And speaking of shopping (see the previous entry), I recently took the plunge and bought myself a brand-spankin’-new monitor. This is something that I’ve been planning for a dog’s age. Actually, I’m not exactly certain how long a dog’s age is, so let’s just say that the dog in question was born about the same time that LCD monitors first came on the consumer market.
So now that the dog is a few years old, LCD monitors have come down in price enough that I decided to take the bull by the horns (to add another cliché to my post). I unpacked it, cleared a nice spot on my desk, realized that I did this in the wrong order, then placed the pretty new monitor in its new home. Oooh, real purty.
That was last week. Because I’m a technical writer, I naturally didn’t read the user manual until this week. That’s when I discovered something that wasn’t in any of the product specs. My purty new monitor rotates. I had no idea.
This is like buying a car and then discovering that it has a button labelled Turbo Boost. Well maybe not that cool. Hold on a sec… I’ll be right back.
Okay, I’m back. My Civic doesn’t have a Turbo Boost button.
Anyway, thanks to the nifty Pivot software, which was included with the monitor, I can rotate my monitor. This is surprisingly perfect for browsing the web. And when I’m writing, which I do almost every day, it feels amazingly natural. (You can see the whole page!)
I’d highly recommend this Pivot stuff to anyone. You don’t need any special hardware — you can rest any monitor on its side. I’m seriously tempted to buy a copy of Pivot for the office before any dogs become much older.
This ends my unsolicited product endorsement.