I’m on day 3 of my 2 week holidays from NewBay. Saw Cars and Angel-A at the cinema. Mneh to both, although Angel-A had it’s moments. I’m doing a bit of running, my legs haven’t this poor in quite some time – muscles straining – it’s a good sign right?

I’ve wanted to do more on the Java front, but alas haven’t spent much time on the computer yet at all.

My good friend Ray Gallagher just sent me this link of his: extreme motivation

Brilliant!

Played my first Civilization 3 game through on the monitor. I had only once previously played on Emperor – and won with great difficulty (Space Race, with another Civ very close behind). This time I played the same basic strategy, but lost to Space Race, with a nasty nuclear war a few turns beforehard. It was a joy to play on the monitor at 2560×1600 – Zoomed out I could almost see the entire standard map. I just read an article regarding the greap leap from monarch to emperor

Watched Season One of DeadWood over the weekend too. I’m impressed, the language is very sharp and consistently so. Calamity Jane for all the cheap humour associated with, is still my favourite character.

Calamity Jane: I’m drunk. Correct. What the fuck is it to you?

I travelled to Galway to collect my new Dell 30″ Widescreen Monitor this weekend. I brought down my graphics card to test out on the brothers machine – I’ve been using it now for 2 days and every time I walk into the room the scale and resolution of this monitor doesn’t cease to impress me. I’d read a lot of articles and reviews online before making the purchase. Some mention uneven brightness, dead pixels and random interference in the shape of specked dots appearing. I haven’t experienced or seen any of these (yet).

It has a native resolution of 2560×1600 which I believe is the upper limits of Dual Link DVI. Above is a picture of my new set up with my ‘old’ Dell 2001FP working at 1200×1600 beside it.

It took me a full hour or two to configure the above in linux. Using the nvidia drivers in linux I quickly realised that TwinView would not allow me to set it up as I wanted it (With the second monitor being in portrait mode). Rotation is not supported when using TwinView. I had to do some reading about Xinerama – Which is how I got it working in the end. Throw me a mail if you have problems getting something similar to work. Some other pictures are available from my gallery.

I’m just after noticing that there is a very noticable brightness difference in the picture above. The 3007WFP is brighter than the 2001FP. Reducing the brightness level on the 3007WFP by a notch or two makes the color/brightness differences indistinguishable.

I wouldn’t normally post about my housey service providers; vodafone, smart telecom, ESB, Sky Digital etc… But Damn. Hibernian Direct just saved me the bones of €1,000.

I did the Ignition Test with them well over a month ago and I’ve read mixed reports online about it – mostly from boards.ie. I found it a long day but worthwhile in itself and for the reason mentioned above.

Number one on my wishlist for quite some time… My Dell 30″ will be here soon! In preperation for the arrival I just received in the post my new Dual Link DVI capable graphics that I need to drive the beast. I had a dilema in purchasing this card… Two options… 1: New CPU, MB, RAM and PCI express dual link graphics card 2. New AGP based graphics card. Well I ended up buying, currently one of the best nvidia based AGP graphics cards out there, a Gainward Bliss 7800 GS 512 MB AGP. The reason was twofold; cash & I don’t think I need much more out of my machine right now or the foreseeable future.

I’m no gamer – but I brought up Half Life 2, Doom 4 and Civ 4 and they all ran astonishingly well compared to my older gainward. Civilization IV runs a hell of a lot better now in Cedega than it did in windows before. This could be dangerous!