Still dancing as fast as I can

View 759 Sunday, January 20, 2013

Richard and Herrin and the grandchildren are on visits to California friends, so in theory we had the day to catch up, but in fact the day was devoured by locusts. All small and nearly trivial problems that ate time.

I am grateful to Thermaltake and their gaming keyboards. Roberta managed to spill coffee in her old Gateway, and at the same time my old Ortek decided that the n key was going to be flakey. I found a Thermaltake for Roberta, and another for me. The one I have is the Challenger and comes in a professional carry bag. Everything Thermaltake does is in the direction of elegance. Of course keyboards and gaming keyboards are greatly a matter of personal preferences. The Thermaltake Challenger is definitely not a writer’s keyboard, and after Richard’s family goes back east I’m going out to Fry’s to get a Microsoft Comfort Curve keyboard. I prefer the old Ortek but it is really OLD, and no longer reliable. If I did a lot of gaming I’d keep the Challenger in place, and in fact the simple solution would be to make some changes in my setup here and use the Comfort Curve on Emily over here on my main Windows machine. But I’m planning on replacing both the main Windows machines here with newly built systems anyway.

One thing we have learned is that Windows 8 may be great for gamers and other home use but Windows 7 is more than good enough for writers and office use. I think Windows 8 should be reserved for touch control machines. Windows 7 is still the best Windows yet, and in fact it’s the reason I haven’t converted everything to Mac systems. I was on the way to that conversion when 7 replaced (ugh) Vista, and 7 seduced me back to the dark side. Apple is too persnickety about things being done the Mac way or no way at all. Underneath the hood there’s real UNIX in Macs and that will solve almost all Mac problems, but UNIX remains the guru-friendly system. Ah well. More on that another time.

The Thermaltake keyboard is elegant, but the keys are too close together (perhaps that is a good thing if you are primarily a gamer) and I find I have the CAPS LOCK key on a lot when I didn’t want it. As far as I am concerned CAPS LOCK could be on a key switch over to one side of the keyboard. On my old ORTEK I disabled it by stuffing rubber foam under the key until it takes real pressure to activate it. If I keep this Thermaltake in service (not likely because the keys are just too close together for my style of typing) I’ll try that trick with it, only I don’t quite remember where I got the foam rubber. Probably from a dying chair.

I will repeat that Thermaltake has elegant products. I love their cases and their power supplies and cables and those work extremely well as well as look elegant. Their accessories run to the expensive elegant and impressive side – which is in fact a bit appealing, but not for keyboards where you have to do a lot of writing. Which is why I am still using, or wish I were still using, a 20 year old ORTEK programmable, and Roberta is using an even older Gateway. Or she may be. She’s got a Thermaltake now, and I washed her coffee soaked Gateway in the shower. That often fixes them. We can hope it works with hers. And for my ORTEK for that matter.

Anyway, I’m catching up, trying to get some work done. I don’t seem to be catching up although I am dancing as fast as I can.