The Last Nexus Survivor....Author: jawapro
Date: Fri 24/06/2011 09:23 AM
Way way back in December of 2005 I blogged about my new LCD monitor.
http://www.headlessmoron.com/viewthread.php?postid=39I’d gone to a Nexus LAN in Launceston, and as per normal, they had a Lucky Door Prize. It was Nexus Mayhem - which was the large End-of-Year LAN - so the prizes were heavily sponsored by some of the local IT shops.
I had my eye on a few 500G hard-drives. Or maybe they were only 200G - whatever, they were large for the time. But first prize was a Philips 17" LCD monitor.
Back in those days a lot of people still had CRTs. Looking around the LAN you’d see about half and half with LCDs. I still had my trusty CRT and had no plans to change it. In fact - I didn’t like the idea of changing - to me LCDs were pointless.
The way the Lucky Door prize worked this year was everyone got a few tickets as they walked in. During the night, Rayner (one of the admins) went up on stage and began reading numbers out. When one of your numbers was called, you went up and had to pop a balloon (of which there were hundreds). Inside the balloon was another ticket with a number - and that corresponded to the prize you got.
Most of the prizes were just bags with posters and things from computer shops. My first trip up got one of them.
So as I waited besides Trojen to see if I’d get another shot - I saw Hard-drive after hard-drive get claimed. That was what I really wanted - but there were still one or two on offer.
Behind me I heard someone tell his mate "Don’t go for the pink balloons - they’re gay" or something to that effect. This made me think - of course the guys (Nexus was about 95% male) wouldn’t go for pink - so if you wanted to drag the game out, you’d hide the good prizes in pink balloons! So if I wanted on of the better prizes (hard-drives) I should probably go for pink.
So with this new strategy, I waited for another of my numbers to come up - and sure enough it did.
Walked up on stage and found a pink balloon. Popped it - and grabbed the bit of paper and took it to Rayner to be checked. She got quite excited, but I didn’t quite as much. It was the monitor - not the harddrive. I was out of storage space and had a perfectly good CRT.
I was disappointed at the time - but it’s not like I complained. A free LCD wasn’t something to sniff at, but I did consider offering to swap it for one of the guys with the harddrives - but back in those days, LCDs were worth a fair bit, so I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.
Over the next few months and years, the sheer reduction in desk footprint of the LCD won me over completely. And after I used it enough to trust it - I preferred the way the screen looked too. When I had to go back to a CRT occasionally I hated it.
I was a convert. LCDs from then on.
I ended up getting a wide-screen as a second monitor, and a cheap HP for a third (attached to my server), but my primary monitor has always been my trusty 17" Nexus Phillips.
That was - until a few weeks ago.
I was using the monitor - and it just died. No amount of cable fiddling was able to bring it back to life for more than a flicker.
Poor monitor - one of the last survivors of Nexus.
I really wanted another square (4:3 ratio) monitor - but these days they are had to find - and you really pay a premium for the ratio. So unless I wanted to spend bucketloads - I had to get a second widescreen.
Lo and behold - Catch of the Day sends me an email. Today’s Catch is a Phillips monitor. It’s widescreen, but it’s also cheap.
So I placed my order - and it should arrive in a few weeks.
It’ll be a sad day when I unplug the old one for the last time.
Sorry little buddy - you may be replaced, but you won’t be forgotten.
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