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Got a haircut today, which is a big deal concerning the weather. On a hot day like this, (27°C), You sure notice losing a pound of thick curly locks from the top of your head. I've had a lot of people cut my hair over the years, and lots of them have commented on how wonderful and thick my hair is. Tell you what, I'd trade thin, limp, stringy hair for this curly mop any day of the week. At least thin hair can be made to lay flat, or do whatever else you want, for that matter.

Last night I got it in my head to build my own coffee table. The first step was to design it out, and that meant CAD. The trouble is, all the computers in my house, save for my laptop, are rigged up for a specific purpose (either serving files or driving a TV set,) and I didn't feel like trying to do CAD on a laptop with a trackpad and teeny tiny keyboard. But the computer driving my 42" LCD TV is actually just a Linux workstation running Gnome, with MythTV thrown on top. So, I dug out the rollaway desk and office chair, planted them between the couch and the wall-mounted TV, and fired up the CAD program. Turns out that an LCD TV makes a better monitor than I thought. Most HDTV sets are set up for 1080p, which is 1920x1080 when you're driving your TV from a computer. This is a resolution you'd expect from a much smaller screen (like a 20" monitor). However, when you're using a computer monitor, your eyeballs are less than a metre from the screen. Everything can be a lot smaller, since it's a lot closer. When you're using a 42" TV as your monitor, you can't sit that close, since the whole thing won't actually fit in your field of view. To solve this problem, you sit more like two metres from the screen. In that case, 1920x1080 is just perfect. However, now that you're sitting three times farther away from the screen that you would with a regular computer monitor, your eyes don't have to work so hard to focus on the display. (Consider this: the average person can watch TV for hours on end without their eyes getting tired, but they have to take frequent breaks when doing long stints at the computer.)

So I get a 1920x1080 display without the eyestrain. Sweet.

As for the coffee table, I'll post photos as I start building.