Upgrades have a funny way of turning into more upgrades. For Christmas I got a geForce 3 graphics card (which has rather helped my Quake 3 score!). This card has DVI-out, and, wooed by the Apple Cinema Displays that I saw while christmas shopping for other people, I suddenly felt the need to have a LCD monitor as well. After an amazing (and probably mistaken) price drop from $1500 to $860 on the 19" VG191 I decided to go for it. (Two days later, the price was back over $1000!)
OK, so the LCD is great, but the pivot software (you can turn your monitor 90°, which rules for reading web pages) crashes my computer. So yesterday I took advantage of CMU's Microsoft site license and got Windows XP for $10. (I don't know if it will actually fix the pivot software problem -- they say that an update is coming out soon -- but like I said, upgrades have a way of turning into more upgrades!) The XP upgrade actually worked really well, and the OS also has other nice features like cleartype for typography nuts like myself. I also saw on TV that using XP will get you laid.
So then, since I love to look at the monitor, I started using my new NTemacs 21.1 and tramp to do some tedious (but the pixels were so crisp!) work on aphasia to support nicer URLs in some of my web software. Phew! | 
