Real Estate
March 25, 2002
Some of the more senior members of my department got their new 19" flat-panel monitors from Dell Friday. This allowed me to replace my two 19" regular boxy monitors with two large 21" monitors. These things have a viewing surface of 18.1" which adds up two a lot of screen real estate. I didn't think that having two monitors would really increase my productivity much, just that it would be a convenience. But now that I've gotten into a routine using them, I find that I'm able to perform a number of operations (cut & paste from different documents, deploy & test, and debugging) much faster than I did before, since I don't have to keep flipping between windows. Its also nice to have the source code for the program you are testing right next to it.
The only downfall to this new situation is that I'm noticing the much smaller screen available on my home 17" Trinitron. Luckily, I just use Gnome's multiple desktops to make up for it.