Retroview

I saw a homeless lady (a bag lady), all her worldly possessions in her shopping cart, while I was driving to work a few days ago.

She had a 21" CRT monitor perched awkwardly (with some bungie cables to hold it steady) attached to her overflowing cart. I suppose she picked it up from someone who didn't think it was worth even selling anymore.

And yet I confess, despite my nice 24" Dell LCD, I have a 21" CRT as my second monitor. In fact, I just adjusted it to run at 100Hz, at 1280x960. (It was getting too blurry at 1600x1200.) But why?

Well when you move the mouse, and it really actually moves at 100Hz with no tearing or ghosting or strobing, and you scroll a window and it does the same, and your antialiased fonts are just a little bit blurry, and...it makes you happy, that's all. And you think to yourself, "It's dim and blurry, but it's real."

And honestly, I wish it were as bright as my 24" monster -- I mean, when I'm looking at digital pictures, I can see the CCD noise in every pixel on my LCD, and it's bright and the colors stay the same all day long. But there's a difference, and I'll probably keep using the old thing until I can be sure that every frame of animation I make in Picasa looks exactly right at 100fps. How can you really tell, if your LCD blurs the heck out of everything that moves and really, honestly only shows you 40fps of information? That's just too slow.

But the bag lady? Sure made me think about it.