Resurrection of the blog

Back in Vancouver for Christmas, I'm finally getting around to this blog that I started when I first enrolled in McGill. Just some update: I've done my courses, and currently doing my thesis at NRC. This post would be about computers. My parents bought a laptop in China, for slightly more than the before tax price of a similar laptop in Vancouver. It's a Asus tx 2000 14 inch laptop, designed for the Asian market. With 1G memory and T5550 CPU, it's not exactly a performance model. Bought recently for a bit more than 5000 yuan, it would be slightly more expensive than an Acer or Gateway at Futureshop. Part of this can be attributed to the included tax in the price, and another part could be the increased cost of Chinse Window Vista built into it. Overall it's what you expect from a budget notebook. The native resolution is 1280x800, which puts it in the widescreen territory. The graphics card is Geforce 9300m G, which is somewhat of an upgrade compared to standard offerings in Vancouver. My guess is that more people use their laptop for gaming in China. Otherwise, the interesting thing is how natively Chinese the Windows Vista seem. Many folder names are in Chinese, and when I log into McGill exchange email server, many buttons are in Chinese, suggesting that Microsoft has multi-lingual support built in, includin support for east asian language. It should be interesting to see how Office files turn out when I open the reports in an English-only computer.

What's with ulra-wide LCD monitors?

I just got a new LCD monitor at work. For a graduate student, I don't get these toys very often. The monitor is nice and bright, but the screen resolution-2048x1152, is driving me nuts. That's almost 2:1 ratio! You know, some people actually need monitors for work, or read text, rather than watching movies. But manufacturers seem to think that the wider, the better. Since it's not rotatable, reading text or surfing net on this monitor is quite distracting. For now, I'm trying to get used to having two almost square screens, and learn to ignore one of them. At home, I have a 1680x1050 monitor, and I consider that pretty wide. The newer LCDs seem to have one use in mind- watching movies. Or, more realisticly, to allow vendors to say it's 2x inch, with x being the higher the better.