come out the winner almost every time. Usability is always being slain by marketability...

I've also got to say that, of all the entries, the winner had perhaps the least to do with the "home" part of a home office. It is just a single-purpose room with a desk and office junk jammed in it.

And have I mentioned recently how irritating it is that my office somehow became the cactus office in this competition? It is the hole-in-the-floor office, dammit!