I'm now also listing on the new site SF Actors. 

I can now be cast from anywhere.  After talking with the good people at Look Talent, arrange to send sides to SF Actors.  Then kick back and wait for my auditions to be posted to the web for your viewing.

Have passport, will travel.

For those of you who requested shots of the dual monitor setup I've described, here it is.  With desk space and/or document stands to left and right, you've got a lot of simultaneously viewable space.  The top monitor allows you to see about a page and a third while word processing.  Make sure your monitor and computer will agree to do this if it's what you want.  Some don't support the vertical (portrait) orientation.  Geek on.

Yeah...I've only ever had cable TV twice in my life, briefly.  My mom had it for about a year when I was a teenager.  That and a brief roommate situation many years ago is about it. 

Here in my low-fi old-school DIY media laboratory, I'm rebuilding an ancient Intel tower to stream my Netflix (they will apparently never support my PowerPC Mac, those f*%@s), and I need to get from my VGA out to my vintage 2000 Aiwa TV's S-Video or RCA inputs. 

People in big box electronics stores and Radio Shack look at me like I'm from the Olduvai Gorge.  It's all DVI and HDMI up in there.  Heavy sigh - gotta order it off the interwebs. 

Would rather have a tiny Asus notebook for the purpose, but $10 in cabling beats a $400 laptop in these economic conditions.  Here's to hearing the ancient tower's multiple fans roar back to life and to stringing four kinds of cabling all over hell and tarnation with in-line adapters and whatnot.  My media server is basically in geriatric ICU, I guess.  Beats hospice.  I'm making this thing last me ten years. 

UPDATE Jan 09:  Comic failure involving dual-column redundant squashed illegible screen images on borderline obsolete television display.  Seeking cutting edge recycling solution.

Last time I checked in about my computer life, I was a newly converted raging Linux hippie.  Having labored years to optimize a stable and uninstrusive Windows XP environment on old hardware that was only getting older, I started messing with open source OS options, eventually settling on Ubuntu.

Well, it was a mixed success.  You can find the earlier post to read about the travails, but let's just say that I was not prepared to forward the requisite patience and time under the hood.  I just want to drive.

Backed up, unplugged the tower.  Now I'm back at good ol' Mac OSX, sharing the computer my better half was using exclusively before. 

What have I learned?  All operating systems have good and bad aspects.  Working with more than one leads to insights that transcend the limitations of each.  Mastery crosses platforms.

Will I go back to Ubuntu?  Perhaps, but I'd like to do so on hardware built for the OS.  Video and audio card and device config and codec compatibility were my main gripes with Ubuntu (though that's not the only OS with these kind of problems in an age of proliferating obscure video codecs).

Will I go back to Windows?  So long as I can keep using XP, I see no reason not to rebuild the old tower (yeah, alright, maybe a new video card and some RAM) and all the drives I have for it as a media server for the living room.

Do I love Mac OS?  Sure.  It's elegant, more fun, less cluttered in managing hardware, system resources, and security.  But it's still got a management curve.

The main thing is to operate a little behind the curve.  I run XP, not Vista, Tiger, not Leopard, and only stable Open Source OS options.  It's more stable, less expensive, and the bugs are better worked out. 

Now, can you run Mac, Windows, and a Linux flavor all on your Mac?  Sure.  If you buy a leading edge machine with buffed out chip and memory and that's what you want to do with your system resources.  For my money, multiple recent ancestor generation harware elements running different OS's gives an optimal combination of redundancy, freedom, and value.