14.07.2004 22:47 - The Flatscreen Cometh
Today at work my new computer arrived. It\'s one of the latest Dell computers with.... a flatscreen.
I have now regained a huge amount of my desk where the old, big, bulky monitor used to reside, and I\'m frankly amazed by the sudden liberation of space. You see, ever since I started to work, I\'ve had to give up a huge amount of deskspace to the large box which displayed the results of my labours. In some jobs, frankly, there was only about enough space for the monitor on the desk, and so secondary labour, such as old-fashioned-getting-down-to-basics-with-a-pen-and-paper, was rendered very cramped and difficult indeed. It became even more difficult to find space as acceptance for windows gained speed and the mouse took up even more space, and I began to pray for the flatscreen to deliver us from evil.
You see, I can\'t stand the old monitors. It\'s the last major piece of thermionic valve technology in wide use, and as far as I was concerned I could not wait for the day of their passing. Valves may sound great (I swear blind by my old VOX AC30 guitar amplifier) but they have no place in modern computing equipment. They are space-gobbling, migraine-inducing, dust-attracting, noise-generating, overweight, overheated (they need it to work in the first place, for heaven\'s sake) anachronisms. I often used to suffer migraines which I now realise were often due to the high magnetic fields round computer monitors, or due to the monitors themselves being old, crappy, flickery and not giving a clear-enough picture. Funnily enough, the migraines stopped as soon as I moved over to using a laptop with an LCD display.
Now all we need is for the top of the desk to be a touch-sensitive flatscreen. Let\'s see how long that takes.
