Upgraded treadmill desk with coffee mug from the Atomic Testing Museum.

My treadmill desk has been such a success, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I put my little netbook spare back into mothballs and bought a Dell Inspirion 2020 all-in-one desktop ($400 at Best Buy). I outfitted this with a wireless mouse, a Microsoft Arc ergonomic keyboard, and a Logictech touchpad T650.

Then the fun began.

My improvised wire rack desk has worked well, but I knew it couldn’t stand up to the additional weight (It did, barely, but with a slightly scary wobble). So I ordered an Ergotron LX desk mount LCD arm. This is a well-made monitor arm, but left me with two problems: 1) how to mount it to my treadmill, and 2) how to mount my non-VESA monitor to it.

The Ergotron arm is designed to mount to a desk, either by clamping to the edge or bolting through a hole. The mounting hardware is extremely well made and could easily have been adapted to bolt onto one arm of the treadmill, but this would have eaten up four inches of usable space.

Instead, I needed to mount the arm’s riser to the treadmill’s handle grip, really a steel crossbar that stiffens the frame and has no other function but to hold two palm grip pulse sensors that I never use.

Rota-Lock perpendicular clamp.

Rota-Lock makes a clever, $15 pipe clamp used to form perpendicular joints in scaffolding and light bar rigging for theatrical work. A continuous loop of heavy steel rod is bent and bent again to form perpendicularly opposing saddles. A forged seat rests between the pipes to be joined and is cranked down with a locking bolt until it forces the pipes apart–firmly locking them between its own recesses and the outer saddle. Because the 35mm riser and the treadmill handle are both a bit smaller than the smallest Rota-Lock is designed for, I left the plastic palm sensor in place and fit the riser with the rubber sleeve from a $3 plumbing pipe repair clamp. I also replaced the clamp’s locking bolt with a slightly longer one from the hardware store, just to give it a little more travel.

Pictured here (right), the black, Ergotron riser stands vertically in front of the horizontal treadmill grip. The locking bolt is on the left and can just be seen digging through the plastic of the handle sensor. This installation is not good for the 1,800 pound foot rating of the clamp, but should have more than adequate safety margins for my 20 pound computer. Anyway, it seems rock solid. Edit: Clamp has remained rock solid for over 3 years, with one removal and reinstallation for treadmill maintenance.

VESA Plate modified to fit Dell Inspirion mount.

At the other end of the arm, problem #2 was easily solved. The Dell computer stand bolts on with an odd but heavy-duty steel plate that clips in such that the weight of the monitor tends to lock it in place. The Ergotron arm is pre-drilled to fit a standard VESA mount–that is, four bolts at the corners of either a 75mm or 100mm square. The VESA plate is sturdy enough, I simply drilled new holes to accommodate machine screws passing through the VESA plate (shown), through the Dell mounting plate (click to enlarge) and into the computer. Slightly longer metric machine screws (shown in top two holes) ensure that the mount will hold. Edit: Mount has remained trouble-free for over three years.

This only left me with the work surface to settle. The open wire shelving has its advantages, but it really isn’t a very good work surface. While testing out the new system, I found a handy scrap of 1/4″ plywood just the right width to fit the wire shelving. This was actually left over packaging from the treadmill, but was perfect for completing my desktop. The table saw cut it to length and nibbled away the recesses needed for the upper shelf to lock into the base shelf. A little sandpaper and spray varnish and voila!

Work Surface

Work Surface

Finished Treadmill Desk

The result is strong and sturdy and doesn’t shake at all. I can type at a comfortable level, swap out the keyboard for a laptop if needed, and even keep my coffee within reach. What’s not to love? So far, using this treadmill desk a few hours a week and using MyFitnessPal to track my calories, I’ve lost nearly 50 pounds.

Lots of places give discounts to veterans as a way of saying thanks for their service. One couple in South Dakota aims to give something more–a free vacation.

