How I learned to stop worrying and love technology

So it's now been four and a half days since I made a post, apologizing for not blogging more and saying I'd make it up to you. My plan was to post the next chapter of The History Of Peanuts (it's better than nothing, right?) on Friday. Obviously I didn't follow through on that.

Why not? Well, I got sick. Not deathly sick or anything, but worse than a common cold, bad enough that if I didn't start to do something about it, I'd probably be stuck in bed for the better part of a few days.

So, Friday night (and part of Saturday), I did something about it. I stuck myself in bed. Voluntarily. The idea being that I'd be more likely to get over the bug if I wasn't doing anything.

Of course, lying in bed and I do not generally go well together. I haven't done it with my laptop since some point in the summer, and with a book...well, never. So the question became...what can I do?

And then it occurred to me - I have a lot of movies and TV shows on my external hard drive. I should watch them. Of course, if I'm potentially going to be drifting in and out of sleep, I don't want to have a laptop that could potentially fall to the ground. So I should take advantage of some of my other technology.

Here's what I came up with:


(MS Paint is all anyone ever needs for photo-editing.)

1) Nice big widescreen monitor. Ordinarily it's on the big desk, but I moved it to the counter - my bedroom used to be a kitchen - so I could see it better from my bed.

2) Once the sun even *starts* going down, it's very rare for that light to not be on. However, there's no way I could look at the monitor and the light without any trouble. So light goes off, and lamp next to my bed (which I more or less never use) goes on.

3) Computer is ordinarily against the far wall, gets moved to edge of desk so that all the cords can reach where they need to go. I've actually kept it there ever since.

4) Nice speaker that was moved along with the monitor.

5) This is my sock. I didn't realize it was part of the picture.

6) Wireless keyboard and mouse. There's no #6 on the picture, that's because I kept them on the floor next to my bed.

So basically, I had a great view of my monitor, with great sound, and the ability to change what I was watching (or surf the web, although that was straining my eyes) without getting out of bed.

I should get sick more often.

--Ryan

(P.S. DayQuil will get me over any illness, ever. If I somehow got rabies, the bubonic plague, or lepresy, I would immediately rush to my bottle of DayQuil. Unless I was planning on going to bed soon, then it would be NyQuil.)