Various doodlings for week 36 of 2004

The Handyman

Back in June, I bought a nifty LCD arm for my circa 2001 Sony SDM-N50PS LCD. I checked, double checked and ended up ordering one of the smallest arms from lcdarms.com. Their ordering process was a big off and I apparently ordered a non-standard arm, and eventually it showed up in July.

It promptly sat in its box in the front bedroom for a good two months.

Finally, yesterday, in a fit of avoiding work I should be doing, I decided it was time to install it as well as drill a hole for a new grommet in the desk to pass cables through.

I got out the drill, cleared everything off the desk. Measured twice, drilled twice.

You know, since I checked and double-checked before ordering, it never occurred to me to verify that the VESA standard plates that came with the LCD arm actually matched the (alleged) VESA standard holes on the display.

But, I digress. I assembled the LCD arm, dealt with the minor setback of placing it exactly just far enough in on the desk to be difficult to brace and bolt the screw at the same time.

I pulled all of the cables through the second hole and through the plastic grommet I'd bought eons ago. Unfortunately the grommet was 2 inches in diameter. The drill bit I used, I thought was also two inches in diameter. However, it was really 2.125 inches in diameter, so the grommet is sort of loose. It will function for now.

So, everything was coming together. The next bit was to put the display on the arm.

!@*($&(#@*%&@(#$*!

I apparently misunderstood the meaning of VESA standard. The Sony displays may now be VESA standard sizes, but the SDMN50PS we bought in January 2001 is definitely not. It's rectangular instead of square, and the holes are too small for the screws that came with the LCD arm. Briefly, briefly I thought I'd be able to get away with only screwing the plate into one side of the display but ran into the size difference on the screws.

So, now I'm contemplating whether to try getting another adapter plate or if I should just get another display.

Redesigning epcostello.net

I continue to play around with my redesign. Since I don't have the dagger of Corporate Communications hanging over me this might take awhile. I have a work-in-progress-no-guarantee-of-anything version here. Notes, flames, etc welcome in the comments.

On it being September 10, 2004

I noticed the date and remembered it was my parent's anniversary. I believe it would have been their 3836^th anniversary. I noted the date as well because I've been working with a couple of spare computers we have here and determined that one of them had been last used on September 10, 2001, though it appeared to have been booted a couple of time later that year. Was sort of weird trolling through the directories of cached web pages to see what either I or Lisa was looking at on September 10th.

(Ok, there's a bit of a math problem in thinking it was their 36^th anniversary which I realized at dinner. Duh.)