Settings & Configurations

So I am still configuring my new computer - have been all week long - as I posted over to The OddBlog yesterday, and I dragged the old "executive" office chair out of the bedroom to use - not because I wanted to complete the ultra-swankiness of my new home office digs, but because it has a high back and the other chair doesn't and it was killing me. The thing about it is that the executive office chair (it's one of those really fancy ones that would cost you $175-250 brand new, but I got it at a flea market for $10 because it had no wheels and was covered in cat hair) has all these levers and buttons and wheels so you can adjust it to fit your body, posture, height, style of sitting, whatever, and I never bothered to learn how to use them.

So, of course, I had the chair set too high and my knees were banging the desk, and I started pressing levers yesterday, looking for the one that lowers the height of the chair...

I pulled the first one and it did nothing, so I pushed it. Suddenly, the back gave way and I would have toppled, head over feet, were it not for the fact that my knees crashed into the desk and sent the sleek, swanky, new keyboard flying. I managed to catch it with my left hand, which would have been cool, except that my fingers pressed almost every key on the damned thing, leaving a string of characters across the screen that looked like a cat had walked across the keyboard - and promptly put the computer to sleep. I found out (the hard way, with no back support from the executive office chair) that you have to press the power button to reawaken said computer. With that accomplished, I reset the executive office chair and went for the next lever.

This time, I was more cautious: I barely pulled the lever, but it doesn't pull. I exhaled dramatically as I wiped non-existent sweat from my brow, then thought about how flipping melodramatic I am and looked around to see if anyone was watching me. They weren't; how could they be? - I was in my house with the door shut. So then I pushed it: it went all the way down and locked... but nothing happened! I have no idea how to unlock it, so I spent about an hour wondering if it was on a timer, what it was going to do when that time expired, and why anyone would put a timer on a chair. But then, I remember that it's an executive office chair, so, you know... there's that; I mean, if any chair is going to have a timer on it, you know? So long as we're on the subject, does anyone know if executive office chairs have "eject" options?

One lever left: I pulled it and it did nothing (but it did pull), so I pushed it. My ass met with a thumping as I was unceremoniously dropped - not lowered, dropped - to the zenith of the executive office chair's height setting. So I stood slightly and adjusted the seat to the proper height. My mission accomplished, I fiddled with the first lever and got the back set just right - so that it affords me solid support with just enough play that I am not sitting rigidly like a Catholic school attendee - and fretted over the (now permanently?) depressed lever, and whether or not I was going to be forcibly ejected from my executive office seating at some point later on.

Ah... now to work!

I set about the business of opening windows and checking mail, but something was slightly off: my right arm was resting about an inch lower than my left; the arms on the chair were uneven. You see where this is going, right?

So, fast-forward to me on my knees in front of the damned thing with a ruler setting atop the arms, hands flying back and forth to my forehead in exasperation, as I pace in circles and curse the designer for making the adjusting wheels "click" into preset places, instead of allowing for "half-turns" and other fine-tunings. This chair had turned me into Woody Allen, or (better yet) Richard Lewis, inside of an hour!

But I finally got it, and here I sit, typing away on my brand, spanking new, swank-o-matic computer-toy!

I may actually get to some things today, as I have most of the configuring and so forth out of the way - at least everything that's vitally important to me. Neither my camera, scanner, nor printer work with Vista, and even though it has like nine jacks for speakers, everytime I plug more than one set in, all the audio cuts out, but I'm not worrying with all that right now.

Now I just have to get all the files I was working on off the 98 machine and the XP hard drive (I am going to slave it to this one one of these days, but not anytime real, real soon - a few weeks from now, if everything goes well - you know, God willing, knock wood, wish upon a star, and all that), and you will start seeing some real action!

It's just surreal to actually be able to work without worrying about when the modem or hard drive or fan or something else is going to give-out... not to mention having the hard drive space to put literally everything on one computer! Just amazing.