One of the biggest game-changers of my computing life occurred when I got a Mac II and, for the first time, was able to connect a second monitor. It made a huge difference in my productivity.
When I was working, I settled into a pattern of having a laptop as my primary machine. I could take it to work where (as a physician) I could actually use it in my lap as well as at my office desk. At my office and home office I also had external monitors that I would connect. I really liked having my whole world with me all the time, in my lap, on my desk, or in my bag without having to worry about syncing to a desktop machine or relying on cloud services or the like.
I had been using a 16” MacBook Pro for a long time, but it really wasn’t as portable as I liked. It filled my computer bag and made it heavy, it took up a lot of space on my tiny work desk, and when I was doing serious work I was always connected to a 32” external monitor. (This needn’t be an expensive habit: I bought the 32 inch monitor on sale, many years ago, for around $200 as it only had 1080p resolution; when I need hi-res I just move the window to my laptop screen.)
When I decided to climb over the Apple garden wall and escape to the FOSS world, I got a 13” Framework. It’s much better for traveling and for actually using on my lap and the display, while small, is excellent for my purposes. Then I came to the island…
My 32” monitor is on the boat. My printer is on the boat. I’m having to deal with making house plans and bills of materials and checklists. I’m having to assemble multiple documents to glean data to support the sale of the mainland house. I’m having to create my personal medical dossier to establish care with new doctors. All these things require multiple open windows and many poorly-formatted documents. Having six windows open on a 13” screen gets challenging, and navigating to a window to grab some information and then navigating back without forgetting where I was or losing the information I just looked up is proving to be way too challenging for my feeble brain.
So the list of things I miss because they’re on the boat (or, actually, in the nearest harbor but not yet released by Matson) keeps growing. I solved the bidet seat problem. We’re getting by with minimal dishes. But we’re sleeping on a lumpy, damp, moldy mattress on the floor and I’m building and fixing things with a dinky tool kit from the local hardware store and I’m trying to do CAD work and fill out badly-designed forms (redundant?) while my bed, my mattress, my tools, my external monitor, and my printer are all still on the boat.
I’m loving living in paradise, but I do wish my ship would come in.
—2p