The richness of the communication channel makes a huge
difference in the audience's enjoyment. Or, more simply:
Above is a screenshot of my desktop as I worked on some code
recently.
2 things happened to cause this:
- We bought a webcam for my wife
- My wife's computer ran out of space on the hard drive
And those 2 things led me to watch my music, instead of just
listening to it.
What? You want to know how that's related? Let me explain.
Well, my wife needed a webcam for online meetings. So we went
down to the local BuyMore
and looked at webcams. Then, being enterprising, we looked to see
if there were any monitors with webcams built in and lo! there
were. And with speakers to boot (the current speakers needed
replacement). Sign me up.
Bringing home the
22" Samsung LCD to connect to my wife's computer meant that I
got the cast-off. My old 19" CRT was replaced with the year-old 22"
LCD. Beautiful. Oodles of screen real estate.
Item 2: no hard drive space. It was just 1 of the 2 hard drives
(the smaller one - we haven't filled up the whole 0.8 TB yet). I
ran my usual jdiskreport
to see where the space was. It was all in the videos (- 80GB in my
"video projects" folder [source video files that I need to blog
about, edit, crop, resize, transcode,
etc.]). I noticed that a number of videos in the folder were music
videos. I had completely forgotten. Austin City Limits, Private Sessions,
and various iTunes videos that came with album purchases.
So, with music that I could watch (and I have some music videos
of music that I don't own) and with all that screen real estate
(1680 x 1050) - I watched my music instead.
And this is how those 2 things collided to have me watching my
music that evening. And it's a much better show (except for the
videos with commercials).
BTW, I'm completely agreeing with those
who would argue that "big monitors are the easiest way to increase
white-collar productivity." (scroll down to the part about "Big
Screens")