I got a Dell 2007WFP Ultrasharp 20″ LCD monitor this week using BINalert.com.

First, about the monitor and setup. It is a great monitor, nice and bright! My friend, Matt, encouraged me to spend a little more and get the Ultrasharp. I am glad I did (although I didn’t pay much more, see below). I REALLY love the portrait mode. In the picture I have Mailplane, Pyro, Skype, and Twitterific all stacked nicely. And it doesn’t feel crowded. I use VirtueDesktops and keep all my work on the another virtual desktop. On the “work” desktop I put Textmate and can see lots of lines of code. Plus I still have room to keep open console windows at the bottom to see autotest results, server logs, etc. My browser can stay open on the laptop for easy inspection of whatever I am developing.

Now about BINalert.com. (Disclosure: I built this site with a friend and I do make money with it.) BINalert lets you setup up alerts so you can get notifications on new Buy-It-Now auctions on eBay. There are lots of items listed with Buy-It-Now prices that are REALLY good deals. For example, this monitor. I setup an alert to watch for Dell 2007WFP Ultrasharp monitors with a Buy-It-Now price of $250 or less. As soon as this one was listed, I got an email letting me know. I went and checked it out (it was used but in great condition), and a week later I have my new monitor (or at least it’s new to me). And I saved about $150 in the process.

photo by chick_e_pooo

Last night, Adam Keys and I did a little ping pong pairing for the Dallas.rb meeting. It was fun. Of course it highlighted how much I have to jump back to the Ruby docs to get much done. But I don’t see that as a problem, since it leaves more room in my head for other things. It also showed my lack of regex-fu.

Here is the code we worked on. We were trying to solve the Ruby Quiz Credit Card problem, and got most of the way through. The fun part about pairing was bouncing ideas off of each other. Others in attendance were also helpful with their suggestions. It was especially interesting as we looked back over the code and discussed even more ways to clean it up.

Would I do it again? You bet. But I think next time, I would like to work on something that I am more comfortable with, like a Rails related app. I love writing specs for that.