Status Report

Well, it's been a while since I've written an entry. I'd like to say that's because I've been really busy, but that wouldn't entirely be true. It's more that I've been really lazy. I haven't written anything for my essay journal in a while, either, and I really ought to.

I've taken to bicycling to and from work; I've found a route that's nice and quiet, with either sidewalks or quiet residential streets for about 90% of the distance, and I can usually cover it in ten to fifteen minutes of biking. There's even an apple tree by the side of the road in front of one house where I sometimes stop and pluck an apple. So far, the weather has been favorable...any raining that's been done happened either during the night or during the day between rides to and fro. The only problems have been a day or so when it was really hot, and then I'd just ride slowly to stay cool.

( Food! )

So what have I been doing with my time? Well, partly I've been writing some reviews of some Japanese Transformers episodes that have only recently been getting fansubbed. I've kept meaning to mark them up in HTML at some point but will probably never get around to it, so here's the reviews of Masterforce episodes one, two, three, and four in text form. I've also finished a bit of Transformers fan-fiction that I started writing six years ago, and I'm quite proud of. Oh, and I've been working, too.

( My monitor needs a monocle :( )

And that's more or less how things have been going in my life lately. Except, of course, for the stuff I'm leaving out...but isn't that always the way?

(no subject)

Made a brief post to my essay journal with a few comments on the BoingBoing-blogged Exalted Abyssals confiscation story in mephron's LJ.

Monitor Not Merry, Mac

So. I checked out the used monitor place, and this is more or less what they have that I would be interested in. Brands are mostly Dells, with the odd Hitachi or Gateway sprinkled here and there:

19" ordinary (curved screen) CRTs—$65 (and some cheaper that have defects)

17" flat-panel (Trinitron or equivalent) CRTs—$75

21" ordinary CRT—$125.

Which leaves me in a bit of a quandary as to what to get. I mean, I want to have something that's at least 19", but I also want a flat panel because those are the sharpest and clearest displays, and least likely to cause eyestrain in gaming. I wouldn't mind maybe having one of those curved CRTs as a secondary display (particularly that 21" for watching DVDs), but not for my primary. I kind of feel like if I'm going to spend that much money anyway, maybe I should just spend it on a brand new monitor. Keeping my present monitor just isn't an option...it's causing me more and more eyestrain just to look at it, and I'm serously considering moving to my laptop for the remainder of the evening.

Edit: And an LCD is pretty much out of the question at the moment, too...it's about 4 times as expensive.

I'd kind of like advice...sooo, since I'm currently subscribed to LJ, I'm going to take advantage of these spiffy-keen paid-for features and post a poll on the matter so that all three of you folks who read my LJ can chime in. I'm not going to commit to doing "whatever wins" but it would be nice to see what people think and why. So, if you have any opinion at all, please take the poll, okay?

[Poll #334602]