Words are inadequate

My deliciously clicky Unicomp keyboard and Henge Dock both came in yesterday, so I spent the evening setting up a desktop workspace to test everything out.

24" is a heck of a lot of monitor. It is overpowering in its monitorness. On the other hand, I appreciate the ability to read text without squinting, and Portal looks pretty good at that size.

The display adapter for the Henge Dock is being finicky. The speaker and USB and power connectors all click into place perfectly but something about the display connector is just Not Fitting. I can still plug it in from the underside of the dock, so it works and is usable. It just defeats the drop-in-and-use nature of the dock. I'll mess with it more over the weekend, I guess. Other than that the dock is amazingly easy to use, and looks classy too. My only real complaint is that it really wants a dedicated charger. The power connector, like all the other connectors, has to be screwed into place. It's easy enough to unscrew, it just adds to the time and effort and makes it slightly less awesome. (Now, if I had convinced uilos to get a Macbook Air, there would be an extra charger lying around...)

It's the keyboard that's really wowed me. Unicomp has done a fantastic job with this thing: not too surprising, since I think they bought all the old IBM designs and manufacturing equipment. It is gorgeous and heavy-duty ("can stun a burglar in the dark, which is my definition of great art" --NG). Also, it just feels right to type on. It even came with extra keycaps to replace the Windows and Alt keys with Command and Option (no symbols, sadly; just the words). Now I just need to figure out if there's a way to map the worthless right-hand meta key to something useful. Fn, maybe.

It's most definitely Loud, though. We're talking machine-gun levels of Loud, here. As someone or other said, it's like a gigantic tailpipe for geeks. It is, in fact, so much louder than my previous Model M (from 1995) that I went ahead and pried a key off the old one to see what was going on. Turns out all this time I've been typing on a standard dome-switch keyboard: better than most, but still not the same. (I'd take it to work to replace the keyboard I have here, but I'm worried it would break the cheap keyboard tray they gave me.)

Also of some interest: it's fairly easy for me to adapt to the Mac keyboard shortcuts on the laptop, but I keep using Windows muscle memory on the new keyboard. I guess it's embedded on a deeper level than I'd thought.

So now I have most of what I need for a good desktop setup (still lacking: desk, also chair). The question now becomes, when I get settled in Vancouver, do I use the same desk setup for work and for fun, or do I need to put together a whole different desk for work?

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Coda: This, incidentally, is the first keyboard I ever used. We had it for, mm, not quite nine years, Christmas 1982 to late August 1991. For context, this was two revisions earlier than the one true keyboard, of which all others, including our own 104-key, are but shadows. (Edit: fixt links)

Looking at that picture, it's the little things that come back to me. The ridiculously oversized meta keys with their normal-sized key caps. The random PrintScreen key under the vertical ENTER, and the backslash next to Z. The gigantic PLUS next to the number pad. What the heck were the designers thinking? (Of course they probably weren't, they were more interested in getting all those weird new keys on the keyboard than in putting them someplace usable.)

Because I am a) a crazy person who b) wants to become more acquainted with his new computer in a trial by fire and is c) in desperate need of something to distract his brain, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year for the first time.

This is madness for any number of reasons, but mostly because the only time I've ever written more than 1,667 words of fiction in a day, it wiped me out for several hours. 50,000 words is an order of magnitude longer than anything I've ever written. It may be more words than all the fiction I've written so far put together. Honestly, the only reason I think this is even possible is that I had several thousand-plus wordcount days in a row the last time I was writing anything, back in July.

(Also, I figure that if I get something else written, that'll give me the distance I need to go back and revise the space story.)

I've taken a couple days off from work in the middle of the month, and a couple more at the end, so in theory I'll have a chance to catch up when (not if) I fall behind on word count.

I have no intention of posting daily word counts here, no worries. I'll probably gripe about it here once a week or so, and give the same vague story info you've come to know and love from other things I've been working on. If you're actually interested I'll be keeping a running wordcount at the NaNo website. I'm jazzfish over there as well.

I fully expect to crash and burn with this but it'll be interesting to see how far I get at least. And yes, I do have a personal bribe waiting for me at the end of it, beyond just bragging rights.

(I'm using the special NaNo edition of Scrivener to write this thing, plus of course Neo for writing on my lunch break etc.)

A discussion with darkfyre_muse yesterday reminded me to take a closer look at the displays that were being offered. Turns out the only way to get a non-glossy display on a Mac laptop is to spend more money on a larger Pro. And poking at them in the store confirms that the antiglare is o so very much nicer on the eyes. Feh. I was looking forward to a slightly smaller machine but no dice.

So, yay for the Refurbished section of the Apple store, which has provided me with a 15" Macbook Pro that's slightly better than the baseline spec and has an antiglare display, for about what I could have spent on a baseline machine in the store today if they'd had one. (As of early this week $company gets an Apple discount, but it doesn't apply to refurbs.) Which is still more money than I've ever spent on anything that's not a car, by about a factor of four.

Oh well. In theory, and based on what I've heard from just about everyone who has one, assuming I like this computer it'll last me until at least the middle of the next decade.

Now to wait impatiently until the end of next week, and also to see how twitchy buyers' remorse makes me.

rbandrews: You are obviously very picky particular about the tools you use for typing.

Yeah, I very much am.

( A rant about how I put words on the screen. )

I've been considering a number of lifestyleish changes for awhile now. I blame the hat. I've never thought of myself as a guy who wears a hat, and yet now I have one. (A black paper/straw trilby. I'm told it looks pretty decent.) The concept of wearing a hat is starting to grow on me.

Anyway, once I got a hat, other things started popping into my head. Some of them I'd been considering for awhile, some of them are brand-new. One was kind of shocking, honestly:

I'm thinking of going Mac.

Hear me out. There are a lot of things about Windows systems that I like but they mostly boil down to "I know how to get things done on Windows." My fingers know the keyboard shortcuts intuitively. When something goes wrong, I can find what I need to do to fix it; when something needs tweaking, I have a pretty good idea of where to look to tweak. Like with QWERTY, I accept that there's some inherent inefficiency in the system, but I'm not willing to switch because learning to overcome that inefficiency will take more time than the inefficiency itself.

But my next computer (coming in probably another year) is likely to be running Windows 7, with its ridiculous ribbon bars and general revamping of the user interface. Now, I've not actually used Win7, or Vista, for any length of time: just long enough to grumble at not being able to do things with the speed and finesse I'm used to. So I don't really know how much additional learning time there'll be, but there will definitely be some.

I don't game much anymore. Every so often I get inspired to pick up something oldish (Moonbase Commander is currently taunting me again), but mostly I satisfy my gaming urges elsewhere. For me the computer's for netsurfing and writing, in that order.

I know for a fact there are things that will minorly irritate me ("War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Backspace is delete.") and things that will irk me no end (learning the difference between option and apple, trying to right-click on things for a context menu). I understand that the interface, once you fully grok it, is an aesthetic triumph of form/function melding.

So tell me, o converts, and you who never knew another system: is this way for me? Or will it end in me throwing a thousand-dollar laptop through a window and rooting through sketchy websites for a copy of Windows XP?

(Things I am specifically not looking for: lengthy paeans to the awesomeness of the Way of Mac; diatribes about the horribilitude of Apple or Windows; exhortations to try Linux or any other OS.)