Brettia

The last several days have been…interesting. First was the two-day drive through snow and fog from Phoenix, Arizona, to Springfield, Missouri (down in the southwest corner of the state). The entire drive was around 1300 miles…and exhausting, even though I wasn’t doing the driving. We stopped at two Cracker Barrel restaurants along the way to eat breakfast; they really do have better breakfast food than anywhere else. (Try the hashbrown casserole!)

Anyway, we reached Springfield at about 5:00 PM on the 24th, just in time to go southward to the suburb of Nixa to have Christmas at my aunt’s house. I only got three presents of note: Star Ocean III (a PlayStation 2 game), a nice CD player/clock radio, and, the piez de resistance (spl?), a LG 1720P. What is that exactly? Only the most ass-kickenest flat-panel monitor you’ll ever have the privilege of looking at. According to the box (though not LG’s website), the monitor has an ultra-fast 12 millisecond response time, enough for gaming, and its color and brightness are amazing. Remember that I’m a graphic designer by trade (at least part of the time), so color quality is important to me. I actually think that this monitor’s contrast and degree of realism (color-wise) is better than that of my old CRT, which I had lovingly dubbed “Chunky”. I’m typing this entry on a 15-inch Dell flat-panel with a native resolution of what looks to be 1024×768, and there really is no comparison - my monitor is just too awesome.

I think the results of my limited experience with my new monitor are bolstered by several favorable reviews that I’ve seen, one from a fellow graphic designer who compared the LG 1720P alongside a similar offering from Sony and found that the LG won the comparison hands-down. The only thing that he found lacking in the LG was the sturdiness of the base, which is true, but it just wobbles a bit if someone heavy walks into the room; it’s not as if it’s in danger of falling down or anything. We’ll see how it goes after further use. Before I move on, though, I should mention that, according to PCWorld’s ranking, my monitor’s sister model, the LG 1710SK, is the top one in its class. That feels good.

So now all I have to do is ensure that my computer and monitor get to Milwaukee safely. This is no easy feat, since it’s been taken in and out of the car several times. However, since I did get to hook up and use my pride and joy yesterday, I know it’s still in working order. I only hope it still will be when we get there (we leave Missouri on Friday).

I’d add a bit more about my vacation, but I really haven’t done all that much. Most of what has happened has been family stuff, like the huge, elegant dinner that was held at my other aunt’s house. The food was really good, making up for all the posing and smiling and fake laughter that had to be endured during the course of the meal. My great-grandfather’s entire family was in attendance, from his three sons and their wives on down to their children and their wives to me and my cousins and second-cousins. I think about 32 people were there, altogether.

A sort-of late Christmas gift came today, when I rode with my parents to Kansas City in order to drop my dad off at the airport. I didn’t really need to go, but I didn’t have anything else to do (though I wanted to play Star Ocean), so I went along anyway. I spent most of the day either sleeping or reading the two technology books that I got: Dive Into Python and Web Standards Solutions. The Christmas gift was a really nice Kansas City Chiefs pull-over/sweater from a little shop on US 40 near the stadium called SportsNutz. They have just about every Chiefs thing imaginable, even stuff that isn’t available in team shops or on the NFL website. So now I have something to wear other than my Priest Holmes (#31) jersey, which makes kind of an empty statement since Priest hasn’t played for several weeks because of a knee injury and might not be playing again too much. I think I’d rather have a Tony Gonzalez jersey, anyway, since he is the best tight end in the league (not many tight ends can play well as wide receivers too). I wouldn’t mind a Dante Hall jersey, or even a Jared Allen one, if I can find it (he’s a rookie who has nine sacks and has only played for part of this season). Anyway, my hunger for Chiefs stuff has been satiated for now.

I will eventually update the design of this blog when WordPress 1.5 comes out. I don’t want to get a nice new template all up-and-running only to have to update it to make it work with the new WP version (which should be released soon). While I wait for that, I will be working on the new Rounded design of BrettEpps.com, my professional site for promoting my web development services. Expect to see that up at least by February 2005, if not much sooner (I have to give myself some room in case school gets all mean and hairy with it). The new design will utilize lots of nice new CSS techniques that I learned and understood better after reading Web Standards Solutions, which I would recommend to anyone who already knows HTML and wants to move up to standards-based design.

While BrettEpps.com will lack prettiness that doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, I’m considering making Organon work in browsers based on the Mozilla Gecko and KHTML engines only. We’ll see.