BilikFamily.com

Friday - As thought, my phone is getting progressively flakier. If I want to give up my phone for 2-4 weeks, I can have it repaired under warrantee by Motorola. I opted to play some games and take advantage of the fact that Michelle's phone is old enough to be eligible for an upgrade. So now Michelle has the same all-singing, all dancing phone that I have.

This is the way it was when we first dropped the land line a few years ago. We each got the rugged and simple Motorola i530. Last August when one of the phones suddenly flaked out, I upgraded mine to a clamshell model that would support Bluetooth wireless headsets because my commuter car is a manual transmission. I opted for the i580, which happens to be on the other end of the Nextel/Motorola line, just this side of a Blackberry or so called "smart phone". There were some handy features to this phone that I thought Michelle could use. While my phone goes in for repair, I'll use her old i530.

I haven't put any custom ringtones on it (yet) or given her a wallpaper with the children on it. I did test the ability of her phone to take a picture and send it to my phone. Geeky and it could come in handy. Michelle is also a weather junky, especially for Dopler radar maps. So I setup a few web bookmarks so her phone can surf to the custom mobile friendly pages at WMUR, Accuweather, Weather Underground, and of course (personal vanity alert) the mobile version of BilikFamily.com.

I also brought home a borrowed 17 inch tube based monitor from my supervisor to do some tests. More on that below...

Saturday - When mom and dad last visited, Michelle bought me a nice desk for our bedroom. It was for me to use when I stay home and work remotely. The office hasn't bought me a laptop for work use, but frankly, I haven't pushed hard for one. Using the Mac version of Microsoft Remote Desktop has been sufficient for getting work done. The major downside has been the dramatic loss in screen real estate. At my office I have two side-by-side 20 inch monitors. My iBook, on the other hand, is a simple 12 inch model with 1024x768. It was bought for its extreme portability.

One unadvertised feature of these little laptops is that they have a video out that with the help of the Screen Spanning Doctor can support a second monitor in spanning mode. In other words the external monitor can be additional workspace to your laptop's built in screen.

Before I went off buying a new monitor, I wanted to do some testing of hardware and software to see what was possible before I went and bought more than I needed. With the help of my supervisor's old tube based monitor, I came to the following realizations.

1. Indeed for most ATI Mobility Radeon graphics based iBooks (like mine) the screen spanning works well.
2. The external screen need not be restricted to the same resolution as the built in monitor. For instance, I kicked the second screen up to 1280x1024 without any problems.
3. Apple has a nice Preferences panel where you can graphically show how the two screens correlate in space.
4. The external screen could be rotated 90 degrees either way if you want more of a portrait monitor for desktop publishing.
5. The current Mac version of Microsoft Remote Desktop does not support displaying your office PC's deskop across both screens. It's either the attached screen or the external that you can use, but not both.
6. The open source rdesktop client, also nicely packaged for Macs as TSclientX, will gladly let you use all of those dual screen pixels as a desktop to your office PC.
7. Lastly, if you don't keep both screens the same pixel height, the current Windows XP side software won't know how to handle the missing strip of pixels on the shorter screen. You'll either end up missing the Windows Task Bar along the bottom, or not be able to read the title bars on your windows.

Armed with this knowledge, I ordered a cheap ViewSonic 15" LCD with the same resolution as my iBook. I looked for the rare WXGA (Wide XGA resolution) LCD monitor with a resolution of 1280x768, but could not find one for a reasonable price. For $160 the simple 15 inch 1024x768 LCD gives me a modest solution to enhance my debugging when I'm at home. When I'm sitting at my desk, I simply plug this small monitor to my laptop and position the two side by side. The laptop recognizes it and immediately all programs can use all available screen space seamlessly. When I run TSclientX, I just ask for full screen mode and the PC at the office suddenly thinks he has a 2048x768 monitor available for display. It is unaware that it is actually two screens working together.

With Mighty Timbo's help, I also assembled a comfy task chair for my desk. For the past few weeks I had just borrowed a spare kitchen chair from around the house. This chair, for which many a nauga gave up its hyde, is better suited for long hours of debugging. The kids spent much of the rest of the day making things out of the cardboard box that the "some assembly required" chair came in.

Aside from the technical tinkering, it was a typical Saturday. We took the kids to the local book store, the local "dollar" store, and to BK for lunch. Abby played at a friend's house. There were also trips to the car wash and an afternoon coffee run. The boys did some Wii work and built structures with the box cardboard. Michelle looked over brochures for a back yard storage shed. Oh, and Michelle learned how to play Tetris! I hadn't realized that she'd never played this game which she's seen me pass many an idle moment on. All these years... ya' think ya' know someone!

Spring Snow - About a week and a half ago, I was sitting in a long meeting and glanced at how nice it looked outside. I checked my phone and it said (all on the same screen) that it was currently 71°F outside with a winter storm watch for 2 days later. It seemed absurd, but it did happen. 2 days later we did get about 10 inches of wet sticky snow.

Today appears to be repeating history. It was sunny and hit 55°F. We took the car and van to the car wash to get the dirt, salt, and grime off. Tonight they're predicting a few inches of heavy, wet snow. Why did we bother? Currently it's raining and we're just a couple of degrees above freezing. When I wake for Mass tomorrow, will it just have been rain, or will it have crossed over? Tomorrow will tell...