I ordered a kangaroo yesterday. Yes, indeed. No, it’s not some sort of exotic drink like a Wallaby Darned, although ordering a wallaby was an option.
I’ve been on a quest to find a reasonably affordable sit-stand desk adapter. Something that allows me to work at my computer sitting or standing. Most of the solutions I found previously involved a swivel arm for the monitor that either had to be bolted into the desktop or clamped to the back end. They didn’t address the keyboard/mouse issue at all, which meant getting a separate product to lift them, probably a fixed amount.
Then I stumbled upon Ergo Desktop, which looks to be just what the doctor ordered—the doctor being me. Their low end product, the wallaby, allows you to raise the keyboard platform and the monitor at the same time. The kangaroo lets you lift the monitor another several inches independently of the keyboard. The whole thing just sits on the desktop—no installation required. There’s another level up that lets you mount the monitor via the VESA clamp, but I didn’t think I needed that. I should have it in a couple of weeks, at which point I intend to spend most of my workday standing, with the option of sitting whenever I want. They have a nice video on YouTube that shows it in action. I was sold. It’s affordable (many other swivel arm solutions cost upwards of twice that amount) and exactly what I imagined when I set out on this quest. I’ll let everyone know what I think of it after I get it.
I took the morning off from writing to strategize. I have four short stories that I want to tackle. Their deadlines are November, December, January and July. So which one do I have the best idea for? The last one, of course. I’m going to have to put that idea aside for the time being, though and focus on the deadlines in order if I’m going to meet them all.
I’m surprised they ran the vampire/werewolf episode of CSI so early. It would have been a natural for the week before Halloween. I got a kick out of Dr. Robbins trying to get the head off the spike. “It’s like trying to get meat off a shish kabob,” he said. Reminded me of my cameo in a Michael Slade novel, where my head is impaled on a spike outside Ted Bundy’s house.
Episode 3 of Fringe was in the alternate world. Reminds me a bit of Lost, with the flash sideways: the same actors playing slightly different versions of themselves. We learned that in that universe ink pens are rare relics, avocados are an expensive delicacy, small pox hasn’t been eradicated, the US Mail has a different logo (though I couldn’t make out what it was supposed to depict), and the US was involved in a war in, of all places, Aruba. The oxygen level in the air is unreliable. They also apparently had Star Trek. The plot was cool, with the guy working out all the possible outcomes from a sequence of events, like a Rube Goldberg machine. When Olivia and her partner were debating over the iterations of what the guy might have anticipated and counter anticipated, I thought they should have just tossed a coin, which would have added a level of randomness to the equation. Even if the killer could have guessed that they’d do that, he couldn’t guess the outcome. Still, I liked that Olivia defeated him because she didn’t behave like a person from that world.
It’s always fun watching Malcolm McDowell chew up the scenery. The unanswered question from this week’s The Mentalist is how Stiles knows so much about Red John (“a perfectly unpleasant sort of fellow”). It’s a tantalizing mystery, but almost something of a cheat. Patrick should have called him on it: the guy is withholding information pertaining to a number of homicides. I laughed at Patrick’s jibe to the undercover FBI (“Don’t freak out, Serpico”). Amazing that Rigsby and Grace walked away from that accident without so much as a stiff neck. And the guy at the end set a world record for the number of bullets he could take to the chest before falling down (excluding villains in horror movies). The “séance with a living person” was a nifty idea. My favorite exchange of the episode: Grace: “They all seemed so happy. Truly happy.” Cho: “Yeah, it’s creepy.” Interesting the way they all seemed to glide around in that last shot. MAYBE THEY’RE ALL REALLY DEAD!
