Tag: family

Shiny, sharp, and green

The light of my life got me a Razer keyboard today–the BlackWidow. I saw one in… September or so, I think, wanted it very badly, and then it had sort of slowly slipped off my radar in the intervening months.

takketa

I may have made extremely undignified joyful squeeing noises upon unwrapping it. I am just saying.

This is a mechanical keyboard, which means (1) ultra-satisfying clicky noises–

clikclikclik tic tic takketa tap clik

–and tactile feedback, (2) lasts maybe ten times as long as your average keyboard, and (3) could probably serve as a blunt instrument in a (small) zombie emergency. It also has braided sleeves on all the cords, and when I say all the cords I mean that this thing has a power USB connection, a data USB connection, and runs speakers/headphones and mike out of the little port on its side. It comes with macro keys, and multiple settings, and software that backs all your custom settings up to the cloud so that when you get a new keyboard, you don’t need to fiddle around rebinding and re-entering all your custom setups, not that I am envisioning getting a new keyboard anytime soon because mine and it’s delightfully clicky.

clickety

The keys are slightly narrower than my old keyboard; they’re small squares, rather than subtle oblongs. I need to sit back a bit, instead of vulturing over my keys. Obviously, I will have to use this a whole lot in the coming days to practice.

I’m not sure if this is optimism or cynically informed pessimism. But it’s working!

So I am trying to tidy something up and get it ready to send off. And I am actually not getting this done, because the idea of revising is unnerving me greatly, to put it mildly. And as I often do in such circumstances, I turn to the light of my life, for his words of wisdom.

“What are you worried about?” he said.

“What if I make it worse and can’t tell?”

“Well,” he said in a cheer-up kind of voice, “it will probably get rejected by statistically the same number of people.”

(I confess there was something of a stunned pause on my part, here.)

“…boy,” I said in a slightly strangled voice, “are you lucky you took the knives and forks away.”

Still, you know. He’s… right, I guess?  I mean, if I make it better, it will probably get rejected by fewer people. If I make it worse, it likely won’t actually get rejected by more.

I am fairly sure that I am missing something, but since I am more looking to get unstuck than I am looking for statistical analysis[1], at least I am achieving my primary goal. Cheers!
—
[1] Which is fascinating, but often leaves me with that faintly bubbly feeling that I get when I have managed to (briefly) internalize the Monty Haul problem and the truth of the solution.

Sore and tired, but trucking on.

Viciously sore throat today, and not much sleep.  Plus one of the cats threw up first thing in the morning.  I think it’s going to be a long day; may try for a midday nap.

On the plus side, there is a lovely softly-grey sky outside, shading from dove to slate, and the rain and thunder are at least making indoors seem cosier.

Pets are exhausting to take care of sometimes, but I will grant that they give you a sense of purpose.

Strange indeed.

Was over at my in-laws for dinner.  One of them is an amateur genealogist (do you get professional genealogists? I suppose you could…), and he plugged my dad’s name and birth date into the program he uses.  From what I have garnered, it is a loose cloud of information floating somewhere in the internether.  You build your family tree there, other people build theirs, if the two of you happen to have a common point then the data which you’ve chosen to make public can overlap.

Someone else had already created an entry for someone who could have been my dad–a couple of data points met–and it included a picture, so I got called over to take a look at it.

It was him.

It was taken in the mid-late 40s, I guess; the scan of it online[1] is greyscale and not very big.  You can make out four candles on the cake balanced on his knees (birthday picture, is the guess), but he’s clearly way more than four.  I looked at it for a second, and I couldn’t say one way or the other if it was dad, and then there was this realization that I’d seen that expression on his face before, that exact expression, and I felt… nothing as strong as stunned.  Taken aback, maybe, or pleasantly surprised, or something.

Part of it was understanding that someone else knew about him; someone I’d never had reason to imagine existed found a picture of him and figured out or was told who he was.  Part of it was that he looked happy.

Also I have now learnt my paternal grandmother’s names, and picked up a smidgen of detail about the trip she took to come over from Italy.

—
[1] I had a moment of thinking “Am I sure it was a scan?” and then being slightly disconcerted to realize that yes, of course I am sure.  Digital pictures were so not an option at that point, after all.