Screensavers, the Ill-Begotten Stepchild Application

After my debacle with the monitor this week, I decided that I needed a new screensaver. Primarily I was thinking of disabling the login display when returning to the OS from the screensaver, but I have been thinking I wanted something more for a while now. And since my new monitor does not recover from power-save mode, I need something good to prevent the burn-in that I saw on the monitor at Best Buy.

I've been using the basic My Pictures slideshow screensaver that comes with Windows XP for a while. I have a lot of pictures, and the kids like to see my computer showing them photos of us on all of our vacations. Abby actually asked me why I had changed my screensaver once, which prompted me to restore the photo one.

The thing is, the one that comes with Windows is pretty lame. It'll only show photos on one monitor at a time, unless you turn on the "animation" feature, which simply drags the single photo across all three screens very slowly. I'm looking for something that does a little bit more....

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Today Sucked

I'll just say it plainly -- today sucked.

It started last night after the kids got home from Trick-or-Treat. I was reassembling my computer, which I had to take apart partially to hook the projector to my notebook. See, I was projecting a Halloween sign onto our garage door that told the kids to go up the street for candy. Perhaps I'll explain that more later. In any case, I was reassembling things when I noticed that, unrelated to my reassembly, my center monitor's backlight seemed to have blown out. This makes it exceptionally hard to log in.

It's kind of a strange puzzle. The center monitor is the only one on DVI, and the side monitors are both VGA-only. This might have been fine if I had a DVI to VGA adapter, but there were none to be found. So, it was time to order a new monitor, and with me being off to take care of Riley while Nana was on vacation, I saw this as a perfect opportunity to visit Best Buy and get that upgrade I've been considering. But then, events seem to collude to conspire against me. more

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