TigerDirect keeps sending me ads for widescreen LCD monitors. I’d love to pick up a 22″ widescreen (right now I’ve got a 17″ LCD that runs 1280×1024), but my computer is in much more need of a mobo+processor upgrade. Especially since something on the system — and not the video card or the monitor — went bad recently and is preventing it from running at any resolution higher than 1024×768, leaving me stuck with a blurry screen on the monitor I’ve got. So I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of a new monitor anyway.

I’m putting that off mainly because I need to do make the time to research what I’m going to get. I’ve narrowed it down to a dual-core AMD, but then I have to balance which processor, motherboard, and memory to get.

Also, at this point, I may as well go 64-bit, which is going to mean reinstalling Fedora. Though in theory I should be able to run the 32-bit OS to start with, which means I could do the hardware upgrade one weekend, and the OS reinstall the next.

The other tech upgrade I’m desperate to get is a new phone. While my ideal phone doesn’t quite exist yet, I’d really like something with better mobile internet access than my RAZR V3T — particularly with Comic-Con coming up next month. They’re usually good at keeping you informed of scheduling changes (unlike Wizard World), but now that I’ve got SpeedForce.org, I’d like to be able to do at least minimal blogging from the convention floor rather than waiting until I get back to the hotel. Posting by email doesn’t cut it, and even with the WPhone Plugin providing a stripped-down admin interface, half the time the built-in browser tells me it can’t display the page. I may bite the bullet and pay T-Mobile the extra $20/month for a data plan so that I can run Opera Mini.

On the plus side, I’ve at least found a way to post photos directly using Flickr.

See Also: Convention Photos & Write-Ups