I'll Clear the Stone From the Dell

[austin_dern]

I've reached a milestone at work: they've replaced my laptop. There wasn't anything specifically wrong with the old besides that the 'E' key was getting fussy and so making me look like I nd hlp splling, but that probably could have been fixed with a jet of compressed air in the right spot. Still, their policy is to replace laptops every N years, need it or not, and we reached that point now. We actually reached that point back in January but nobody noticed then. Part of that was caused by the agency reorganization; my laptop was originally registered with my former agency and probably fell through a crack in the responsibility chains.

So the past week has been a bunch of new setup work, in-between my normal work. Mostly, waiting for the software I specifically need to get installed, which led to getting the admin privileges I need to develop installed. And then discovering that the laptop's built-in microphone didn't work, which ultimately needed a call to tech support and their remotely reinstalling drivers and restarting twice to fix. The tech support guy said he liked service calls for programmers like me because we have admin privileges rather than his having to re-enter his password every five seconds.

Mostly it's been an easy change over except that the new camera makes everything look dust-covered. Maybe there's some color correction setting that would make me look still alive but I don't know where it is. That and the new laptop has a single unified trackpad, like it's a Mac or something, instead of the trackpad with specific left, middle, and right buttons, because all those old As The Apple Turns jokes about Michael Dell wanting to be Steve Jobs were so, soooooo very true. This is proving annoying to me to adjust to, I think because the Mac is built around ``yeah, you mostly want to left click but there's some weird cases where a right click makes sense'' while Windows is designed around ``you need left-clicks, right-clicks, sometimes a medium-click, and we wouldn't turn down a top-click, strange-click, and charm-click too''. Plus I keep brushing my fingers in some way that hides everything everywhere. I'll either learn to stop doing that or get used to how sometimes Windows just does that. Don't know.

(Also, I just went to see if As The Apple Turns's web site was still up to link to it, and yeah, it was. And it turns out it's doing a replay of episodes from 25 years ago and the installment for today 25 years ago has a Michael Dell Wants To Be Steve Jobs joke in it.)

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And now, let's see something of the front of Glen Echo Park.

Glen Echo Park was, in the oldest days, a trolley park, visited by Washingtonians taking public transportation out there. These tracks are ... probably not from then. The park got a trolley about twenty years ago, and had it out in front of the park a while, but returned it to wherever it is good trolleys come from.

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Overgrown stone stairs that lead from the highway outside to ... the grass opposite the trolley in front of the park. There was probably a time this was very useful for people being dropped off at the park.

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And here's the entrance, a streamline moderne beauty. I'm sorry not to have seen this by night, or evening beauty.

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Here's my panoramic photograph showing the gorgeous sign and the new trolley tracks and the stone castle --- what had once been the chatauqua tower before the place got all amusement park-y.

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And here's what the park looks like from the old entrance. The candy shop's on the right.

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And then down this way we get a flying saucer on the right and the Crystal Pool to the left.

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Trivia: The word ``cop'', as in the verb for ``to get ahold of, to catch'' first appears in English around 1700 as a slang word, possibly from Dutch. The word has curiously remained slang through to the present, neither becoming respectable nor fading to obscurity. Source: Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins, Editor Frederick C Mish. The word expanded to ``copper'' as a noun for the guys who catch you in the 19th century and shortly after that the noun shortened to ``cop''.

Currently Reading: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry.