This weekend we finally admitted defeat and consigned the now 10 year old monitor to the scrap heap. While it was a very impressive flat screen CRT monitor, it’s colours had seen better days and it kept pretending to be broken. The random fix of unplugging all the cables waiting a indeterminate amount of time and plugging them back in bringing it back to life was begging to ware a bit thin.

After the latest bout of Monitor stroppyness on Friday, I trekked over to John Lewis and picked up an 21.4″ wide-screen monitor, For what was quite a reasonable price. The net effect on the study is a lot more desk space now we have got rid of the monster and massive screen real estate - we’ve gone from a fairly respectible 1280*1024 to a quite massive 1920*1080, which is a lot of desktop to fill.

While at work (and for a while at home) I have multi-monitors – having a single wide screen monitor is a different experience. for one you need a nice single picture to fill the screen. Since Saturday both Ruth and I have been looking for excuses not to use our laptops for a while and now we have both dug around and come up with our own 1920×1080 wallpapers for the superwide screen PC we hardly ever use.

Liverpool Skyline

Blossom (Ruth's Desktop)

Compton Bay

They are not quite all 1920*1080 because, well, we’re a bit lazy – but still they are very pretty on a very big screen – which means you will need a big screen to see them properly

All we do now is occasionally disappear upstairs turn the computer on and stare at the desktop. We haven’t worked out how to fill the space on the screen, websites full screen just look a bit lost, and well you need to be able to see the pretty pictures don’t you?

Having slow broadband is like having your arm cut off; well that might be a bit harsh. It’s more like when you trap your thumb in the door, and then it swells up a bit and then every time you do something it you knock it and start to realise just how much you actually use your thumbs for picking up stuff and holding on to things.

My Friendly Broadband Provider Virgin Media have told me that it’s something more complicated than they are willing to explain and it will take 6-8 weeks to fix – which is a long time to have a swollen thumb.

I’ve thought about moving to some other way of getting the internet into the house but the lack of physical BT wire means it would need reconnecting and surprise surprise that takes 6-8 weeks.

My Insecent moaning on twitter and in emails has gotten me £15 of my bill – but i still don’t have broadband I would call in any sense of the word broad.

Sorry for the rant I just need write that down.

Christmas is a-coming, so thoughts turn to how we can change the world next year and make loads of money, and well never have to work again.

At the moment it appears you can make a lot of money from writing flash based facebook games that basically turn people into clicky automatons.  So we’ve been thinking, there must be a way for us to enslave people in our own version of a flash based sweatshop – but first we needed to work out just what makes them so successfull.

Drudgery: people apparently enjoy virtual versions of labour intensive jobs that advances in modern machinery and technology has all but eliminated.

So how about Dishville? Where you have to wash the dishes?

Reward: Ruth thinks this won’t work because you need a ‘reward’. Apparently in a certain farming game “oh look i have a picture of some grapes” constitutes a reward, so we need to find a game that gives people a reward.

Sweepville? where you clean the street and at the end you get a reward from a local councillor? … humm maybe not

So what else do we need? Oh yes, the game has to enslave your friends too. Again drawing inspiration from a certain agricultural game, you can apparently guilt people into playing by doing their farming for them. Personally I don’t see why this works but hey ho.

Anyway, we’ve had a bit of a scuba in our thinktank, and ran a couple of things up the ideas runway; and now I can announce the next big thing in the world of doing a boring job on the internet:

PostVillie!

You are a postmaster – so you have to deliver letters, occasionally sell stamps and maybe every once in a while deal with an aggressive pensioner whose pension book has gone missing.

The main bit of the game however will be the enslaving delivery system;

• using the names of everyone playing the game (i reckon we’ll get around 70million) you will get a letter to deliver to someone who might or might not be a friend
• but you can only send it to one of your friends who will then send it on
• when it gets to the right person – the postage cost will be divided between everyone who handled the letter
• so if the letter goes through 5 people you get a fifth of the money

This, I think, is a winner. It has the drudgery of running a post office, combined with the reward of someone saying ‘I got a letter’ and the enslaving of your friends to send the mail.

Now I just have to learn some flash….. but I can’t be bothered, oh well I need another money making scheme.

just downloaded the transparent iPhone App

more piccies over here.