It’s been very quiet here today — hardly anyone’s around, and my e-mail and phone have been almost idle all day. It’s almost like the end-of-the-year lull.

I agree with Brent — it’s good to be able to turn off computers. I don’t have to worry about servers any more (well, I do have one Manila server still running, but it takes care of itself), but I remember those days all too well. I don’t miss those days, but I remember them!

And I’ll probably keep my computers turned off this weekend; the weather looks wonderful, and I hope to have many better things to do than stare at a screen.

Shabbat Shalom!

But while I was there, I did pick up a copy of Beta 2 of Windows XP, aka Whistler. And today, I installed it on the sacrificial machine in my office. It installed easily, but there’s no explicit support for my ancient video card (a Matrox Millennium II), and it didn’t detect my monitor (an IBM P201, which should be Plug-and-Play), so it came up at a 60Hz refresh rate — which is headache-inducing in the extreme. And I couldn’t find anywhere to adjust the refresh rate — unlike Win2000 or the Win9x family, the Device Manager doesn’t show “Monitors” at all (at least not in this configuration), and the Display applet wouldn’t let me change the refresh rate, either.

So I guess I’m done with Whistler until I find a more modern machine on which to experiment. But I wonder if this would work on Whistler, too? (Link via Q.)

[And yes, Mom, this is another one of those talking in initials entries.]