Monday, January 30, 2006

Pre-breakfast: a banana. Usual breakfast at the cafeteria. Restarted the server—smc.exe seemed to be taking up more system resources than normal. Worked on the regalia web order form for Joel. Lunch with Joel at Pasta Pomodoro. Got sticky hooks at the hardware store. Reposted the P1 schedule, which Lucia had updated to correct an error. Forwarded a listserv message from a student which had accidentally been tagged as spam. Dinner at home with Patrick: homemade pan pacific wontons, sweet potato bisque. Installed a Kensington lock on my Dell 2005FPW monitor. Got our ATI Remote Wonder II remote control working with PowerDVD. Here's my review of the Dell 2005FPW monitor. The Dell 2005FPW monitor is poorly designed in that the Kensington lock hole is placed in a location which interferes with the VGA cable enough that I would call it considerably difficult to attach the lock. You can unhook the VGA cable, which simplifies the attachment of the lock, but then the reattachment of the VGA cable is considerably difficult. For most people, it's painful to wrangle with all of this just once and then you leave it alone until you need a new monitor, but in our house the monitor will also be used for watching movies, and we'll be needing to unlock the lock and pick up the monitor and move it a few feet now and then. The Dell 2005FPW also fails to sleep properly. My 7-year-old Panasonic LC50 monitor sleeps properly, so I don't know what Dell's problem is. When I turn computers off but leave the Dell 2005FPW monitor on, it displays RGB bars instead of going to sleep, so I have to remember to manually turn off the monitor—it's very annoying. Consequently, I cannot recommend the Dell 2005FPW monitor to anyone for purchase. It's a giant screen, it's relatively inexpensive, and it is indeed a great value, but you must put up with these annoyances. Mine, manufactured November 2005, purchased December 24, 2005, Revision A03, did not have any bad pixels, and I did not notice any light leakage in the corners or anywhere else which other people reported when the monitor was first released. Installed flip4mac 2.01. Installed Winamp 5.13.