Busier than I thought…

Things have been busier than I expected the past week and a half. Arranging movers, buying basics for the new apartment, unpacking all took a while. I had to catch up on a book I agreed to edit, and on a week’s e-mail I was getting behind on with only my laptop, which wasn’t set up for all the accounts I need to check. Now I’m in the middle of the the first week back in classes, with the aggressive schedule I gave myself. My last class ran from 6-10PM. Tomorrow’s packed, but I have no classes on Fridays. Unless something else comes up, I’ll be syncing up my code repositories again (they weren’t in a great state when I packed up the desktop two weeks ago and I didn’t have time to fix ‘em), and getting to work again.

I need a new monitor. This Dell UltraSharp 2001FP I’ve had for a few years is starting to go. The backlight is dim compared to what it used to be, and it’s showing some smudgy looking spots despite long periods turned off, showing all-white screens, and running JScreenFix. It was great while it lasted, so I think I’ll turn it into a nice 20″ LCD TV. I’ve got enough spare hardware and a TV tuner card to put together a media center PC to stick under it.

I would love a Dell 2407WPF-HC monitor, but I don’t want to spend the $600+ that’s going to cost. OfficeMax is advertising a Soyo brand 24″ widescreen for $299 I might pick up this weekend.

That’s a decent excuse to call Comcast too. So far I’ve been tuning into a low quality analog signal with a Slingbox — I’m lucky to get that since I haven’t signed up for cable service at all, but the line in the wall seems to have basic cable anyway. The “free internet” the apartment comes with appears to be shared DSL judging by the speed, and filters BitTorrent traffic… I need to ditch it if I want my weekly episodes of BLEACH, and Comcast will do for that too.

Posted on September 27, 2007 in Personal

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  • http://www.mysiteonline.org/ Brendon Kozlowski

    All considered, it sounds like the move went smoothly – it’s now just catch up time due to the move back. But…I thought Comcast is now filtering the torrent protocols? Bleach (on Cartoon Network) was starting to get interesting, I was feeling a climax (and in pure anime tradition, they flung it in a completely different direction just to make viewers even more anxious).

    $600+ for an LCD monitor? Might as well buy an LCD TV and use it as a monitor instead, it might be cheaper (especially with Black Friday retail sales coming up in about 2 more months).

  • http://www.dangrossman.info Dan

    Up until two weeks ago, I was using Comcast to download torrents regularly. I saw no evidence of filtering or throttling. I hope that doesn’t change… tunneling enough ports through SSH to mask torrent traffic would be a pain, and torrents are the only way some shows I watch get released.

  • http://www.CleverTools.com Jason

    Dan,

    I have two of these and I LOVE them: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824014139. Great reviews and also from a great place like NewEgg.com

  • http://www.abstractpromotion.com/ Promotion Techniques

    I have a 19″ Hyundai ImageQuest L90D+, and I love it. No dead pixels, great image. I’ve had it for about 2 years now and have never had a problem with it.