myTrevor.com

So I had this blury looking dead pixel on my laptop LCD and I tried the “massage” technique without any success.  I thought it was weird because it was blury, and usually dead pixels are very sharp and exactly one pixel.  Anyways, I decided to try slapping my screen from behind and boom, the “dead pixel” moved down about an 1/16th of an inch.  Well, I kept tapping the back of the screen until the spot went out of site.  I guess some dust got behind the screen or between the LCD and the back light causing the dark spot.  Weird, huh?

Seems like you can now justify that purchase of that big monitor… or monitors. A recent study finds that those that have larger monitors (more screen real estate), are 10 - 45% more productive on tasks.

Read: Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times

Imagine what productivity 3 24″ LCDs could bring you…

So as predicted, Microsoft released the Beta 1 for Windows Vista (formerly code-named Windows “Longhorn”) today. It is rumored that Microsoft is holding a large meeting with stakeholders Thursday and wanted to be able to have something to talk about to show their progress. The DVD ISO is 2.49 GB and available for download on MSDN.

It took me between and hour and half to two hours to download (I was downstairs working) and installing on VPC is not fast. Unlike previous releases, install boots up into a full GUI which asks where you want to install (with an option to upgrade, if applicable). It then takes you to step 2, the crawl of the green turtle, err.. progress bar. At least Microsoft has learned not to even attempt in estimating how much time they expect it to take .

Hopefully with the RTM version they’ll have the cutsy advertising (You should buy Vista because… oh wait, you already have) during install.

Microsoft released their name for Longhorn, Windows Vista. I’m not terribly impressed with the name, but neither was I with ‘XP’ when it was first announced. And Beta 1 will be released August 3rd, for those of you who care to download it.

I started reading this and thought I’d share it with my INFO friends http://time-tripper.com/uipatterns/Introduction seems to be a really nice reference for different design elements, when/why you’d want to use them and when/why not to.