1:1 devices are the biggest mistake the education industry has made during my career. I’m not elaborating, I’m too tired and I’m still kinda pissed off.
Almost there
No pictures yet, because I still have a jangle and a tangle of cords and mess all over everything, and I think at least one piece of wall art still needs to be moved, but I think it’s fair to say that 80% of the work I alluded to in the “Before” post a couple of days ago is done. What’s left isn’t difficult so much as annoying, and I also need to get an adapter that I hadn’t counted on to make something new work.
Yes, I’m being cagey. No, I don’t care. I have to have my fun somehow, Goddammit, and pretending you guys are chewing your nails wondering what I could possibly be doing in my office is what I do for fun.
In the meantime, I am sweaty and tired, and my office is a mess, and I have far too much to do tomorrow. Whee!
In which I’m not there yet
If you have never seen someone wearing a CPAP mask, be aware that it is impossible to overstate just how completely fucking ridiculous they look. Prince couldn’t look cool in one of these fucking things. Bowie couldn’t look cool in a CPAP mask. It’s just impossible, and it’s driven home by the fact that if you Google the masks you get a bunch of pictures of attractive people and models and they still look completely ridiculous– none of them are dressed for bed, and critically, none of them are giant, hairy fat men, which by my understanding are the main clients for these things, as our bodies are tired of us and thus try to strangle us in our sleep.
Anyway, you might be wondering why I haven’t given an update for the CPAPpery yet, and the reason is that I haven’t got one to give. I’ve got my machine, but the mask they sent me … isn’t working. At any size. It is absolutely impossible (I’ve said that a lot in this post already, but it remains true) to get the mask they sent me, at any size, to seal properly– my unit will work for no more than five to ten minutes before stopping because of a “major airflow leak” and tell me to reattach my hoses, which have never been detached and do not have any holes in them, nor are they attached improperly.
We’re trying a different mask of another style, one that is close to the diagram to the right but I think doesn’t feature the idiotic top-of-the-head air tube attachment, and I fully expect to find out when that gets here that there’s something wrong with my machine. Looking forward to it, even, because when you try three different versions of the same mask with three different people, two of whom do not have beards, and remain entirely unable to achieve a proper seal even once, it’s probably a sensor issue somewhere and not the mask’s fault.
I get the new masks on Thursday next week, supposedly, because they are apparently being sent by camel. I feel like given that the insurance company is already hassling me for “noncompliance with my therapy,” which I currently can’t do because my shit doesn’t work, and my respiratory therapist was supposedly going to take care of this exact problem, they maybe could have shipped the equipment faster. Maybe just, like, a guy, on foot. He could have gotten it here before next Thursday, I’m certain of that.
Anyway, if I ever get to attempt to sleep in one of these things, I’ll tell you all about it. It hasn’t happened yet.
New hotness alert!
Forgive me, for I have sinned; I spent money on Black Friday, the fruits of which arrived today in the form of that pretty-ass new 27″ monitor on the right there. The one it replaced was, in general, a capable device (and will continue in service, but on my wife’s desk) but was so old that I literally don’t remember when I bought it; it may well date to the computer before Apple switched to the current iMac setup, where the computer and the monitor are one piece. It’s possible that it dates back to my Chicago years, although I think it might be too thin for that.
Thing is, I have a new desk coming– it’s backordered, but it’s coming– and that desk is a bit wider and deeper than my current one, and has a spot underneath it where I can put the PS5. So I decided that meant it was okay to become the ultimate in geekery: a three-monitor person. And Amazon had these fuckers on sale steep on Black Friday; I saved about $220 on the two I ordered, one of which is just going to sit in the box until the new desk arrives in a couple of months and, when I install it, might go in oriented vertically. Why? Why the fuck not?
Also, it’s curved, and I don’t know if you’ve ever used a curved monitor before? I hadn’t, and while I can’t quite explain why I like it as much as I do, it’s kind of amazing, and between the curve, a more efficient stand, and the smaller bezels compared to the old monitor, it actually really doesn’t take up much more room on my desk– so even the one drawback I’d managed to come up with regarding spending the money & upgrading really didn’t pan out.
Next trick: figure out why the colors on that picture look so supersaturated. Which I think is the phone and not the (main) monitor.
In which I am very, very, very dumb and not smart
This showed up on my porch this afternoon, apparently because I purchased it? I don’t know why the hell I might have purchased a 3D printer, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with a 3D printer, and I don’t know why I went out and bought a little table for it or why I’m putting it together in my office right now, but apparently my lizard brain took a look at the number in my bank account and realized that I’d survived the school year (my kids are gone GONE gONe GoNE) and decided that this was a thing that should happen.
Super. I look forward to printing six more things that will sit pointlessly on a shelf somewhere in my house because I definitely don’t have enough stuff like that.
Fuck.
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