The Passing of a Close Friend, or What I'm Buying Myself for Christmas
It was just there, you know. And now it's not. And life just isn't the same.
I got used to having a 19" monitor on my desk. It's big screen made me feel like I was peering into the eye of the world. It was never one for untoward attention, its end was the same as its life. It blew with a short zzzt sound, and simply wouldn't turn on. It was nearly seven years old, and it has been dragged to the odd LAN party, moved from house to house, and has even been hauled across the country. In the lexicon of the muscle-car crowd, it didn't owe me a thing.
I've temporarily replaced it with a 14" that's been kicking around for a ridiculously long time. I require monitors to run at least at 1024x768, and my techno-pride means that I can hardly read anything on the screen. Its refresh is slow enough to cause serious flicker issues. Furthermore, I can't even stretch the image to fill the width of the screen I do have -- the knob simply doesn't exist. I want to go replace it right now, but this has taught to appreciate the things we take for granted. Remember when you had to buy a monitor and graphics card together? If anything happened to either you'd have to replace both. My first computer had a Hercules Graphics monochrome screen, amber not green, and when you got used to the odd dithering you could even play games on the thing!
Well now I'm shopping. I think I'll go CRT one last time. The technology is more mature, and I simply like the picture better. I'll put up with the extra heft and bulk, and save some pennies even. And maybe I'll skip the whole LCD generation, and go straight to the first generation of "plug-in-brain" monitors. Oh yeah, that's not funny.
I got used to having a 19" monitor on my desk. It's big screen made me feel like I was peering into the eye of the world. It was never one for untoward attention, its end was the same as its life. It blew with a short zzzt sound, and simply wouldn't turn on. It was nearly seven years old, and it has been dragged to the odd LAN party, moved from house to house, and has even been hauled across the country. In the lexicon of the muscle-car crowd, it didn't owe me a thing.
I've temporarily replaced it with a 14" that's been kicking around for a ridiculously long time. I require monitors to run at least at 1024x768, and my techno-pride means that I can hardly read anything on the screen. Its refresh is slow enough to cause serious flicker issues. Furthermore, I can't even stretch the image to fill the width of the screen I do have -- the knob simply doesn't exist. I want to go replace it right now, but this has taught to appreciate the things we take for granted. Remember when you had to buy a monitor and graphics card together? If anything happened to either you'd have to replace both. My first computer had a Hercules Graphics monochrome screen, amber not green, and when you got used to the odd dithering you could even play games on the thing!
Well now I'm shopping. I think I'll go CRT one last time. The technology is more mature, and I simply like the picture better. I'll put up with the extra heft and bulk, and save some pennies even. And maybe I'll skip the whole LCD generation, and go straight to the first generation of "plug-in-brain" monitors. Oh yeah, that's not funny.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home