Rampant Consumerism

Apparently January is the month for me to buy all the things! In addition to buying two living creatures, I bought a bunch of electronics1.

You may recall that I recently bought a 13″ Macbook Pro because the 15″ one cost $1,000 more than the 13″ and “2″ are just not worth that kind of money2, with the intention of buying myself a big monitor for my office and a big TV, which can double as a computer monitor, for my living room. Well, a combination of Boxing Week sales and an unexpectedly large royalty cheque ((Unexpectedly large in that I wasn’t really expecting much, as I didn’t know how many classes had taken up our book.)) meant that I may have gone a wee bit crazy on the screenage.

First: a 55″ Panasonic TV for my living room:

My new TV

My new TV

Given that I haven’t had a TV in ages, this really feels like it dominants the living room. But holy crap is the picture quality amazing. It has built in “smart TV” features, so I can watch Netflix and Youtube directly through wifi, and it’s kind of neat to hook up my computer in the living room and be able to surf the net or send an email in extra large size!

Next: my computer monitors. Yes, monitors plural. Because there was a sale at Dell that meant that it was actually cheaper for me to buy two 24″ monitors than one 27″ monitor. So I did this:

My new home office setup.

The Macbook Pro, but apparently not the Air (from what I read), allows you to hook up two monitors *and* still use the laptop screen at the same time3. Because three is better than one. At least when it comes to screens.  I like to be able to see several things on the screen at one time – like if I’m marking a student’s assignment, I can have the assignment on one screen and the marking guide on the other screen4. Now that I have this set up, I’m really kicking myself for not getting it while I was still in school – it really would have made my life a lot easier!

  1. Incidentally, the living creatures were much less expensive than the gadgets. []
  2. That’s what she said! []
  3. When I was in Toronto at Christmas, I met up with my friend Jen at her office – she works in Finance – and got see the trading floor. It pretty much was just a bunch of desks that looked like this. []
  4. Or, you know, have 24″ of Twitter going on while I work! []

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