Progress of the Combobulation (Blog Notes)

[UPDATE Wednesday 5 p.m.: Success! Up and running now (except for the external drives and printer), so the recent interruption is over. Thanks again for your patience!]

Me at my non-work computer upstairs

Just a brief update for you, and to break the silence. It's going pretty well. I did more physical work yesterday than I've done since last summer, and slept the sleep of the zonked last night. I'm typing this on my upstairs, non-work computer—and on my old keyboard, which actually feels quite strange now. I've already adapted to the new one, which I was so afraid I wouldn't.

New desk in the raised position. I ordered it in black, but oh well.

Man needs a desk (sung to the tune of Neil Young's "Man Needs a Maid")
The desk is fully assembled and operational. It was actually pretty easy. Just a few fastidious details to attend to such as leveling. In dismantling the old desk, it becomes apparent that the new ones have been streamlined to be much easier to put together. I like the old controls better—just two tactile buttons, up and down. (Pressing both together performs a reset, which you must remember to do every so often.) The old one also moved slower, making it easier to fine-tune. Presumably I'll adapt; hey, I adapted to the new keyboard, didn't I? However this one has presets, and an auto-lock.

The new desk locks its controls when they haven't been used in a few minutes. You have to remember how to unlock it. Coming to it cold, you would never figure out how. They claim this is a feature, to prevent children from playing with the desk. All right, but in my household, Butters is never tempted to mess with the desk. And when I was a kid, we weren't allowed in my father's office. Maybe there's a way for me to defeat the lock; we'll see. [UPDATE: fixed now. It wasn't in the instructions, but I found the info in a video on the Amazon page.]

People sometimes think I complain about aging, but I'm really just observing. I'm interested in it. It wasn't an issue until I was 45, when my very first sign of mental decline showed up—I began occasionally transposing letters when I typed. I find mental decline more interesting than physical decline, generally, although I got very interested in this history and function of my pacemaker. So, just as an observation, not a complaint: a new physical issue has cropped up, one I never noticed before. When I'm down on my knees and try to get up, an interim position is raising one knee to put one foot on the floor, so that I'm momentarily down on one knee, and, when I do that, the one knee that's still on the floor and supporting all my weight hurts too much. That's a new thing. I guess it's natural when you're closer to 70 than 60 that it's no longer comfortable to crawl all over the floor. The kneepads I use for gardening came in handy!

The state of the house right now is downright alarming. You've probably moved, so you know how it is*. You move a bunch of stuff out of one room and empty a few pieces of furniture, and next thing you know it looks like a hoarder lives here. Recombobulate! Recombobulate! Gaaah. This is going to give me bad dreams if I don't get the house cleaned up and back in order. Entropy is winning. Next I have to empty and clean the printer stand and try to get the printer going.

EMBRACE THE WIRES
There's nowhere to hide

Wi-Fi signal strength in the new location is only about two-thirds of what it was on the front porch, but 242 Mbps ought to be plenty.

Here's another weird thing. For a guy who is pretty, um, laid-back about housekeeping, I'm highly fastidious when I do get around to cleaning. I have to keep telling myself things like "the perfect is the enemy of the good the done," and "wire management can never be optimized to finality." A standing desk in open space is going to have to proudly celebrate the wire tangle rather than try to hide it. One more little thing I neglected to take into account when planning the move: in a room with windows on all four sides, there's going to be a window behind the screen...reflecting off it. One more thing: this new office would have room for a flat file. Yum, and oooh.

This is probably the neatest my desk will be for the next 1,825 days

Whistle and pin?
I should show you pictures, but that might have to wait. [UPDATE: Illustrations are added FWIW.] This computer doesn't have Photoshop on it. It just has something called "Photos." No idea how to use that.  :-)

Well, this too shall pass, and with any luck I will be back up and running at the main workstation by the end of the day. Hopefully with that whole room clean as a whistle and neat as a pin. But it won't happen if I don't get back to work. See you later.

Mike

*Although I have older friends here in rural Central New York who were born in the house they live in, and one, a guy of about 77,  whose parents were born in the house he lives in. Up here you hear stories like this.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

ASW: "Re: wires on the lose (ha!) I've had good luck with Alex Tech braided cable sleeve. It's available on Amazon and comes in various lengths, diameters, and colors. It also cuts easily with scissors so you can buy a big role and cut the length(s) you need for multiple jobs. I used the 1/2-inch diameter to tidy up home theater speaker wires running along the wall to my side and rear speakers. The single black sleeve is much less noticeable (and offensive to the wife) than a mess of individual speaker wires."

Tom Burke (partial comment): "Good to hear the move has gone well. I tidied my computer desk yesterday afternoon, and that was stressful enough for me.... Photos: I think it's great—thanks to Apple's ecosystem, anything that gets into Photos is immediately available to me on the Macs, the iPad and the iPhone. So I export the best images that I've taken with the Canon (after processing them in Lightroom) as full-size, high-quality JPEG files, and import them into Photos. That way all of my images, from both the Canon and the iPhone, are available to me for casual looking, in one place. Saves having to sit at the computer and fire up LR. And the displays on recent-generation Macs, iPhones and iPad Pros are exceptional."

