Getting L A R G E R
I just spent a bunch of time out west (which, since I live on the east coast, isn’t saying much) working with a client trying to do agile development. I have a kind of gentlemen’s agreement with the client that I won’t write anything that makes them look too bad. Presumably, they’ll be kind enough to do the same thing for me :).
That said, I want to talk about something that I absolutely cannot stand about the development environment out there: They have really big monitors, usually two per pairing station. And I don’t.
It’s a little bit surprising how easy it was to get used to working with multiple monitors. In fact, towards the end of the engagement I got moved in to a cubicle that had three monitors in it - one for the old user’s laptop, one for a desktop that was sitting there, and one small one unused. Since I was bringing two monitors with me, that took me up to five monitors. Sadly, I couldn’t talk the IT guys into buying the Lenovo advanced docking station that supported a plug-in video controller, or I’m sure I could have driven all five monitors off my laptop.
Now, you might be asking “what on earth could you do with five monitors?” And, you know, I’m not entirely sure myself. But I would surely have loved to find out. In the meantime, I got away with using Synergy to share my laptop’s keyboard and mouse with another computer, and then drove three monitors from my laptop with a USB video adapter.
What can I do with four monitors? One of them was my designated remote desktop box, for connecting to the Windows servers the team was using. The other three? Well, whatever I wanted.
I almost always had Firefox open in one monitor, maximized. Because I was almost always working on something that required frequent reference to online forums or documentation. CM consultants never spend much time in the “well documented, easy to configure” part of the system. Go figure.
Sometimes I had email open in another monitor, but more often I had a text editor maximized. And then I stuck a couple of shell windows (MSYS, Powershell, Cygwin, rxvt, whatever it takes) in the other monitor. And then I silently wished that I could have gotten that fifth monitor up, because sometimes you need to RDP into two different remote servers, in order to test a deployment script.
So, yeah. I’m addicted to having multiple monitors. LOTS of them. And my addiction is growing. Two monitors, which I’m using now, just isn’t enough anymore. So I’ve taken steps. I’m ordering more monitors. And a monitor stand to hang them from, because that was one thing that I didn’t have out west. And this time, they’re going to be BIG.
Apparently, Alienware hasn’t released their promised 3′-wide ubermonitor, but Panasonic has got a 103″ screen in production. Sadly, I can’t afford one. So I’m going to settle for 22″ LCD monitors.
Now, you’re probably saying “Wait, why not get two 24 or 30 inch monitors?” And there are three answers. One, I like having a “main” screen in front of me. Two monitors would put the main screen at an angle (bad) or put the main screen in front and require twisting my neck in one direction half the time (bad). So three is the right number. Second, the native resolutions for the big displays is too large for my laptop to drive, and is also too large for a USB video adapter to drive, and is also too large for a Matrox TripleHead2Go adapter to drive. So 1650×1050 or 1650×1200 is the right size. And third, they don’t make three-across monitor mounting brackets quite that big yet.