→

I want to tell you how cool my wife Wendy is. The company she works for periodically has auctions for old things like furniture and computer stuff to its employees. She called me up to ask me if I wanted anything. I didn’t figure there would be anything worth getting (or at least nothing I could think of) so unless she spotted something really cool not to worry about it. She spotted a 21″ monitor and signed up for it. It was a silent auction – one where you place your name and bid on a list and wait. Someone else comes along and outbids you. And so forth. She called me and told me, but noted “I didn’t know if you wanted a bigger monitor.” My response? “HELL YEAH! I NEEDS MORE RESOLUTION!”

She also put her name down for some office type furniture which she wanted. The auction was over at 6:00 and she got off work at 5:00. She went down and she knew a way to win at least one thing (the monitor or the furniture) – stand next to it to intimidate potential bidders. They would see the name on the list, the name on the tag, and then feel too bad to bid. She really really wanted the furniture, but she decided to stand next to the monitor for me. Her bid was up to $55 ($5 increments). Someone bid $60. She bid $65. She stood there and stared down bidders (not really) while tons of people swarmed the furniture she wanted. 6:00 came and we won the 21″ monitor for $65, and someone walked by and informed her we had won the furniture as well. Life is good.

So I got it home and it’s huge. It takes up most of this desk. It’s dingy and the little pull down thingy is half-broke. It had no power cord or VGA cord, I had to dig some up. And it originally hated my Encore card (a reboot synced them up). But man, once I got it hooked up and calibrated with Photoshop and the control panel – it’s huge, and it’s specatcular.

Yeah, my wife rocks like that.

I just played some games on it and since I don’t have the juice to run most games higher than 1024×768, I’m suddenly a big proponent of Full Screen Anti-Aliasing, so that’s next on my list. However, I have NO complaints – this monitor kicks ass and having games playing this big is amazing.

Oh, and I’m now running 1280×960 resolution, so I finally have some screen real estate in VisualStudio.NET, or anything else for that matter.

Can you tell I’m a wee bit happy?