Can you tell what it is yet?
Related to my ongoing quest for suitable monitors to use with the beast as a dual display system, my research threw up an interesting program. I've always been very picky about the screens I use, nothing less than a 100Hz refresh rate is generally where I start from. Colours should be bright and vibrant, whites and blacks should be as their name suggests and text should be clear and sharp. It has been known for me to spend an entire morning to get a monitor set up just right. It never ceases to amaze me the rubbish, flickering, smudged, washed out pictures that people will stare at all day. It's infinitely cheaper and quicker to get a good monitor and set it up properly than a replacement pair of eyes.
Anyway, I digress. I've settled upon a 17" LCD as the second monitor and a Iiyama 22" CRT as the main screen. Both these monitors are "A" listed by PCPro (click Reviews-->A List). Further investigation of users comments about this screen were less than favourable about the geometry and colour rendition. I noticed in PCPro's review that they use a program called Displaymate to firstly set up the monitor and then carry out tests to make judgment. There is a free demo available of the program with 6 sample test screens that can be used to correctly set the geometry, brightness, contrast, colour, moire patterns etc. It can also be used on LCDs and Projectors. I suspect the great review from PCPro and the poor comments from users are down to the fact that they didn't spend the time and effort to properly set the thing up. A screen of that cost needs to be properly configured to the ambient light condition of where you place it, the video card driving it and the tasks that you plan to use it for. There's no such thing as a "plug and play" monitor in my opinion.
I'm seriously considering purchasing the full package, and as the boss is into his home cinema with a very expensive LCD projector, I may get him to pay for it as a business expense for the office workstations too. Give the demo a try, your eyes will thank you for it.
posted by Ricky Dee at
4:49 PM
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Guess where I'll be on the 14th October? That's right, getting the new Pink Floyd book, 
The complete shambles that passes for a postal service here in the UK is well known. The media reports on the Post Office's millions of pounds of losses, mail being delivered late or not at all, thefts etc are common place. 
As promised here are a few thoughts and tips that you may find useful if you find yourself in the position of working from home. Many of them will be common sense and can be found by looking at sites dedicated to home working.
So Uncle Tony has 
It's looking like my favourite monitor is on it's last legs. I've never seen a better image than that produced by my 17" Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 720, but at over 4 years old it has started to produce some glitches.
Well, that is a full week completed of working from home. I was in the office on Tuesday, supposedly for a conference call but that quickly got cancelled in all of the chaos, and spent my time building cardboard boxes (who says nobody is aware of my talents?).
Margo MacDonald MSP has 
Never been sporty in the participation sense of the word but there's nothing better lying on the sofa watching the telly, particularly when it's watching the US get humped. To coin a phrase "Ahhhwesome!" I usually only watch the closing holes of a major championship when it's on the box but the Ryder Cup is different. It's personal. You've got to support your local boys and for me that's Darren Clarke from Norn Iron, then the Irish guys and so on. 
Today was my first day of working from home. This will be a temporary arrangement for a couple of weeks while we move our office out of the longtime empty factory to a smaller office more in keeping with the remaining 7 staff (5 managers, 2 workers). I can connect to our European HQ in Belgium through VPN over broadband to pull a floating licence of 
I've received an invitation to join Google's 1Gb E-mail service, G-Mail(thanks Ian), but for the life of me I can't seem to get a username that I like. Either, everybody in the entire world has already registered or Google have pre-registered the entire Oxford English Dictionary. I must have tried dozens of screwy words and phrases but every single one came back unavailable. I refuse to have an address that looks like some twat on AOL with their name and then a load of random numbers in a vain attempt to get something individual. I generally have better luck registering domain names but it can't be long before saturation point is reached on that too. Changing the TLD is not the answer either, nobody wants to be a .biz or .whatever it's .com or .co.uk or nothing. Anyway, I'll try again tonight to come up with some devastatingly clever pun that befits my rapier wit.
Oh dear, I think I may be becoming a computer geek. It's all the fault of my former 
Christie's are having one of their rare Pop Memorabilia auction sales on September 29th. If you really want to make that certain someone very happy, then pop on over and buy me the Platinum Presentation Disc for Pink Floyd's 
The man who makes it all worthwhile has been very busy recently. Roger "Pink Floydmeister" Waters has released 2 tracks on the internet for download of his work in progress of the new studio album. With typical masterly timing the two tracks are titled Leaving Beirut and To Kill the Child. You can listen to free streaming versions 
Oh the glorious Green and White army of Norn Iron. What a game! It took me back, over 20 years, to the beginning of Norn Iron's second period of the glory years(1980-1986)... the first being the Danny Blanchflower team of 1958. What a match, 6000 fans from home bouncing and waving and cheering, tremendous stuff. The hilarity of Robbie Savage getting sent off for... uhmmm... flashing his kecks? The irony of it, the one time he does nothing to get sent off, he walks... pure dead brilliant. Healy gesturing to his family with his arm, brilliant. A twat of a referee to completely bugger it all up, headless Welsh chickens all over the park, Norn Iron 2:0 up within 20 minutes and only 9 men left, you couldn't make this up. Even the Norn Iron team looked like their counterparts from all those years ago, 3 stone heavier, 10 yards slower and all balder than the opposition (apart from John "the Gonk" Hartson).
