this old anvil

newslacker Just told me that the Samsung 204b is no longer being sold. This was shocking.

Spending as much time in front of computers as I do, their interfaces are supremely important to me. The way I figure, if you're going to spend hours on end in front of a machine, you might as well have a decent screen, keyboard mouse and audio. It makes life so much more pleasant.

The 204b was the finest monitor in my opinion. It's not for everyone, but created an almost cult-like following for its intended market.

For geeks: it is simply a 4:3 monitor, 20.1 diagonal inches, running a native resolution of 1600x1200. Most of us who had them usually had two or sometimes three monitor setups. If your machine is powerful enough, they lend themselves well to gaming as well. Even the exterior design was nice, about as nice as you can get in the non-mac world.

It was one of the few, if only if it's kind. Long before LCD's, 17" CRT monitors were standard.. but even the highest quality monitors could rarely do 1600x1200 in any pleasant way. That resolution is ideal for people who work with machines, programming or otherwise.

Seems that most consumer products I fall in love with go out of production with no suitable replacement in a relatively short amount of time. Other examples include my Saab 900 (of course), and that stereo you see in the picture. That thing originally sold for a mere $100 and was later dropped to around $60 at one point.. the sound reproduction is amazing.. many times it's value. Phillips then stopped making it.

Time to go outside.. the day is just too awesome to spend indoors in any capacity.

Last week was pretty good.   got to have lunch with Lana, I worked out 4 times (yay me!), and Deana found her dogs.  They were missing for 3 days!  It turns out they had been having a great time racing around the neighborhood golf course.

On Friday, we went for Mexican food.  I REALLY wanted a Margarita and it totally hit the spot.  I had been working on an issue all day that turned out to be not really an Oracle problem.  It would have been nice to get good error messages, but that doesn't always happen.