brad's life

Hung out with Dina all evening... went to Mt. Tabor, walked around, drove around, went back to her place, made dinner, watched a movie.

Learned a new word: apothecary.

It was in the movie we were watching and she clued me in. Then I got excited... Apotheke in German is drugstore. Look at its etymology! Some common words (mother, father, month names) are understandable to be so similar across languages, but it was weird seeing a concept of pharmacist so common and old. But then it made sense: people have always been sick, and in the past more so than nowadays. Anyway, it amused me.

Cable gets hooked up tomorrow.

Been getting a lot of work done, not being on AIM.

AT&T dude is here now installing cable. Norwegian accent or something.

I was told on the phone they'd only install jacks on outside walls, but he's making one behind the TV for me, drilling down into the crawl space... cool.

In other cool news, I got tons of rad email this morning... almost all of it was exciting. And a ton of good fotobilder posts.

Norwegian dude is gone, and I now have cable.

Amusing anecdotes:

He was totally confused by my Tivo setup: RF in to Tivo, RCA out to receiver, RCA from receiver to VCR, RF from VCR to TV. He kept insisting that you have to hook up the RF in and out to the same physical box, and I kept trying to explain that it was going over the RCA cables. In the end, I appeased him and hooked shit right up to the TV, avoiding my tower of boxes. He'd never seen Tivo, but he seemed sold on it after hearing about it. "So inside it has hard drive?"

He tried to talk me into switching to AT&T phone service and AT&T internet service, but I told him I need fast upstream, which I can get with DSL and not with cable. He asked if I had to pay for bandwidth, and told how he got screwed by AT&T when he was in Chicago for transferring too much. I told him no, and I also get a static IP and can run servers, with the upstream being fast. He got excited about DSL then also. :)

I rearranged the computers & monitors in my office.... much better now. Main desktop's off the floor and hidden behind the flat screen. That makes the desktop close enough to plug in my 19" CRT without a VGA extender, which was ghosting the image. The 15" CRT is now plugged into the Windows machine, since it makes a high pitch noise after being on a couple minutes, but I don't use Windows ever more than a couple minutes to test stuff, so they're a good match. That also means I have more room on my left desk for junk.

Now that I'm actually using Xinerama, I notice it's kinda slow.

Matrox G400
XFree86 4.1
Matrox drivers

Can anybody recommend a fast dual-VGA card for Xinerama? Or am I best going with two cards? (it seems like you could get better acceleration with a dual card)

I'll probably stick with what I've got for now, but when it comes time to build a new desktop, I'll want a good video card. My drives are slow & loud, my HSF is becoming whiny, and my PSU could be quieter.