Author: Tom Kern

Know it now…

I’ve been having an hankering to post on workspaces and perceived ergonomics of the home side of a hybrid workspace. The very short version of that is get a standing desk and be willing to put in the money to build and maintain your space. You are spending 32 hours+ a week there… might as well reflect you.

Ok with that out of the way, on to the entry for the evening and most likely the next good long while. I’ve been in a reflective mood for the last couple of months. I think part of it is I often spend the first part of years in a reflective mood. Friends are resetting from the holidays with their family units, work life returns to some level of normal, and life just in general is busy. This is the time of year I often take stock of what has passed, what I think is coming, and generally do any minor resets. 2024 so far has been very much in this paradigm. The most unexpected thing to occur is re-connecting with a friend from the 1900’s that I count amongst my oldest and most cherished.

On the other side of the coin I look at where I am in relation to my peer group in just about everything. On the marriage and kids part… that’s a full on non-starter as I’m very much not in that camp. Which often leaves other aspects of life to balance against. And for the most part I’m right where I should be for the most part. Maybe a bit ahead in some aspects, but by all counts not really behind. That’s the thing I always think that I’m behind and missing something in someway that will be detrimental, and what I find is that I often have paid close attention to the fundamentals that I’m generally in pretty good shape. The trick is telling my inner monologue to chill we are ok… my inner monolouge is still convinced that we will end up on the street next week. I don’t know where this concern comes from, but that is particular brand of “crazy”.

Which is a very long way of saying, for all of my crazy I think it’s turned out pretty good ok.

Reflection on a New Years Day…

It’s not often that I get the urge to write on a Monday morning, much less in the morning at all… but here it is 7:30AM on a 1/1/24…

So why am I writing this? I’m not sure honestly, but I think part of it is reflection on the year past, part of it is contemplating the year to come, part of it is I logged in and was really really relieved to find that the previous iteration of this site is no longer on the internet.

Wait there was a previous iteration of this site? Yes indeed my friends on the dearly departed geocities.com. As I’ve written before I started writing December of 2000 while ignoring the Cobol final I had coming up. (At least I think it was a Cobol final it’s been damn near 25 years).

I’m something of a digital packrat so of course I had to go diving through my records to see if I still had the old site… and sure enough I do in a zip archive on one of my cloud services. The archive goes from 2000 through mid 2004 where this site picks up. And let’s say I was a very different person back then. Seeing that old material made me really appreciate the friends I still have from that time. What I really appreciate though is that somehow the internet wayback machine only captured one version of a copy of the old geo cities site.

Which is to say 20+ years ago Tom, probably won’t hurt today Tom. I have a copy and that’s enough, if I lose it then it’s like losing a photo album sad but not the end of the world.

So on this New Years Day, take a moment to reflect on where you came from and contemplate where you are going.

As for me, I’m going to keep scouring the internet to lock down Tom from before 2017… he was a willey one.

P.S. This is post #600 on this page… which is probably why I posted today.

Choices in gaming… or how Bethesda dropped the ball.

So I’ve been playing Starfield for the last 2 months and overall I got to say I do enjoy it. It’s a Bethesda RPG and I played the daylights out of Skyrim and Fallout 4. Starfield however has had one thing that is bothering me and it’s bothering me enough I want it on the internet.

I was doing a main story line mission and had to “acquire” an object central to the story line of the game. Well I murder hobo’d the ship “acquired” the item and on returning to the main system to turn in the quest, I got stopped and sent on this whole other story line… in the middle of the main quest. It was like watching Better Call Saul and swiching to Malcom in the Middle.

This is the “Crimson Fleet” quest line, and there isn’t a way to opt-out. You must do it or at least the initial piece of it. Which really broke the flow of the main story because when I got back to turn in my main quest thing, some really big story events happened! And they would have hit way more emotionally if I didn’t have some random dude sending me on a errand that I had no interest in.

Normally Bethesda is pretty good on letting you “Opt-In” in quest lines, this one was odd since it was pretty much foisted on to me. There were some other things about the quest line that I didn’t like. Such as “I’m a deep cover agent, but I can’t shoot my out of things” I get it from the side of I’m working for a law and order agency, but dude you hired a murder hobo… murder hobo gonna murder hobo.

Contrast this with my table top game… I sent my GM a note an hour before game on somethings I had been thinking about for my character and she sent my character on a glorious trip. It was my choice, until that point I had just been a bump on a log because that is how I wanted to play and I made a leap and I like where the initial result landed. And if I don’t like it… I can always opt out.

