They are everywhere

The cables are getting to me. Again. As so often happens when I move stuff around on my desk, I ended up sitting underneath it, staring at the jungle of cables wishing I could just cut all or at least most of them and tie the rest up in invisible ways.

Unfortunately, the current mess is what remains after cutting any slack there once was. Removing more cables would have rather unfortunate side effects such as a lamp not working, a screen not lighting up or a computer no longer having power to boot.

Actually, I think the lamp is the most dispensible at the moment, but I hear some extra light apart from the screen is not only nice but also good for you, so I think it will stay. The power cable for the hard drive cabinet could technically be removed most of the time, but I would not exactly be more likely to make backups and generally offload to external storage if I had to fiddle under the desk first each time.

Still … tempting now that I think more about it …

Went west

Today I finished a project started two days ago: as possibly the last interested person on the planet I watched Westworld. I now have opinions, but I am making notes and saving them for the pod. This pod, to be specific. We are likely to record in less than 48 hours, so I think I can do it. My usual habit after watching something is to immediately listen to whatever the Incomparable may have produced on the topic, but I think I will save that too. Nobody spoiled me with strong opinions on the series, and now I kind of want to get my opinion out without possible influence by others first.

If it was more than 48 hours, I probably would not care, or at least not succeed. 48 hours I think I can do. It might even be easy.

I had voluntarily listened to some discussions of the show before watching it. Looking back now, they must have discussed the whole series, but I do not think the details I knew detracted from my enjoyment. (Especially since I could not weigh or place them before watching for myself.) Perhaps I saw some things coming a bit earlier, but on the whole I found the story (or rather my enjoyment of it) less reliant on surprise twists than I had expected. I also had no recollection whatsoever of many major lines of the plot, so I feel I got the vast majority completely fresh.

Was I going somewhere with this? Mostly I think I am just standing around tapping away at the keyboard, noticing how standing up further throws off my finger positioning, feeling glad to have my energy back from fevers and whatnot. I connected my Macbook to the external display for the first time in a long while and - connecting back to those cables - that has me thinking again about retiring the Mac mini or at least give it a much more hidden spot with much fewer cables connected.

Fewer machines, fewer cables, less management, less power, less feeling of wanting to anchor my computing in one spot. Then swinging the pendulum back to the various conveniences of having a more stationary machine at home to push things to, store libraries on and have old but oh-so-nice keyboards connected to. How beautifully bittersweet a pastime this it …