radiac.net

My 19" CRT monitor is coming up for its 6th birthday, and I've been thinking of replacing it for a while. After I'd been using it for a bit on Saturday, I thought 'hey, my eyes feel weird'. Then I looked at the edges of the screen, and saw that the picture was slowly shrinking and expanding. On top of the voltage regulation issue that it's suffered for years (where the brightness suddenly drops out), and the fact that at its very brightest I still can't make out dark greys, I decided that enough was enough.

I went for it and ordered a Dell 2407WFP - a 24" TFT with 1960x1200 of 6ms grey-to-grey goodness. Knowing how Dell are renowned for regularly offering discounts, I'd been watching the monitor pages for a while; although Saturday's 35% off with free shipping isn't the best price it has been this year, it is probably the cheapest I'm going to find it any time soon. So I ordered it on Saturday, it arrived today, and it's awesome.

I'm sure you'll understand that I had to give it a quick test of the, err, response time. Or something. I fired up DoD:Source, upped the resolution to 1960x1200, and it was good. It was better than good. And I was still getting 90fps - for a 3 year old machine, I don't think that's too shabby - if I didn't need Vista for software compatibility, I don't think I'd be upgrading that any time soon. Perhaps I'll just double the RAM.

At the end of the day though, good performance for games and films are a bonus - even if they were rubbish I wouldn't care, because being able to work without ruining my eyes makes it worth every penny.

You know what stinks, figuratively? Neighbours who don't pull their weight. You know what stinks, literally? Used nappies that have been sitting in a broken bag, in an outside bin with a broken lid, for the past 2 weeks. And I thought being woken up at 3am was the worst part of having an upstairs neighbour with a recently activated sprog.

We have a little open-roofed shed out the back that is home to 5 wheely bins, and the inhabitants of the other 8 flats in this building are quite happy to fill the bins. However, when it comes to dragging them out to the road (or back to the shed), they all seem to be too busy.

The best bit is that when we moved in, we asked the self-appointed leader of the building whether there was a bin rota. His response was a rather condescending "there is no need, we're all adults here".

Of course, the reality is that it ended up with us sharing bin duty with one other neighbour, but since he moved out in February it has fallen to Leela and me to take most of the bins out and bring them back in.

I know that in the grand scheme of things it is only a little thing, but I should only have to do it once every two months - it's unfair and it's getting really annoying, and on days like today it's just plain disgusting. I have tried leaving them, but we end up with overflowing bins and a shed full of dripping black bags - and of course, it's me who ends up sorting it out.

So, does anyone have any suggestions for a good way to persuade our neighbours to do their fair share?

I've been using my new monitor for a couple of days now, and I'm still really pleased with it. Finished rearranging my desk:

Next up for an upgrade is the machine itself. I'm still on Windows 2000 at the moment, but have software that requires XP or Vista (like Office and CS3). I had been putting off moving to XP because Vista was always just around the corner, but now that it's here I get the feeling that this machine would struggle a bit. I'm therefore thinking I'll just go for a short-term upgrade to XP, and wait for a year for the Vista situation to settle down before I buy a lot of a new hardware.

In other news, my framework is getting there - there are a a fair few features left to add before it's ready for release, but the core is now running one live site. Nifty!

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I have a fair bit of software that now needs XP or Vista. I thought that now was the time to upgrade my desktop so I can run it all on my nice new screen, rather than the small-dull-and-tiny screen of my laptop.

As my machine is quite sufficient at the moment, I didn't really want to upgrade the hardware. However, at nearly 3 years old it wasn't quite beefy enough for an upgrade to Vista, so I went for XP.

I have spent most of the past couple of days (in between work) wiping the hard drive and installing XP and all of the other programs that I need. A few comments:

• Why are there no attractive yet practical XP themes?
• How can Logitech support say there's no problem with their mouse software when the 50MB driver download doesn't recognise anyone's mouse?
• I have already had Outlook 2007 crash 3 times and Outlook Express crash twice. Microsoft need to work on their testing procedures.
• I am now two mini games and one boss level away from completing Wario Ware on my DS. I had forgotten how much waiting was involved when installing Windows.
• My search for a competent light-weight text editor appears to be over - I missed the latest release of Textpad, which seems to fulfil all of my requirements. Well, nearly all.

I haven't installed any games yet - that's a cunning way to remind me to do work. And by not upgrading to a Vista machine, I've also saved myself the pain of having to install and play all of those boring and ugly-looking DX10 games that are about to come out *sob*.

In other news, my Perl framework proceeds slowly, held up by my urge to write hundreds of unit tests for each 10 line subroutine. At least nobody can accuse me of not being thorough.

This bank holiday weekend has been a frenzy of going to the gym and cooking unhealthy things to try to balance it out. We made some cheese scones and chocolate muffins (new recipe!):

They both turned out incredibly well, even though Leela did accidentally try to bake the muffins under the grill. I should have taken some photos just after they came out of the oven, but sadly these were all that were left by the time I found my camera. Think I need to go to the gym again.