::A Geek in Korea::

Part of the rough stakes that has different Korean telecom companies fighting for each other’s customers are the deals you can work out if you switch service contracts between the companies. After being a long time subscriber to the “Megapass” service offered by KT, we switched to Hanaro Telecom after they finally sweetened the pot enough.

The tipping point came when they offered us a twenty-two inch flat screen monitor (55cm) for 50,000 won if we switched over our service. Cheap gigantic flat screen monitor get! My video card has two outputs, so I can set up both monitors as a gigantic wallpaper. Now I can type on my wide screen monitor, and run a music program on my old regular monitor, and not need to worry about minimizing, maximizing, or covering anything up. Instead of virtual desktops, I have actual secondary desktops.

It’s so luxurious that I feel like I’m from the future. I’m Cory Doctorow all of a sudden. All I need are some goggles and a cape.

Anyway, my current monitor array is large enough that when I want to drag one window to the other monitor, I actually have to TURN MY HEAD to see everything. It’s nuts. Currently I’m lacking a nice chair for the set up, but eventually I’ll have a luxury deck to burn time on the series of ‘Tubes. Oddly enough the monitor arrived on my wife’s birthday, so while she and I were planning on buying her gift over the weekend, I got what I was waiting for earlier than I was expecting.

As part of the deal with switching, we also got a free home phone for land line service (my first in Korea!) and a new television box service for movies and television programs. Hanaro box, the digital television service, even has Battlestar Galactica seasons 1 & 2 to watch with subtitles. Take that MegaTv! I’ve seen them multiple times, but now my wife can catch up after watching Season 3 with me. That’s really nice too.

Tackling the modification of my Linux system to set up two monitors wasn’t nearly as hard as I had feared either. I was already using the proprietary Nvidia drivers, so I had to run one configuration application with rights, click a few boxes, and have the settings like I wanted. I took less than an hour to get a non-eye bleed setting that functioned like a massive badass desktop.

I’m still adjusting to having the two monitors, but it will be really hard to go back to a single monitor after this when I go to work. It’s just so nice to have all the space.