Many of my earliest memories are of South Dakota’s Black Hills. It’s a special, privileged feeling to stand among those creaking pines, look out over the prairie, and ponder a fossil trilobite plucked from the hillside. It’s a land of ancient peoples and modern marvels, gold-flecked stream beds and campfires sending embers to meet the sparkling gems of the unobscured Milky Way.

Now, Jeff and Pat Baird of Custer have spearheaded a project to share all that with a few of our nation’s heroes. With the help of retired Air Force colonel Marty Mahrt, retired airline pilot Richard Geeting and hotel manager Ione Fejfar, they’ve secured enough donations to buy and furnish a 1,200 square foot cabin for use by veterans wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan and their families, to complement contributions from various area rentals and businesses.

Qualified veterans receive a free week’s vacation in the cabin or another in the Custer area, along with meals and admission to the many nearby family attractions in the Black Hills.

Operation Black Hills Cabin is a great concept and deserves our support. It can also serve as an inspiration to those who are in a position to copy the idea in other parts of the country.

For more information, check them out on FaceBook at www.facebook.com/operationblackhillscabin.

Some of you may not give a flamingo’s slippers about this, so I’ll keep it short.

As regular followers know, I bought a treadmill over the Christmas break, assembled a treadmill desk, and started using it and MyFitnessPal as part of my normal writing routine the second week of January.

I try to walk at least an hour a day, probably average a little over two, and occasionally up to eight. I never exceed 2.2 MPH with a 2% incline. I eat what I like, but hold myself to the daily net calorie targets set by MyFitnessPal. In practice, this means almost no bread, pasta, or rice, and generally pretty healthy eating. I’m not starving myself or suffering in any way. I do drink a lot of decaf, and I count the calories in the creamer and artificial sweetener.

After slowly losing ground for twenty years, I’ve lost 44 lbs in six months. My cholesterol is down 20%. My BP is down 20%. I am now about 15 pounds from the recommended ideal weight for my height–even without accounting for age. I see no problem with reaching that target and maintaining it indefinitely.

It ain’t easy, but it ain’t complicated, either. Just sayin’.

I bought a pair of those silly, er, trendy toe shoes that have been popping up everywhere. Why would I do that, you ask? Well, not to jump on the minimalist footwear bandwagon, that’s for sure. Humanity may have survived shoe-less until the last few centuries, but they did it with lots of broken toes, mutilated nails, and parasite-infected barking dogs. No, I did it because I’ve lost 44 pounds in five months by walking between two and six hours every day, and there simply is no footwear up to the abuse.

I’ve worn hiking shoes, walking shoes, pool shoes, good leather sandals, two kinds of boots and a pair of steel-toed anti-static sneakers. All have their place, but most of these have the side effect of crowding the toes together. This fosters the further side effect of asymmetrical callouses that eventually become hard and get pinched and generally become noisome.

The toe shoe, a shoe in which each (or at least most) of the toes gets its own little pocket, is a rather obvious solution to this particular problem. Fortunately, I live in an age in which most obvious solutions (and many, many far from obvious ones) are for sale within walking distance of my home—at least in principal.

So I bought a pair of Fila Bay-Run-Some-Damn-Thing-Or-Others and here’s what I think. They work. That is, they solve the problem without immediately presenting any intractable new ones. They do cause my stride to wobble and my knees to hurt a bit, but I’m provisionally okay with that because that just means they are bringing into play fine motor skills and muscles that have spent too much of the last two decades sleeping while hard leather uppers and synthetic soles went “clomp clomp clomp” along life’s byways. That’s fine. That means, if anything, that I’ll be burning more calories. Aside from that, they stink. Well, they smell a little.

Unfortunately, the impetus for this product is not good solid practical Americans like me, it’s the aforementioned fad. As a result, few toe shoes come with any sort of arch support or sole, and many take a positively narcissistic pride in the omission. In fairness, Fila makes a better shoe called the “Voltage” which has characteristics more suitable to humans living in the modern world, but the local store only carries these things—suitable only for the beach or for the lighter heft of Martian gravity. Well, perhaps I’ll order something from Amazon.

