Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Happy (Belated) Easter

I forgot to wish everyone a happy easter this year. I was very pre-occupied and didn't notice the Easter holiday go by. All those heavy themes of torture, death, resurrection, sin, and redemption were just a bit too heavy for me this year.

If I were 20 years younger there's a chance I might be emo, but I've always thought of myself as really quite masculine. It occurred to me that emo kids will have a bit of a problem with Easter given all the heavy themes. Not to mention the constant jokes about eating bunnies.

As luck would have it I found this video on YouTube which may help some of you cope.

(My nieces are all pretty emo, but not my nephews.)

Please recommend this post

Samsung Monitor Hung Up

Note: there are 6 images in this post. Might take a while to load completely.

In a previous post i wrote about my Samsung monitor developing a fatal and incurable tilt forward. I did not have a very good picture at that time but this next image taken from a side view shows just how much this monitor is tilting. (Usually in Alberta things lean to the right then fall over.)



Not to be one to accept bad designs I went to Future Shop and purchased a Vanguard VM-11 Computer Monitor Table Mount. These are a much better solution for mounting a flat screen TV or computer monitors and this one cost around $25. The next picture shows the base mount which clamps to the back edge of your desk. Notice the small hole in the front. The instructions said to screw the mount to the desk and they supplied a large wood screw. I'm not into screwing things to desks. I figure the whole point of the clamp mount was so you could move it around. It reminded me of an old P.D.Q. Bach joke about nailing one foot to the floor so he could dance to Chopin.



The next photo shows what the mounting arm looks like. The square bracket bolts to the back of the monitor and the other end goes in the desk mount. There is an industry standard for the positions of the mounting screws so this should work with almost all flat scree monitors.

It is made of an aluminum alloy. Strong and light. Sexy.




The next photo shows how the bracket bolts to the back of the monitor. Of course you have to remove the original stand first. Samsung was fairly confident in weight vs. gravity and only used 2 screws. The Vanguard mount used 4 screws. I went and bought some of those self locking washers to keep the screws from working themselves out. This is referred to in the business as perpetual motion unscrewing syndrome. (See Ford Truck complaint web sites.)

Don't over-tighten the bolts. The monitor end has the cheapest threads ever and I was worried I might strip them. (Google will have a hoot with these keywords.)



The monitor finally mounted is pictured below. As an added bonus I recovered a whole bunch of desk space under the monitor. I like the illusion that the monitor is just kind of free floating in the air. It reminded me (for some strange reason) of the scene in Dune where Sting was floating around in the air.



Pictured below is the original Samsung mounting stand. We consign this piece of equipment to the large dust heap of poorly designed things. Along side the Ford Pinto, DBase III, Windows ME, the Ariane 5 Flight 501 satellite launcher, and a host of other icky things that were designed or built late in the afternoon on a Friday.




Update: Fixed blogger's broken links to the images and a few grammar and spelling issues. Please recommend this post