A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

The keyboard/mouse combo built in to my mactop is just enough of a pain in the ass that I never used the damn thing, not really.  Oh I’d keep it running so I could use it as a second monitor while trading (more on that in an incoming post) but I never really used the thing.  

Trackpads just really suck.  Yes, they’re all clever and everything, but they really just don’t get the job done for me.  I need a mouse that has buttons (which are buttons and not “sensitive areas”.  It’s not a woman, it’s an input device.)

So I finally unbolted the video cable from my Dual G4 (remember THAT? no?  You HAVEN’T been reading me for 7 years?  hmmpf.) and plugged it into the side of my mactop, along with my nice spiffy macally keyboard and some mouse I had in a box called “The Mouse” which seems to be made by a company called MacMice.  It sucks by the way.

Mr. Bernstein will likely be pleased to know that what’s motivated me to do this is Tinderbox.  In all my bizarre casting about for an organizational system (both on line and off, electronic and paper) that works for me, knowing I have Tinderbox sitting on a mactop that’s for all intents and purposes functionally useless to me was driving me out of my mind. And, since it doesn’t look like Eastgate is going to get to Tinderbox for Win32 this decade (relax Mark, I’ve been a developer for 30 years I actually DO know how it is) I figured it was time to get to it.

So now I’ve got all these weird key combinations I have to learn all over again (whether or not I ever really knew them to start with is a matter of … eh, no it’s not.  I didn’t.)

But this should work.  I’ve signed up with MacHeist for all their goodies “and stuff” (in joke, not with MacHeist.)  So here we go.

Now I have to cast about for “the right things to have installed.”  TweetDeck is already on here (it makes for a great “2nd monitor” application) though it had some serious stability problems on this platform (whether it was TweetDeck or Adobe Air I neither know nor care.)

It feels good to have set this up.  Due to the wonderful lag in the gaming industry (driven by sensible market forces frankly) I can take working on this machine far more seriously than on my big gaming rig that’s become my primary machine.  The distractions here are at least interesting ones.

Let’s see… where’s that xcode icon…