Saturday 30th January 2021
So my days during this pandemic have been pretty identical. I’ll get up, work for most of the day, then go to my support bubble a road or two away and either watch TV or play videogames in company, before returning home, going to bed and repeating the next day.
The problem is that sometimes the TV is just background noise. C might be doing some Pokemon GO and I getting into some debate on Facebook. There are programmes we watch and some that I like to call “easy watching” where you don’t really have to pay attention.
Given the volume of programmes we “watch”, I’m sure it’s doing some good for my imagination. We finished Alice in Borderland today. It was really good and reinforced some of my views on Japanese storytelling. But we also watched a lot of crap, and as such it was the perfect time for a little experiment.
I want to know if this casual time could be used for some Admin work. Could I shift it out of my day and do at night? I’ve certainly done a lot of ToDoist scheduling on just my phone but I don’t like the phone interface. I have poor vision in one eye and as a consequence, I tend to hit the wrong letter on the right hand side of the keypad. I’d rather have a keyboard of some sorts, where the letter keys are large enough that it compensates for the slight error in my vision.
So my plan was to take an old laptop (my gaming laptop is far too clunky) and have it on my lap whilst sat on the sofa. I could then theoretically do some work. Maybe not writing editions of The Climb (which have got backed up this week) but maybe post them.
It was a good idea, but really just that. The laptop hasn’t been used for ages so I spent the first couple of hours patching it. No real problem, it’s a few key presses and then leaving it while it does its stuff. It required finding some additional space to do so (darn macs and their ridiculously small hard drives) but in my mind, this was the perfect type of work to be done whilst sat on the sofa.
The idea, however good it was, proved useless in execution. I couldn’t find a way to sit so that I had a good view of the screen and be comfortable. At best I had the laptop on an arm rest, which meant I had to twist to see the screen.
I don’t think it’s an issue with the size of the laptop. A different laptop will have the same problem. Maybe a tablet but then I’d be back to the old issue with keypad. Maybe the bigger screen and consequent bigger keypad might correct the problem but given I don’t currently have a tablet capable of running the software I’d need, it’s a lot of expense on something that might not work.
So if I want to work whilst sat on the sofa it looks like it will have to be done on my phone for now. Not impossible, due to the fact that the selection of a lot of the software I use was based on there being an iPhone app. But it’s still clunky enough that in any other situation other than desperation, it’s probably best to wait until I’m sat in front of a desktop.
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