the P.Pole

Thank you, Amy. *smooches

You’ll have to excuse the somewhat blurry nature of the pictures. My hands are quite unsteady (the one drawback I concede for taking so many narcotics). Anyway, this gives you a good idea of the size and scale of Higgins–that’s my petite Belle beside him on my desk.

Higgins is the tentative name for my new monitor that I received today. What speedy delivery Newegg has!

I’ve busted the monitor out of its boxes and wrappings and have been using it since doing so. Basically, this is a sexy piece of hardware that I am going to take full advantage of tonight, when I finish off Leon the Professional (starring Natalie Portman when she was 11 y.o. and some badass French dude) with my fair lady.

Higgins is a 22-inch, widescreen (16:10) LCD monitor from Hanns-G. I got him on discount and after all fees and taxes were paid, the entire bundle cost me around $213 CDN. This is including shipping, and also including a separate DVI to DVI connector cable (both ends are male…) from Nippon that I also ordered from Newegg.

So far, it looks super crisp (I’m glad I got the DVI cable) and after some minor calibration, the colors are a near-perfect match with Belle’s rosy visage. I’ve moved all my Geektool meters and my iStat Pro widget onto Higgins (developer’s mode FTW). Now Bellamy feels less cluttered and cleaner while I get to keep all the sexiness of Geektool on the secondary.

Once my dad returns home, I will borrow his fancy-pants DSLR camera to snap a few shots of this mammoth monitor beside Bellamy for you all to see. I actually hadn’t realized just how much extra real-estate a 22″ extended desktop would give me, and now I know.

So I am quite pleased so far with the fruits of my initial idea to start a small custom tee shirt printing business. I suggested we do something like this to Stephen a few weeks ago and things sort of settled out to nothing for awhile. Recently, however, I have been working with Amy on two different orders.

First were the two shirts from Cristian which, I will admit, were hard shirts to do. The design wasn’t too complex, but it was the sheer amount of text that required quite a bit of extra attention. My dear Amy (who has been the real talent at work here) has been sure to chide me on the little details all along the way. I screwed one shirt up (as I already mentioned) and have since replaced it–out of pocket–and we have started (and finished) from scratch. In any case, Cristian’s two shirts are done and very nice. Aaron Burr would be proud.

As for the other order, I was commissioned to make a shirt for Herman. In classic Herman fashion (literally), this was to a Flash (comics) design. It turned out more or less perfectly and I am hoping he will be pleased with it. Again, the bulk of the work was done by my maiden Amy, so I take no credit for myself. I’m just pleased to have started this little venture.

I am planning to host a small gallery page for all the happy customers of Loud Tees here on the P.Pole. I will be asking served customers for photographs of themselves wearing the shirts (if they want to help me out) and then posting them somewhere. My hope is to advertise a little through this means, while depending mostly on customers’ word-of-mouth to get the connections going. *crosses fingers for customers with generous words*

Of course my own experience with this particular product may be just an outlier, but in any case I might as well share this with anyone out there who might be thinking of getting a hardshell case for their MB/MBP. For specifics’ sake, I’ve got a first generation MBP 15″, without any outside protective skin (such as ZAGG body skins) on.

I purchased the Incase hardshell (from here on known as “the shell”) a week or two after I received my MBP. There were two main offerings at the time: frost white and smokey black. Both were nice looking but I thought the frosted look would be the least conspicuous.

Installation: Snapping on the shell really was a simple affair, as simple as it sounds, except that it was at the same time a workout in itself. A few tabs and a little pressure later and I’d successfully attached the bottom half of the shell on my lovely Bellamy. The attachment for the top part (the screen) was nowhere near as simple. It was first off slightly confusing where and how to orient it so that the “teeth”/tabs would not bump into the bottom ones when closing the laptop. The second thing that peeved me was the amount of pressure I needed to exert to get the damned thing in place. I was worried I’d have warped the aluminum case by pressing so hard.

Note: Another little thing I hated was the hard plastic tabs that seemed like they were scratching the aluminum finish when sliding over the body into place. I don’t like that one bit.

Maintenance: So far, the shell has been decent and not too hard to clean. Continue reading

My Windows XP desktop as of tweaking today:

I really do enjoy making things look clean. This is Milk 2 MS Visual Style, along with the Milk theme for Styler Toolbar. The bottom is a temporary Objectdock and the background widgets are made with Rainmeter. That’s Safari running as my browser and just regular old Explorer with prettiness.

I really do like these drawings Amy made for me awhile ago. I uploaded them on my flickr page and even mentioned them awhile ago, but here they are in local-gallery glory. Enjoy!