What I do with my Leisure Time...

Obviously, by the looking at the picture, one can see that I enjoy petting the cat now and again...<;^) Other than that, anyone who knows me knows that I don't have a lot of leisure time. I have projects, school, work, school, projects, rehearsals, gigs and on and on. I haven't turned on a T.V. in months or read a novel in years. So why create a "leisure time" web page?? I'll tell you why. Because I had a few minutes of leisure time! My web site is my "leisure activity." Unfortunately I only get to work on it when most of my other work is done. At this moment I need to leave for school to finish up an MFC program (due today) and a Java program (due tomorrow). DOH!

When I'm not working on my website, my "other" liesure time is spent working on computer stuff. In this picture I was migrating data from my old laptop to my new laptop, installing 2 operating systems on a friend's desktop (dual boot system), downloading needed driver files to my desktop for my new laptop, and was updating my website on my Linux box. During lulls in activity I made a network cable (sitting on top of the cardboard box) for my networking class.

One of my majors is software engineering. Since I have picked several languages to develop (C++, Java, MFC, Linux programming), I found that my old monitor was a little shy of usable work space. Because I usually have several programs going at once, I thought I would purchase a slightly larger monitor with a greater resolution. What this added up to was more video real-estate with which to work. Much to my pleasant surprise, I found out that my Radeon 9800 Pro VGA card had enough muscle to not only provide both monitors with video feed, but it also had some built in smarts that really let me exploit its capabilities.

In this picture below I'm transposing data from an Excel spreadsheet to a Visio drawing. I would normally either print up the Excel spreadsheet and copy the data that way, or toggle back and fourth between applications, forcing one application to cover the other and then visa-versa. However I have now plunged head-first into the geek zone with this dual monitor set-up. The monitor on the left is a Dell 20.1" LCD (2001FP) with 1600x1200 resolution (connected to my video card via DVI cable). The monitor on the right is a slightly less spendy REALsync 19" monitor with 1280x1024 resolution (connected via VGA cable). Together this powerhouse of monitors and high-end video card make for quite an awesome work space.

Better yet, because the monitor on the right is fed via a VGA cable, I'm still able to use my KVM switch to toggle between my Linux box and my windows box. Awesome!!

This page is up as of January 30, 2006 - 9:15 AM and was updated February 17, 2006 at 1:50 AM.

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