Ken Owen: "I bet that sword (a sabre?) you have in the corner has a story to tell. I'm guessing there was a cavalryman in your family."

Mike replies: British officer's dress sword from the Crimean War. No family connection, but there sure is a story behind it. This blog is not the place for it, though.

Comments

[dan]

Mike,

Just following the wires, where's your DAC?

[Hi Dan, I use a now-old Halide Design DAC HD, which is a tiny box inline with the interconnect. It's out of view in the picture, coiled underneath the desktop. --Mike]

[MikeR]

Wait until you're 82!

Ever notice that advertising for monitors, computers, and such never show wires?

Btw, looks like you have room for a desk treadmill.

[Jim Arthur]

Small World. I searched TOP earlier today for any mention of M. Ward and ended up at your “Ten Cuts” post from 2007. The first cut listed was “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here" by Porcupine Tree and its YouTube page features the album cover graphic shown on screen in one of your new desk photos. I ended up listening to various cuts from Deadwing and Fear of a Blank Planet. Good stuff. Post War is waiting in the wings.

[John McMillin]

Don' you have a matte, anti-glare screen yet? I ordered one on my latest iMac several years ago, as a $500 option. Well worth it, because it's never shown any screen glare, though my office has windows on three sides, and the screen faces the south. In Denver, which is seriously sunny.

[DB]

You should get a wireless keyboard.

/ducks

[Tom Burke]

Good to hear the move has gone well. I tidied my computer desk yesterday afternoon, and that was stressful enough for me....

Photos: I think it's great - thanks to Apple's ecosystem, anything that gets into Photos is immediately available to me on the Macs, the iPad and the iPhone. So I export the best images that I've taken with the Canon (after processing them in LightRoom) as full-size, high-quality jpg files, and import them into Photos. That way all of my images, from both the Canon and the iPhone, are available to me for casual looking, in one place. Saves having to sit at the computer and fire up LR. And the displays on recent-generation Macs, iPhones and iPad Pros are exceptional.

Ageing: welcome to the club (and I know you have many regular readers older than I). When I was tidying the desk yesterday I also re-did the network cables so I was crawling around under the desk; and the care I had to take when getting myself vertical again surprised me, even though I'd been expecting it. I'm afraid it will only get worse - it's a slippery slope....

[Mike Chisholm]

Relax, Mike, entropy -- like the house -- always wins.

N.B. the Victorian solution to that disgraceful and disturbing show of legs and (I can barely bring myself to say the word) wires would be curtains!

Mike

[Dave B]

I hate to bring this up, but that room is way too big. I’d be rearranging things around every two maybe three days. Good luck! And I don’t want to deplete the bank account anymore than you have, but one shade for the offending window might work.

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

One thing with a wooden desk is that it is possible to fix / screw things to the underside, assuming there is space around the metal frame and cords between all the desk parts. Cable-tying wires together can also help, sometimes…

I know what you mean about moving. I find that when packing boxes, I can’t just lob in any old bunch of things. It has to be organised. That meant that I would inevitably have about 3-4 boxes gradually being packed at any one time, and eventually end up with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t just ‘go’ with other things.

When unpacking, I have to have a staging area - 2 for the last move - in which all the boxes are stacked awaiting unpacking. And I have the reverse - 3-4 boxes in various states of unpack as I try to find suitable places for the storage of things.

[Terry Letton]

Hi Mike
Car magazine many years ago(80’s) carried a Firestone ad in the form of a color chart. All the squares were black but they were labeled with various funny names, my favorite was “Very off White”. Looks like your desk is Very Pale Black.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Fiddly individual wire management just leads to immediate wire changes. I'm pondering the stuff that seems to be called "cable raceway", which looks like it would keep the cables corralled without requiring me to undo all the fastenings for each change.

[Jim Arthur]

David mentioned cable raceways and they are worth a look. I used a PVC version recently to run a coax cable and a couple of speaker wires along the base of a sliding glass door. You can find inexpensive PVC kits at Big-box hardware stores that come with T junctions and pre-installed adhesive backing. My PVC raceway is easy to open and close, easy to cut to length with a $10 miter box and can be painted. In your case you could paint a length to match the table top and adhere it to the underside near the back edge. You could then paint some to match the floor and run an L shaped route over to an inexpensive PVC power strip enclosure (cable management box). You would need to watch/measure your cord lengths and maybe think twice about what sort of adhesive you stick to that wood floor though.

[Richard Sloves]

You might want to consider something like "Alex Tech 25ft – 1/2 inch Split Wire Loom Tubing Wire Conduit – White" listed on Amazon (along with many other brands, to bundle, organize and hide the exposed wiring & cables.