In the meantime, to those who think anti-shoism is a sensible idea, I say this. The whole idea of minimal shoe running arose from a spate of African bare-footed masters who emerged in recent decades and went on to Olympic fame. Despite their successes, the rest of the running world has not followed suit. Why? Because careful scientific analysis has revealed what most knew and some suspected. First, hard use without proper support destroys human feet. Second, Kenyans dominate the track for the same reason minorities dominate American sport: from the time they are small, that’s the only path they see out of poverty.

But, like the rest of my paw wrappers, these have their place, and so I march off into the dream-studded twilight of modern consumerism. At least when these puppies go to the beach, they offer a somewhat less painful alternative to Edward Abbey’s advice to “unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood!, why not?”

I must confess, I never much cared for dogs until I had kids and my wife decided they should have one. I bought a Miniature Australian Shepherd because if I HAD to have a dog, I wanted an actual dog–not something distorted by selective breeding into an affront to the natural world. I exaggerate slightly. The truth is, we had kept a friend’s border collie once and I found her a noble beast, but about three sizes too large for my needs.

Aussies were next of kin to the collie and a miniature breed was available. Other than their size, they were recognizably working dogs, recognizably, in fact, not too distant cousins to the wolf. Breeders warned, however, that an alarming percentage of Aussies, when purchased as pets, end up being taken to the pound. They warned that these were intelligent, willful animals who could not simply be smacked with the odd roll of newsprint and given a bed in the corner. Perfect.

I studied the latest in dog training and psychology. Everything my mother had taught me was completely and utterly wrong, but I could so this. Our dog came from a north Texas equestrian breeder, delivered at great expense by climate-controlled air freight, and no surprise ever more delighted a pair of impressionable girls.

But she never belonged to the girls. I brought her home. I showed her to her food and water. Aussies are bred to have strong jaws. They control sheep by biting at the ankles. Puppies have razor sharp teeth, so I used dog psychology to stop her constant nipping and biting. When she started teething on a $2,000 cherry-wood table, I gave her a more acceptable piece of wood. She started to learn limits, not out of fear, but because I expected it.

She was a sweet little thing when we were home to play with her, but we could not be home all the time. She could escape from or destroy anything of plastic or wood, so expensive steel gates were needed to confine her until she was house-broken. She escaped by squeezing through. I modified. She escaped by leaping over. I adjusted. She borrowed into the wall, I glued up wallboard (I was planning to put wainscoting there anyway).

I taught her a trick, then another, then another. I alternated the toys left out during the day. I taught her to run with my Trike scooter in the fashion of a sled dog and to jog left or right or to check for a post on command. I learned to use hand signals in preference to spoken commands. She learned to find toys by name, to “go get,” to “bring,” to “give,” and to “release,” all as distinct commands. I learned to make her work a little every day, and to recognize pent up energy before it could burst.

Gradually, she slowed down—but not much. She learned how to live in an urban house, and I learned how to be an alpha dog. Often, I know, it frustrates her that I don’t know what any dog should. I took me to or three years to realize why she was so stubborn about eating—she will not eat until I do. I learn and she puts up with me. She lets me bath her and brush her teeth, though she thinks both utterly mad. She makes sure I know when a possum or a squirrel or a blood sucking vampire raccoon is in the yard, and she just knows that if I can just understand her request, I may yet rise up and stop a thunderstorm.

Every night, just like when she was a puppy, she climbs up into my bed and rolls over next to me, exposing her belly for a while, then pads back out to the living room. If she barks in the dead of night, I don’t yell or throw a slipper. I walk out to the living room and ask her what’s what. She runs to a window or door and harrumphs. I turn on the light and look. “Good girl!” I say, “You scarred them away.” I head back to bed and she climbs back up on her perch on the back of the couch. Her fuzzy ear flops and as she rests her lids, but she’s got her eye on things.