I have a saying: "I'm intelligent..."

That's something I frequently say when things happen. Not to be arrogant, mind you, but as sarcasm. A kind of joke.  I say this when I goof something up.

The truth is that I am intelligent. That much isn't a joke. If I wasn't, I don't think I would have created this website the way I have (from scratch, using VS Code). If I wasn't smart or intelligent, I wouldn't be writing blog posts like this.

There's actually a part two to that saying of mine that I wrote at the beginning of this post: "...I never said I was smart."

Put it together, and you get: "I'm intelligent, but I never said I was smart."

For me, being smart is using your skills in a way that lets you succeed at something.  You can be of relatively low intelligence but have enough smarts to learn things anyway. You might take a while to learn it, but you can learn it. You can find a way to succeed. Of course with a low enough amount of intelligence that might not be possible.

The opposite is also true for intelligence. You can be incredibly intelligent but absolutely fail at using your intelligence in a useful way, if using it at all. I don't recall the name, but there is a person that was this brilliant mathematician and has an incredibly high IQ score, but they instead choose to live a relatively humble life on a farm, earning a living from the land. This man could literally do amazing things with their life but instead, they choose to just do whatever. To be fair that might not be a sign of not being smart, but at the end of the day, it's not utilizing their intelligence.

Long-winded ramblings aside, the point I'm looking to make is that I frequently, despite appearing to be intelligent, will do some of the most incredibly stupid things I've ever done. I'm not even going to call it dumb. It's outright stupid. From moving fast and making stupid mistakes that I know are wrong, to forgetting things in code, to even stupid social missteps.

In time, I've begun saying at least that first half of my saying... that "I'm intelligent", any time I make such foolish mistakes. It's actually become amusing because people don't usually expect to hear that as a reactionary phrase. I always get a chuckle out of them though, when I explain it.

So what prompted this post? I purchased a nice, gaming monitor from a friend a couple of years back.  The price was right, I needed a bigger monitor, and to replace a failing one, and otherwise, I finally wanted to experience more than 60Hz (how many times the screen displays an image every second, so 60Hz means the screen blinks an image 60 times every second) and the monitor went up to 144Hz. So, I bought it, set it up, and for the past couple of years, I've enjoyed smooth frames.

Or so I thought.

Turns out, I never actually activated the 144Hz mode.  I literally had the video card continue to push 60Hz on both my basic monitor and the fancy-schmancy gaming monitor.  I had just taken a peek at this short on YouTube posted by ThioJoe and had decided to go check my color settings.  Some options weren't there, but I came across the resolution settings for my monitors.  Low and behold, my ASUS monitor - a VG278Q to be precise, was still set to 60FPS.

A few years prior, when I worked at Micro Center, I had hung out with someone that had one of these monitors, and I had my eyes open to the sheer magic of 120Hz and 144Hz monitors, and just the smoothness of the mouse movements alone was unreal.  Even my current phone which is the OnePlus 7T affords 90Hz when not being throttled, and I can tell the difference when comparing the screen to my previous phone. I thought I would never forget such an impressive thing.

But alas, I didn't. I never paid attention to just how smooth things were, and just assumed everything was going to work from the start. And now, I can't stop drooling over the incredibly high refresh rate as even just something as trivial as scrolling a web page looks almost eerily smooth. I love it.

In other news, I've found that until I create a proper back-end, or find a better way to generate blog posts, I've been settling for using an online HTML editor, located here. It's a two-column editor that works as a good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. You get rich text editing, effectively giving you an experience similar to WordPad (or MS Word, OpenOffice Writer, WordPerfect, and so on), while generating mostly clean code that I can in turn copy and paste into my editor.  It's not the most stellar option, but as I learn to make a home-grown website with many creature comforts of these big-name pre-made solutions, it's a good interim option!