Beginning at the Beginning

Looking back, this all started when my old monitor began burning one evening.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "Sweet! Did you get a picture of it?!" But it wasn't really that sort of burning. Rather, it was more of a, "<sniff, sniff> What is that smell? I'll go check it out." kind of burning. So, after quite a bit of sniffing, I narrowed the source of the circuit-board-in-the-frying-pan smell to the back of my old home desktop CRT.

Now, mind you, the monitor still worked, so if I were still in my bachelor days, I might have simply opened a window or two, stuck a couple of air fresheners around it and kept working until it failed more dramatically and/or interestingly. However, with a (then) expectant wife in the house, I was inclined to be a little less cavalier about this sort of thing.

No, the inescapable conclusion was that I needed to replace that monitor.

So, as any good geek would do, I immediately started doing some research on LCD monitors and found, to my delight, that good sized flat panel LCD displays had dropped into the neighborhood of $200. Not exactly within the reach of your average kid in Somalia, but more than within reach of my Silicon Valley salary. So within reach, in fact, that I started thinking about getting more than one.

This called for yet more research.

Turns out that plugging more than one monitor into a computer is becoming more and more common and you can do it pretty easily with recent versions of Windows (Vista, XP, 2000, Win98 even!) and the right video card(s). There are also some really incredible multi-monitor setups out there, as I discovered browsing through the Multimon Gallery. Check out this guy's rig. Sheesh!

Thus, digging throught the internet looking for information on using multiple monitors, I came across a New York Times article about Life Hackers. This artilce contained two items that became seminal elements for this blog:

1. The research findings of Microsoft's Mary Czerwinski, Interruption Scientist, indicating (according to the NYT article) that a large amount of screen space can increase productivity by up to 44%.
2. A link to Merlin Mann's excellent 43folders site.

All this research convinced me that I needed not 1, not 2, but 3 flat panel monitors to maximize my productivity. At a standard resolution of 1024 x 1280, a 19" monitor puts out 1,310,720 pixels. Multiply this by 3 and a 3 monitor system puts out:

1024 x 1280 x 3 monitors = 3,932,160 pixels

Or just about 4 million pixels.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the genesis of this blog.