X111.com

Never again will I have to suffer single screen hell. As soon as my order arrives… which could take a while…

Years ago I decided to hook a second monitor up to my comp and it was awesome, probably the easiest way to increase my productivity. Simply because it gives you so much more screenspace and you have more of an overview of what’s going on. Like most people I usually had my chat programs (irc, msn, trillian, you name it) on one screen along with my music player and mail and on the other one my productivity apps. Or when working on graphics you can use one screen for the entire picture and the other for all the toolbars and stuff. Or when you’re coding you have your editor on one screen and the preview on the other. Hell, it’s even nice to be able to play a game and still keep an eye on my chatroom on the other screen.

Last year I had to ditch dual screen goodness because I didn’t have the space for it anymore and my computer setup changed (I still have 2 19″ CRT’s, but one’s hooked up to the pc and one to my Mini) and it’s been a very claustrophobic experience. Things just haven’t felt right since.

So seeing as for the first time in history my car checkup today didn’t break the bank and my comp supplier called with a nice deal I ended up ordering 3 luvly Samsung SyncMaster 203B 20″ TFT monitors. Mmmm. I actually wanted to get 4 but that would be a bit over the top… for now…
Alas, apparently there’s a world wide supply problem in the tft market so it could take up to a month before I get my hands on them. That leaves me plenty of time to think about, and build, a new desk.

Just a quick entry to say hi, we’re back.
More later…

The joys of packing… starting tomorrow I’ll be offline for about 12 days as we head off to Greece to enjoy a bit of sun, sea, beach and various other enjoyable things. Take care, have fun, and don’t let us come back to a graveyard forum. ;)

For a while now CommS ‘n me have been discussing friendships and relationships, what’s fake and what’s not, how we look back on past events with the females, how we think people look at us and how a lot of it seems shallow and temporary at best. Ofcourse on the other hand I’ve been wondering if maybe we weren’t just being bitter and jaded.
Then again, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and yesterday was a nice reality check.
So to the 2 people who remembered my birthday; thanks :)

And on a different note, I’ve added a little thingie at the bottom of this page which shows the coverart of what I have playing in Winamp at the moment (assuming I’m home and have Winamp running ofcourse).

Maaaaaybe I started just a fewww things too many all at the same time. I’d need a month off from work just to get some of the other work done. It’s all fun and interesting, but just a tad much at once.
The Mini is awesome, and awaiting a RAM upgrade after a reboot last week took 5 minutes. 2GB baby!
So more and more things I used to do on windows are switching over to it, and I’ll even move X111.com over after the upgrade. So so sweet. Meanwhile I’m also starting 4 other sites for various things. Which takes time to code, make layouts and what not. And Robbie made me think about an old idea again… still wanna give that a go if and when the other sites are under way. For which CommS and Corvo should eventually jump in with the coding/theme-ing.
Plus my MacBook arrived today! Yes it gets hot, no the glossy screen is not annoying, yes it rocks. It also means I’ll be ditching XP as a client at work… right after I figure out how to authenticate against Windows 2003 so I can access my profile/shares and mail there.
*twitches* So yeah, todo overload these days. But it’s a shitload of fun.

Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, and it isn’t a flying horse either.
Someone, for some reason, decided to give me an early birthday present a month ahead of time (thanks crazy ;p). And so I’ve been playing with a Mac Mini for the past 2 weeks, which explains the slow down in terms of finishing my plans around here for the redesign.
By now Pegasus (as all my comps are named after mythical creatures) is purring happily and largely configured, hosting several of my other domains. I must say I’m loving the Mac experience more and more (although iTunes is still the biggest piece of shit ever released, but luckily that’s not what the machine is for). This weekend I hope to do some stress testing to see how it holds up compared to the old Quicksilver which buckled when I wanted to add a lot of stuff to the gallery, but I’m expecting it to pass with flying colours. Which might even get me to move this behemoth over to it.
After I figure out log rotation in combination with analyzer parsing, automating incremental backups, setting up SSH and SFTP, VPN, DNS wildcards… eh yeah, it may take a few days.

ok, scratch the life is good remark, I knew I shouldn’t have said that out loud.
3000,- euro worth of car repairs in a week means I’m shit out of luck (and money) for the rest of the year… again.

The sun is starting to shine, life is good.
Got my contract renewed and a nice raise, so for the next year and a half at least I’m going to stay on as a sysadmin.
Then again I have a job interview as webdeveloper tomorrow which should be interesting. I only replied on their online job application thingie with a link to the site here and got a mail and call from their managing director, so I’m guessing they liked the site.
After work I’ll be picking up this beauty here on the side, woohoo. Finally an Apple again. This lovely machine is the missing ingredient for a lot of new things that will be started over the next months. It’s going to be the webserver which will host my new sites on a dedicated ADSL line. After I’ve added some RAM and stuff first ofcourse, the poor thing only has 384MB at the moment. It’s a G4@733Mhz Quicksilver for anyone interested in that sort of thing.

The only less than cool thing is a major car repair coming up next wednesday which is going to eat a lot of money… as usual. ¬.¬
Ah well, it can’t all be good news.