Unlike Bethesda and the Crimson Fleet questline.

Retirement…

So I’ve been thinking about retirement a lot recently. But not in the have a boatload of money and stop working sense, but more in the uh hey this piece of equipment that still works fine isn’t getting updates anymore sense.

Specifically my 2016 era MacBook Pro, which I bought a couple of months after the refresh came out. As Macs go I think it’s the peak John Ivy design and hubris trying to push the market forward. Innovative new features like the keyboard switch design or the Touch Bar thing. Neither of which survived the transition to the Apple M series of ARM processors. In fact when the first proper mac book pros on the M1 came out and they went back to a dedicated mag safe port and HDMI thats when I knew I had a bad design. Also that apple dropped OS support for it in 2022 which is in the 6 year time frame that you normally see apple drop support on some lower end products. Not on a flagship laptop though.

All in all it’s been a good laptop, I did have to get some work on it and did get a keyboard replacement along with the battery when it was still under warranty but even by then the writing was on the wall. At the end of the day though it got me through a masters program, multiple work trips where I couldn’t use a work laptop, 4 moves, covid, and a bunch of other things. At the end of the day it’s still a laptop and it probably has another good 2 or 3 years left in it. But because of the keyboard and the known thermal issues with intel macs (did you think about doing work? OK the fans are going to kick on now) I can’t in good conscious give it or sell it someone I know… I basically don’t want to be responsible for when it craps out.

It’s a me thing… just roll with it.

The other thing is that I’ve gone back to a desktop as my daily driver across the board. When I use a computer I’m doing a thing I’m not just using it. A laptop still has it’s place in my workflow, just not a primary place like it used to be. So it’s odd to me that I have a piece of equipment that’s good enough for backup work, but I don’t trust it enough to do that. Not good enough to sell because I don’t trust it and so it has sat on my desk for the last year randomly used.

6+ years is a good run for a laptop for me, I got 9 years out of Anubis and 5 years out of the two preceding mac laptops. About the only thing that gets replaced before it’s time is my phone and honestly I may keep the current one another year just because it’s doing all the things I need it to do. Unless usb-c and something else just really drives me over the edge.

So with this post, I retire “I-Am-Groot” you were a good laptop. You did actual work and never complained and I didn’t upgrade you at all… mainly because you were the first Mac I bought with everything soldered on so I didn’t have a choice. Honestly outside of storage and ram I almost never upgrade my computers anymore.

“BruntFCA” MBP M1 14″, welcome to the shit show.

Banging my head against the wall…

Not because of anything going on, it’s just a lyric from the song on spotify… somethings just never change.

So I think I might have a problem… It started in the summer of 2020 and it’s just been slowly escalating to a point now where it’s pervasive.

The issue ask?

Mechanical keyboards… specifically all of my computers now have them and when I type on a membrane keyboard I openly bitch about it at work.

It started simply enough, Keychron K2 that all the tech reviewers were into at the time (and if you watch their videos many are still rocking K2 boards or something similar from Keychron). I then got a “gaming mechanical” keyboard.

What makes it gaming you ask? Why the RGB when you type on it of course.

I then got two more boards… this time both logitech for work. One at home and one for the office when go in. Both are Logitech K8xx series keyboards… they are cheap enough and I’m not spending MX money on stuff for work. Of the two I really like the K845 better, it’s a bit slimmer and lower profile on the deck but has full size keys.

Which got me noticing tall my K2 was when I used it to type (and the distinct lack of a number pad) that I started looking for new keyboard for home and well the Keychron K7 is seeming to fit the bill. I don’t know if I’m loving the RED switches vs the Browns I have in everything else (the K845 is also RED and doesn’t feel as stiff as the K7).

So I now have more mechanical keyboards then I do full time use computers in the house… so yeah….

But of all the problems to have it’s better then turning yellow like a Simpsons character.

Cin13-KC20 with the dishwasher in the background

So one of the things that made me re-light this blog… or attempt to relight this blog is Wil Wheaton has started posting on their blog on the regular again. The reasons are documented over on Wil’s site but sufficete to say the reasons are very similar.

So in addition to being general all around uber-nerd for all things Star Trek. Wil Wheaton is also a table top gamer, which is something that I’ve gotten into in the last couple of years (one day I may even write about it) until then here is a link to Wil’s site that covers some of the basic’s of getting into table top. The only thing missing that was key for me was a group you enjoy playing with. If I don’t like the people I’m hanging with the thing isn’t worth my time, if I do like the people I will absolutely make time.