rocking the 80s, keyboard edition

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?

---

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.)

the voyage of the WHAT?

I've been trying lately to suppress my outrage at stupid films made from decent books. It's not the book: it's an adaptation. It's a different thing entirely. It has different demands, different audience expectations and needs. It's okay that they change things.

And I thought that the film of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was about the best film they could have made of that book. Even the random chase sequence on a frozen river didn't detract from it. Plus, Tilda Swinton imbues everything she touches with a degree of awesome. Not always enough awesome to save it, mind you, but still, awesome. And they started with LWW instead of Magician's Nephew, which lends them a certain credibility.

(Of course, pondering LWW leads one inexorably to Aslan Shrugged, and from there to John Rogers's dictum:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Which in turn brings up thoughts of the LotR movies, and thus back to the topic at hand, or at least its environs. What was I talking about?)

Right, anyway. I never did see Prince Caspian, although it wasn't really much of a book to start with so I can't imagine I missed much. I confess to being somewhat curious as to how (and why) they brought back Tilda Swinton's White Witch, since I'm told she's in it. I was kind of interested in seeing the new Dawn Treader movie: that's always been one of my favorite of the books. Then I read the plot summary in Roger Ebert's Dawn Treader review:

"Lucy and Edmund, now in their mid-teens, seem uncommonly calm about being yanked from their everyday lives and put on a strange ship in uncharted seas, but these kids have pluck."

Fair enough.

"They're briefed on the situation: Narnia is threatened by evil forces from the mysterious Dark Island, which no one has seen but everyone has heard about."

What?

"There is a matter of seven missing magical swords representing the Lords of Telmar, which were given to Narnia by Aslan the Lion..."

WHAT?

"...and must be brought together again to break a spell that imprisons the lords."

I just what I don't even.

(I note with some bafflement that Tilda Swinton is once more listed in the credits as the White Witch. This is not nearly enough inducement to get me to see this trainwreck.)

On the other hand, TRON Legacy will be out in eight days, which will soothe some of the hurting.