Display

At work, I got some new monitors. They are like 22 inch or something. They kick serious butt. It took me a couple tries to get them to run properly. I had to download the new ATI driver and follow some simple instructions. It turns out that the key was a switch on the command line --force. This caused the old configuration to go away and the new configuration to replace it. I cannot control my resolution now, but the screens are basically jammed in the highest resolution. I'm happy for the moment.

This also fixed another problem I had. On the left screen the mouse pointer looked normal. On the right screen the mouse would always look like the image that it held as it passed from the left screen to the right. You know when you move your mouse over the border of a window that is resizable, it changes into arrows. Well, my mouse would only jump around on the spot. The "hot pixel" was god knows where. It made selecting text and resizing windows a nightmare. It also made using a larger mouse pointer impossible because the hot pixel was even harder to guess.

Updating the ATI driver made it all work. The new driver supports 16x9 numbers for the wide screens and dual heads. Well, not all of it works. I can not tell what resolution I'm running under because the normal method of changing the screen resolution no longer works. All the "ATI-setting-blah" stuff in the xorg.conf throws it a curve.

I'll take it. ... I wish this were the end of the story.

Irony is not lost on me often. Sometimes I reject it. I spit upon it and claw at it's eyes.

Nat and I went to Sam's Club this evening for $270 worth of odds and ends. You know, food, toiletries. The lot. It was raining hammers while Nat pumped gas into the car. It was coming in sideways. It was still raining hard, drops like gravel falling off the back of a truck as Nat ordered the food at a window from people none of us ever met.

We get home. I do the cat box. I eat some fast food we picked up on the way home. I'm ready to sit down and calmly blog the blog entry above. My machine takes a very long time to boot. Then the windows bit called X failed to come up. I went through several steps of diagnostics. Several reboots. I tried to remember the latest updates I ran in case I needed to revert. I thought about a bad update from Fedora or Livna. I thought about the painful lack of changes I've made to the machine in since the last time it worked fine.

The thought of a friend who just got a top-notch notebook for gaming crossed my mind. The thought of another friend who got a very top-notch desktop just for gaming crossed my mind. The thought that if anything happens to this machine, I have no way of replacing it. I will be begging for spare parts just to type my blog. I'll not be computerless because I will not be able to use Nat's computer. Elle's computer will be off limits. The web server is a full desktop. It would still really suck to have this box just die.

Then I remember a power flicker between the cat box and the hamburger. Great. What if something is really fried. I'll never get back up and running. I'll go on a tirade and cuss and blame myself for things that are not in my control. I'll wish someone would come along and burn the house down because I'm sick of paying the bills. I'll hide in the bathroom and cuss at the wall under my breath because I do not want to wake Elle or upset Nat.

Then I noticed I could not ping www.yahoo.com, yet, I could ping the neighboring machine. I reset the router. Everything started working again. "Why the hell would X fail if I can't get to the internet!?!" I don't want to know. I just want the damn thing to work.

I need some sleep.