Man, oh man. It's been a very long (but very productive) weekend.

First off, I got myself a new monitor. The old one was fixing to die soon, and I wanted something bigger than a 15" monitor at this point anyway. I had thought about getting the new Apple 17" monitor (to go with my eventual new Mac), but the 15" LCD displays looked tempting too (though they cost over twice as much). I also considered a 19" monitor, which would fall between the two in price but give me a lot more room even than the 17".

Then I saw the new Apple 17" up close, played around with it at the highest resolutions, and decided that I could live with it since the picture was still very nice up to 1280x1024, and I could save over $200 by not going with a 19".

So I'm the proud new owner of an eye-catching iMac-ish Apple Studio Display. The picture is very sharp (it's a Diamondtron screen), and the price isn't bad ($499). I recommend it.

With a new monitor, my whole computing experience has changed even without upgrading the machine yet. The leap from working on an 800x600 screen to a 1024x768 (or higher) feels like letting your breath out when you've been holding it for too long; it's a big relief.

With the greater screen size, it's much easier to do graphics work; zooming and scrolling is much less cumbersome. Which leads me to...the redesigned NowThis home page. It's still in progress, since everything web-related is an iterative process, but I'm pretty happy with this iteration. Let me know what you think.

Other site stuff: I've been programming Frontier 5 to be more helpful with the nitty-gritty stuff I've had to do when posting logs, mostly teaching it to automatically figure out what the previous or next entry is on its own. (I've had to type them in manually up to now.)

Now I've got an easy macro I can stick anywhere in the page and it'll make the link for me. As a result, the Previous & Next links for a day are at the top and bottom of the entry (as requested by a regular reader), and coming soon I'll have an automatically-generated menu of recent entries down the sidebar.

And through the magic of Frontier, I made the change (as well as the addition of the site toolbar at the bottom) retroactive to all the old log pages with a few simple cut-and-pastes and a menu command. Ah, progress.

Are there rules for web logs? I'm talking a lot more lately instead of pointing to other places on the web. Maybe I'm turning this into a journal. Maybe this is a phase. Maybe what I call it doesn't matter that much...

In an inexplicable fit of self-control a couple of months back, I wiped MacMAME (the old-arcade-game emulator) from my hard drive to break its hold over my free time. (Having grown up spending a bit of time in arcades, the primal draw of being given infinite quarters to play your favorite old games is hard to resist.) But tonight I felt like dabbling with it again, downloaded the player, and there are no game ROMs to download. No game ROMS = no games.

Apparently, packs of slavering lawyers have been roused by a controversy involving a Nintendo 64 emulation program, and they have made their displeasure known to the emulation community. The ROM files have been pulled down from the typical servers as a defensive measure, and it isn't important enough to me to go searching high and low for them, so...

Bummer. I wanted Millipede back.