Monday, May 19, 2014

New Old Car, New Old Computer Setup

I've been attempting to blog at least daily the last few months, but dropped the ball last week because I was busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

As mentioned previously, we were looking for a "new" car for Tamara. We finally settled on one and got it purchased on Thursday and licensed on Friday -- a 1994 Isuzu Rodeo. Pretty sweet so far, but of course it takes awhile to be sure about an older vehicle.

Speaking of new stuff, a few years ago Tamara told me about her new computer setup at work. The next time I visited her office to check it out. She was using TWO monitors. I thought that sounded kind of stupid and unnecessary. Then I forgot about it for a few years.

Last week I started thinking about it again. A lot of my online work involves copying and pasting content from web sites into forms, documents, etc. At RRND, for example, I follow 50-odd libertarian commentary sites on a daily basis (myself -- more when I'm covering for other editors), looking for content to excerpt, blurb and link. At C4SS, I transpose our web-published op-eds into cover letters for submission to newspapers. And so on and so forth.

It finally hit me that running two monitors would mean I wouldn't have to constantly switch back and forth between "copying" tabs and "pasting" tabs in one browser window -- I could just keep them in separate windows on separate screens and be able to see both at once and move my mouse directly between them. Yeah, I know that that's something it should have taken me about a second-and-a-half to realize, rather than several years, but sometimes I'm reaaaaallly slow on the uptake.

So anyway, this weekend I finally got around to adding a second monitor to the Chromebox and it is also pretty sweet so far. Heck, even when work doesn't require two monitors, I can open a Netflix tab or whatever on the second monitor and have entertainment right next to the other stuff I'm doing.

How's that for a completely uninteresting blog post done just get a start on catching back up?

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