The volume of screens

A couple years back we had the unfortunate experience of purchasing the contents of a trade show booth for a client who didn't pay. Most of what you develop for a trade show booth is completely unusable for anyone other than the client, but there were a couple of 32' LCD TVs as part of the display -- after a while they ended up in my house.

This means that in addition to the 42' TV downstairs and the little 13.5' TV in the kitchen that we already had, we now have a 32' TV in the home office and another one hanging on the wall in the bedroom (I never wanted a TV in the bedroom, but when I had the flu last year, it was nice to have access to movies).

The square footage of screens that I have available to me is absolutely staggering. Let's do some quick math --

   36' Home office: 426.25'    36' Bedroom: 426.25'    42' Basement: 756'    13.5' Kitchen: 93.5'

    1,703 square inches or about 12 square feet of viewing area

That's just the TVs. I've got a 14' diagonal screen on the Sony Viao I'm typing on right now and Markie's Dell has another 90 square inches. Add in the tower downstairs and we have around 14 square feet of viewable screens in the house, and that's not even counting my Windows Mobile and her iPhone screens or the company laptops that come to visit like Toughbook or the new netbook I bought for SXSW.

If we gathered all these screens together it would be an obscene display of geekdom. Heck, even having them scattered through the house it's pretty obscene. But we're not an unusual household, and the volume I have is in part because my job requires me to be online, and in part by accident -- others get here by intention.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I'm starting to think it might be paved with LCD screens.