... Who needs him when I have an excellent online computer store and a Visa card?

Ladeez and gennulmen, I give you the present that I gave to myself in general and my appalling eyesight in particular... the ASUS PA279Q 27in AH-IPS Widescreen LED Monitor. Pre-calibrated not merely for sRGB but which can display 99% of the Adobe RGB gamut. Yes, I could have gone larger. Yes, I could have gone faster (IPS's aren't known for speed, this one being 6ms GTG), but in the end I decided that the colour accuracy of this one for photographic work outweighed the need for speed when gaming (which in my case consists only of the occasional round of Rome Total War (the original, not the unbridled abomination that Creative Assembly foisted on us in 2013) anyway, and of course things like SQL Server or Excel or Word don't really care one way or the other.

It even has a hood to make it feel real profeshunal and stuff.

Thus far it's been an excellent monitor, and my eyes feel much better already.

Mind you, since this was Christmas Eve there was bupkis in the way of parking in the shopping centre near the post office. Not that it mattered as the post office had forgotten to put the collection form in my box. Thankfully I asked them whether they had received it (as the tracking report indicated that they had). Then when I got it I had to haul it about a kilometre to where I was able to park, and this is not a light monitor. Still, it was worth it in the end.

The only down side is that I was so busy installing it that I forgot to pick up some dry cleaning that was due back that afternoon. Oh well, maybe I'll just spend the Christmas break playing Rome Total War dressed in a bedsheet toga. There are worse fates.
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Edit, August 2024: The monitor is still in service and is my primary photo processing monitor. However these days I have a dual monitor setup, with an ASUS XG349C UWQHD 180Hz FreeSync HDR IPS Curved 34in Monitor sitting to the left of it and serving as my main general purpose monitor. It's not calibrated for photos, but it's much faster and wider and larger, and best of all, I can have Bridge open on one screen and Photoshop in the other. (I would still like to dump Photoshop, especially after Adobe tried to make a unilateral change to their terms and conditions giving themselves complete rights to anything that you process through their software, and then bullshitting that "Oh, no, this was all a big misunderstanding, you see, it's the law, oh, that pesky law, it's so complex, and we were trying to simplify it for you!" But I digress.)

Another change is that I try to make sure that my desk is a lot less cluttered these days.

A further change that has happened since this photo was done was in relation to my mention of dry cleaning. Specifically, I no longer get that done. I used to get my trousers dry cleaned at a little family-run place behind what was the then-excellent Westside Pharmacy in Woonona. Some time between late 2015 and early 2017 Westside Pharmacy changed to being a Priceline pharmacy . (I disparagingly refer to Priceline as the "Girls' Club" chain since they have any cosmetic you could ever desire, it's just a pity about the paucity of medicines in stock.) They expanded out the back of the building, taking over the family run laundry and since then... well, as it turned out the trousers washed well enough. Of course at the time of writing I'm mostly working from home and am wearing sport pants rather than dress trousers, so... chalk another thing up to "changes that happened while you didn't really notice".