I want to start today’s post by sending warm, fuzzy thoughts of hope for recovery to Japan.  The entire country is in serious trouble.  The ground, as far as I know, has stopped shaking, but the death toll has not stopped rising and the aftermath continues to worsen.  The death toll estimates vary widely, from a little over five thousand to around twenty-five thousand.  From the quick Google search I did on the number, the first figure is probably more official with the larger number being an estimate which may yet become reality.

 

Most frightening of all, of course, is the situation with the nuclear reactor which is leading to heroic efforts to get it cooled off.  Helicopters are flying over and dropping tons of seawater on it.  In a worst case scenario, the country’s water supply could become polluted with radiation.  One only has to think back to Chernobyl to see the potential magnitude.  There is now a large area around that Russian facility which is no longer livable.  Japan doesn’t have a whole lot of territory to lose this way, so the long term effects could be catastrophic.

 

My contributions to charity had been few and far between.  I have never had a lot of money to throw around.  That is still true today, but yesterday I gave a little money to the Red Cross specifically for the Japanese crisis.  I have long had an appreciation for Japanese culture, and hope someday I can manage to take a trip there.

 

Meanwhile, on a more personal level, I am slowly adapting to my long hours of overtime.  I have been fairly tired for over a week now, since I started putting in the long hours, but that exhaustion is slowly diminishing.  It won’t go away, but I have high hopes I will manage to get back to some semblance of my life prior to starting the big OT.  For example, I have played very little EverQuest in the last week, but hope to slowly return to heavier play.

 

Last week, I made a purchase in error.  I got an HDMI-to-DVI adapter cord.  My video cards each have four ports on them, but I was only thinking of the two DVI ports and the one HDMI port.  I wanted to hook up a monitor to the HDMI port in hopes of having three monitors connected to one card.  However, the HDMI port is a substitute for one of the DVI ports, not an addition to them.  The fourth port, a DisplayPort port, is for a third monitor.  I purchased an adapter for this long ago but it didn’t work.  There are two kinds of DisplayPort adapters, and I got the wrong one.  I knew it probably wouldn’t work, but I tried it anyway.

 

With all of this in mind, I ordered what’s called an Active DisplayPort adapter.  This, thankfully, was exactly what I needed.  I now have my bottom three monitors connected to one video card.  Because that one card is an ATI Radeon, this meant I could “group” the monitors.  In short, I could make them act as one single, triple-wide monitor.  I did this, stretching my desktop across them.  I then opened EQ just for giggles and logged into Boomer.  It was quite the experience!  The images on the side monitors were stretched, tilting an odd angle.  This gave the whole image a greater illusion of three dimensions, especially when I moved around.  The side monitors were primarily in my peripheral vision, so movement on them enhanced the illusion of depth.

 

I ungrouped the monitors when I was satisfied with this little experiment.  The odd angling of the stuff on the sides would, I knew, eventually annoy me.  I’ll probably raid with the monitors joined like that tomorrow night just to have the experience, at least for as long as I can stand it.

 

That’s all I have for this week.  I am going to Stumble a little, take a nap, and then head into work for more of that tasty OT.  See you tomorrow with a tired little poem.