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Ramona and the greenhouse
Friday, January 24 2014
On sunny days like today, Ramona has been going down to the greenhouse on her own to hang out in the warm (circa 80 degree) temperatures that develop there by around noon purely as a result of the sun. If she thinks about it, Gretchen will go down there and hang out as well, usually bringing some reading material. The solar warmth only lasts until about 2:00pm or so, after which the sun starts to get lost behind pines, and the 15 degree outdoor temperatures quickly draw any stored reserves of heat away.
Today I took delivery of a ASUS VS24AH-P 24 inch LED-lit LCD monitor with pixel dimensions of 1920 by 1200. This was to replace a Samsung LCD monitor I'd bought in 2006 with the then-conventional pixel dimensions of 1600 by 1200. I have two of those Samsung monitors, and while both have needed replacement electrolytic capacitors, the one on my right (the one replaced today) has had a history of problems. For several years it's had a couple bad pixels, and for a year or two there's been an annoying blue vertical line about an inch and a half from the right edge of the screen. A few months ago, a mechanical piece in its stand failed, causing the monitor to lean forward unless propped with a piece of styrofoam. Despite all this, I've been reluctant to replace it; I didn't want its place taken by a monitor with a smaller pixel count in the Y-dimension. And monitors with a 1200 pixel Y-dimension have become rare; the cheapest large monitors are all 1920 X 1080. I've been waiting for 1920 X 1200 pixel monitors to become affordable. The ASUS ASUS VS24AH-P cost a little less than $250; I won't spend much more than that on a single piece of computer equipment, at least not these days.
Another piece of equipment that arrived today was a Honeywell TN924W weather base station, which I'd bought cheap on Ebay. It's compatible with my Meade sensors, and I was hoping it would have a better sensor receiver than my Meade base station. Its sensor receiver reception turned out to be a bit better, but the base station is so poorly designed (some of the important buttons are on the back) that to make it useful, I'd have to reengineer its case.
This evening Gretchen was trying to watch a biopic about Nelson Mandela that seemed to go on forever. She was two hours in and Mandela still wasn't president of South Africa, so gave up on it. By that point it was almost midnight and I still hadn't started watching my stupid gold mining shows. But of late Gretchen and I have been getting up late (11:00 am or so), so midnight is no longer as late as it used to be.
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