new monitor

This is mostly for my own notes, but I welcome feedback. I just suspect that most people won't care. :-)

I have a new LCD monitor at work (yay!). Every monitor is a little different, so I am once again playing with settings. This monitor offers a great variety of things I can twiddle, and I don't fully understand the impact of some of them. So right now I'm tinkering, but I would welcome suggestions from those with clues here about combinations of settings that would be suitable (specific goals below). For example, I haven't been able to characterize the color impact of brightness and contrast, but there seems to be some. Some of you gave me a bunch of advice when I was experimenting with this a year or so ago, so no need to repeat anything there. (The main thing I take from the prior discussion is that color temperature is probably where the action is.)

I can set: brightness, contrast, color temperature (individual RGB values), gamma (3 pre-defined and unnamed modes), and three independent mysterious numeric parameters under an "image" menu (course, fine, sharpness). (I couldn't see any obvious impact from changing these.) There are also three pre-set color combinations (white point??), called cool (blue), normal, and warm (red); I've bypassed those for the "custom" option (RGB values). "Cool" is definitely too blue and warm seems awfully red.

My current settings are:
Brightness 30
Contrast 90
Gamma: "mode 3" (the one I parse as darkest)
R: 70
G: 70
B: 60

My main goal is to keep the bright white pixels from screaming at me quite so much as they currently do (specifically: black text on white background is harsh; it wasn't so great on the CRT monitor either), while maintaining sufficient contrast and getting colors that are as close to normal as I can achieve. It appears that the absolute RBB values, and not just the ratios among them, matter for overall brightness; I'm not sure yet how that interacts with the brightness control.

I'll try replicating the settings I use at home (also an LCD monitor) at work, but won't be back in the office to try until Tuesday.

Pesach

The cleaning fairy came today, and tonight I kashered everything that needs it and finished switching things over. We had a miscommunication -- she apparently assumed that I wouldn't be using the microwave -- so I had to scrub that out before kashering, but that's no big deal. I am so glad that we can afford to foist off some of the cleaning on someone else. There are certain cleaning tasks I really hate, including the oven. (One of these days we'll replace that sucker with one that does self-clean.) It's also nice to have a cleaning fairy who groks kashrut; she's a gentile, but she's been working in this neighborhood for a couple decades and she knows what to pay attention to.

(I should perhaps clarify that the name of her business is, in fact, The Cleaning Fairy.)

We were instructed to make charoset for the seders, so I had to make that tonight after the switch-over. Usually we make it there, but Pesach usually doesn't fall on a Saturday night and I don't want to try to get there with enough time to do it before Shabbat. Dani knew this was the plan, but apparently thought he was supposed to help. I made it while he was playing an online computer game, and then later he went downstairs for a while and then came back up and said "we had a failure to communicate; I just peeled the rest of the apples". Oops. Good thing the rest of the walnuts were harder for him to find. :-) (He was wondering why I'd only gotten a few apples when we would clearly need more...)

I'll be offline until Monday night. Depending on how talkative everyone is, I might or might not be able to catch up when I return. So, the usual comment -- if it's something I should see, send me a pointer.

Chag sameach!