I apologize at the outset, for blathering on about my utterly boring and unexceptional situation….. I simply lack anywhere else to go with it… social media is cut off and even if it wasn’t I doubt anyone I knew on there would care. Perhaps it is the same here, but at least my words don’t run away from me at 100 miles an hour…. I wonder how that idiom translates, like to metric countries; 100 kilometers an hour? Seems colder, less emotional.
I’ve been on a quest of sorts, I have a little less than two months until I go back to school. That’s not enough time to find a job…. and even if it was… I’m pretty bitter about the whole job thing as is. So I have to justify myself, to my parents and to myself for the time. One of those tasks has been rearranging my office… always seems to be a decent bulwark against depression to rearrange my furniture. Anyway this particular time I’m trying to follow a more practical model…. after all these years in this same office, I’m trying again to work with the space and not against it. I put my desk up against the wall, and now have easier access to the built in shelves…..
So far I’ve been at it a few weeks. For the past week or so I’ve been chipping away at it, slowly moving stuff, clearing a path. At the beginning of this project I had no floor space at all to work with, just stuff cluttering the path, six years at least of not cleaning behind furniture. Today the last part of my new workspace came together. I got a little table to store my keyboard and mouse on…. an obvious solution perhaps, but one I resisted for many years.
So now I’m sitting at my rebuilt workstation, feeling….. as close to proud as I have in awhile. It’s _MY_ office, even if outside4 these walls I have very little control, in here my will reins supreme. Well, supreme within my budget. If I had my way I’d have a mini split instead of a window unit….. but I seem to always have some improvements in mind I can’t quite afford to make happen.
The next project is getting my printers set up, a laser printer and a 3d printer… I still have to diagnose my old desktop, no idea when that will happen.. and of course we’re waiting on parts for the next project on my primary machine. The case I got when I built it…. sucks, it doesn’t have a rack for hard drives, I’m told that some people consider hard drives “obsolete.” To which I reply aren’t desktop computers considered obsolete yet? With so many fine mobile options, I’m clearly a dinosaur for wanting an immobile shell for my computer to live within. I also don’t buy particularly nice phones as a result. I know people that buy them every year, and brand new. I buy one every five years, and at least a year and a half after release.
Sometimes I wonder, if they are happier. Surely they must be, to have $1000 a year to pay to have the newest prettiest phone….. meanwhile I’m back in the early aughts thinking a phone is an appliance, nothing more.
Oh, the other thing I want to do is clear a space for a dog bed. One of the best things about this office is that there’s room for my dog to lay near me where I can see him while I’m working.
I wish I knew how to be happier about the progress I made, and not just thinking about what next, what next…. can I never just arrive at a point nothing is?
apparently not….. the curse of existence that is.
3 comments
that’s amazing news and I’m not being patronizing when I say that. Organizing a safe corner of the universe can be a game changer. My guess is that it just hasn’t hit you yet how significant this progress is. Your mind is probably experiencing the void of “now what?” and that usually translates to a bad feeling. But give it a day or 2, stretch out, get your dog in there with you, and I think it’ll sink in that you can finally breathe where for months (years) you’ve been psychologically suffocated.
also since you mentioned desktop computers this might be a good place for me to make my technology rant. call me crazy but keyboards have changed drastically with new devices. The tactile feedback isn’t there anymore. Instead we’re being re-trained to type on a flat sheet of glass, and these new low profile keyboards are almost as bad as far as having no feel. Desktop computers, obsolete as they are, still have keyboards that feel like keyboards (which are still a far cry from those awesome chunky typewriter buttons that cradle your fingertips but at least they’re not totally irritating). so yeah, go dinosaur power.
Oh man I didn’t even get into the keyboard thing, or the mouse things. I hate touch pads, so inaccurate…. which I guess isn’t a big deal for some type of programs, but for me makes me feel like I’m trying to use one of the weird 90s pointing devices that never quite pointed at the right thing.
Keyboards though…. it’s been a review of how obsessive I’ve been about keyboards going back over the last eight years. I got really into mechanical keyboards, such that I have four or five I’m not using, and two that I am (dang it, three, forgot to count the standalone number pad.) The others are waiting for me to open them up and figure out what went wrong… for the past two years I’ve just been burning through keyboards. I buy a cheap mechanical keyboard, use it until it malfunctions, then buy another one.
My folks get onto me about that; “We don’t go through electronics at that rate” and I respond; “You use a different computer or computers at work, and you don’t game or code, at all.” Right now I’ve got a blue backlit white keyboard with blue switches that make that wonderful clicky sound when the key is pressed to the point of activation. I might get back into keyboard racing/speed typing…. I’ve been saying that for years though. I can touch type like a boss though.
Oh, on the list of new features I finally bought a volume knob, so now I can adjust volume from my desk, instead of having to drop down into menus…. I resisted it for many years, thought it was an unnecessary luxury, but I love this thing. I’m watching videos right now and I can just slightly adjust the volume with a tap, vs having to open taskbar then volume control.
I have a keyboard that’s a total beast though, the frame is metal, and most of the keys are metal as well. It’s got the highest resistance switches, so it feels like you’re really committing to typing… buuuuut it developed a fault in the plug in port, so I need to take it apart and reattach/resolder that.
the project list just keeps going.
dayam that metal keyboard sounds badass. yes Clicks. yes that subtle resistance you feel when a button engages, yes the feeling of solid keys under your fingers… all these things are sensory feedback, comforting little “validation” for pressing a key. And it’s totally missing from touchpads. We’re not the only ones who notice this. I see on ebay the original chunky IBM keyboards from the 80s fetch a pretty penny. They did the clicky thing. I haven’t felt a clicky thing in decades.
idk man, it’s like technology is dehumanizing us. Taking away our senses. Toggle switches what happened to those? Now we touch a piece of polished glass to turn things on. Sometimes not even that, the devices ‘sense’ when we pick them up and turn on automatically. I WANT FUCKING TOGGLE SWITCHES DUDE. Toggle switches that CLICK and remind me that I’m in control. And lights. Real lights, not pixels designed to look like lights. We’re not stupid we can tell the difference. Or maybe we could once…
Anyway…. I lost the point… Something about carving out a corner of the universe where we feel like we’re in control again. instead of feeling controlled