When I moved into my own apartment, I’d had some vague plan to set-up my computer as the center of a sort of home entertainment thing, essentially imitating Israel.
Once there’d been enough of an unpacking to have a living room, I got the computer hooked up to the TV and the stereo, and since then I’ve been consuming media purely through my Internet connection (I haven’t had TV reception since cancelling my cable subscription a couple of months before moving out of Hod HaSharon).
But surely, I thought, there must be more to this then just running over to the computer, setting up the show you want to watch in the media player, changing screen resolution, dragging the window to the TV part of the desktop, hitting full screen and rushing back (I remember a lot of rushing when I started out with this; also a great deal of having to get up to the computer to pause).
So when I got a new desktop computer, I got a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, again imitating Israel. I think I had some notion of being able to use them in the living room without getting up to the computer, but the crappy resolution of the TV screen made that impractical.
Recently the level of discomfort from sitting in the bad chair by the desk, and of using the mouse, has been getting to me. I can’t concentrate enough to write, I said to myself (somewhat hypocritically: I do sit there uncomfortably for many hours reading the Internet or fiddling about, but that requires less concentration, I guess). So yesterday, while trying to write a session recap, I decided to give this a try: take the text editor I’m using (Kate) and put it in full screen mode, get rid of all the toolbars and sidebars (the default interface is much to cluttered to my taste), switch to a really big font, change to a low resolution (the one I use to watch TV), and settle comfortably on the sofa, with the wireless keyboard. Turns out that this works out not bad at all. I need to find the best posture, but I can actually work like this, it seems.
Of course, instead of writing the recap, I got so excited I decided to take a photograph, and post it to my blog, and write an entry (which has taken me over 24 hours…). Procrastination is a constant.