Laptopless "Dancing" - Granite Grok

Laptopless “Dancing”

MSI LaptopIt has been an interesting week.  The power jack on my laptop coughed up its connecter pin last Thursday.  A bit of ingenuity and some copper tape later and I kept it powered up though GrokTALK! last Saturday and long enough to get the show edited, segmented, and the full podcast published.  But that fix went belly up Sunday.  I shipped it out for repair Monday morning and have been without my primary progressive torture tool until today.

Yes, I managed to post a few things, but it’s just not the same.

First of all, if you are using a different laptop in your home it is probably someone elses so when you are using it they are not.  The not has a way of making them suddenly want to use it more than they typically would.  Strange how that works.

My wife and kids use the laptop at a work center in our kitchen.  Most of the time it is just my wife and daughter – the boys are older and have their own PC’s to while away the hours in communal solitude.   So my abrupt intrusion threw a few folks into internet withdrawal they never suspected they had.

In response to my intrusion my daughter, who can be rather clever, discovered that if she was using it when I got home I was too polite to kick her off.  So here’s me, looking like an internet wallflower, staring at my feet, pretending to take interest in the brick-a-brack.  You stare at the walls for a while, whistle until someone asks you to stop.

I realized that the solution was to start dinner early.  There’s no eating at the communal laptop unless no one is around to notice.  I was around.  The interruption gave me an in and I took it.

When I did get my turn it was a lot like driving someone elses car.  The mirrors are aimed for someone else.  The seat doesn’t feel right.  And who was listening to “what is that noise?”  Wipers, headlights?  Or maybe its like a hotel bed.   Also not yours, the pillows are crap, the blanket weight is off, nothing sounds right and no matter which side you lay on or how you arrange those curtains even the darkness is wrong.   I think you have to drink a lot to sleep in a cheap hotel or motel.  That might be why people who are “holed up” in a motel on television or in movies, are always pictured with a flask nearby or laying on the bed–TV on in the background–next to a tumbler with a murky amber liquid that would taste a lot like bourbon if you could get past the cloudy looking glass that is not long for a plastic bag labeled ‘evidence.’

Then the phone rings.

So you get your shot at the communal laptop but it isn’t using your browser and you never took the time to really set up your own log-in on the communal computer.  You remember thinking “I should have done that” but something kept distracting you. That’s right.  You were on your own laptop, remember?  Communal is a concept for the rest of your ‘loved ones.’

You open the browser (revisit the motel metaphor if that helps) and none of your favorite internet haunts pop up with even more than just a few keystrokes.   You might as well be a man trying to put on a woman’s button down-shirt, which I believe is still called a blouse, but a shirt with the buttons on the wrong side by any other name is still a clumsy disaster for the unfamiliar.  Even if you have experience with one of those as a man it’s probably from the outside.  An entirely different set of muscle memory rules apply.  (Now I’m envisioning Monty Python’s Idiot Olympics and they are trying to remove the bra from a mannequin).  So you are officially handicapped and on top of that you have to recall dozens of password and log-in combinations you carelessly let your usual browser remember for you.

All those files, links, pictures, and notes…you don’t have them.

Oh, and its Linux.

I can use Linux but its a smidge’ different from Windows, and the one thing I hate most about the Sony VAIO the Linux and the unfamiliar browser are on (and maybe they never fixed this) is that you couldn’t turn off the most sensitive touch pad in human history.  If you look at this thing sideways the cursor hops, or the screen scrolls while you are typing and if you actually touch it with the heel of your hand you discover what your kids were watching on YouTube when you were out with the wife to do some ‘grocery shopping.’

First world problems.

So now that I have my laptop back I am pondering its end of life scenarios.  I’m quite certain it has a few years left in it but if I don’t train a new one before it dies I’ll have to endure the metaphorical blouse, the lumpy bed, and all the other awkwardness of being divorced from a device that has sat before me at least half as long as my dog has warmed my feet while I type.  I’d miss the dog more but her idea of browsing is less state of the art and involves whatever I made for dinner to get my daughter away from the communal laptop.  I can say this.  The dog has a better grasp of constitutional principles than any of the progressives I’ve ever written about.

Good dog.

Did I mention it was only four days?

At least I got a blog out of it.

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