Format the following passage properly, for storytelling purposes. Keep it exactly as it is written, don't change a single word. Improve grammar where necessary.

In about eight minutes the time will be 10:00am. I am running on a combination of adrenaline and pure excitement, having sat down to write my first piece on an Emprex monitor that was gifted to me by one of the JARC staff. It is an LCD monitor manufactured in July 2007, a widescreen model with a maximum resolution of 1680x1050, which yields a roughly 16:10 aspect ratio. I was reluctant at first to hook it up, and as a result it sat atop my big dresser for about two days. The aforementioned staff member came by last night to check up on me, and noticed that it had not been hooked up; she seemed to be understanding of the situation, and was able to view it through the lens of my having gotten used to the CRT monitors. Being manufactured in 2007, the monitor uses the old VGA standard, which thankfully is what my HP Pavilion Slimline uses. I already knew hooking it up wouldn't be a problem, or so I had initially believed. Having not used an LCD monitor in a while, I did not realize that the standard refresh rate for such monitors is 60hz; I would always run my CRT monitors at 1024x768 resolution and 85hz, which yielded a warm image with beautiful pixel blending. It's stunning to be looking at what I am writing in Notepad, and seeing how clear the letters are. Unfortunately, the pixel blending of CRT is lost with LCD, but having everything so sharp and crisp more than makes up for it. I've been quite blessed lately with a multitude of gifts, and I refuse to look any of these gift horses in the mouth. (It's a saying I keep going back to, a constant reminder to be grateful for all the kindness shown by others.) I am already finding ways to make the most of this new monitor, even extending it to games. As a longtime arcade game enthusiast, my go-to emulator has long been good old MAME 0.72, released in August 2003. It's hard to believe it's been over twenty years, but for what I play on it, 0.72 still holds up to this day. If memory serves, I alluded to this in an earlier piece but I'll make a note of it again: the main reason I continue to use 0.72 is because it was the final major release (this does not include the 'u' releases) to include the DCS Sound System hacks that made it possible to play the 90s Midway games (including the Mortal Kombats) at full speed, even on modest hardware (in 2003 terms we're talking a Pentium 4 with integrated graphics and sound; speaking as someone who used to have an HP Compaq DC5000 with no custom video or sound cards installed on the motherboard, I can tell you for a fact that all the Mortal Kombats (and other games that use DCS, such as Revolution X, NBA Hangtime, WWF Wrestlemania, 2-on-2 Open Ice Challenge, Rampage: World Tour, etc.) ran at full speed on that machine if you used MAME 0.72 or older. It is perhaps the best possible balance of compatibility and performance, and as an added bonus it's one of the first versions of MAME with proper DirectX support (meaning it scales well to newer operating systems, and if you have a good graphics/sound card setup, it can take better advantage of it compared to older versions). With a widescreen monitor, there are not many arcade games that can take full advantage of the massive screen, but for those who still use 0.72, I can confirm five that not only work in this release but run quite beautifully: Darius, Darius II, The Ninja Warriors, Warrior Blade: Rastan Saga Episode III, and Tecmo Bowl. Though these games are more than thirty years old and the original Darius' fortieth anniversary is less than two years away, they still look quite dazzling even to this day, even when compared against the capabilities of more modern hardware. I've seen some dismiss the old widescreen concept as being gimmicky, fun for a while but ultimately nothing that couldn't be done on a standard 4:3 screen. And I get what they're getting at. My old Dell CRTs, and in fact the majority of CRT monitors, were designed for 4:3 games. The majority of old arcade games were designed for a 4:3 screen, and created when CRTs remained the dominant monitor format. Going from CRTs that could bring out the beauty in any old game I threw at it to an LCD that doesn't quite scale as well was a bit of a transition, but not as difficult as I was expecting it to be. Even 4:3 games don't look all that bad when I play them on this LCD, thanks to a nice feature found in the majority of modern emulators: bilinear filtering. It's not unheard of for people to find ways to smooth out the image when they're playing an old game. There are a vast assortment of image enhancement plugins out there, but they all have their pros and cons, and some look better than others. MAME itself has had support for bilinear filtering since version 0.37b15, which was released in May 2001. (0.37b15 and 0.37b16 are recommended for ancient PCs with a sub-GHz processor and/or less than 512MB of RAM.) While it may not be everyone's cup of tea, and some may prefer a plugin that smooths out the image more naturally, I've never had a problem with how the bilinear filtering looks, on a CRT or an LCD. In my opinion, it's the best means of getting a smooth image without sacrificing too much CPU power in the process. Another adjustment I've had to make, as it pertains to my writing, is giving myself a smaller window to work with. In 1024x768 on a CRT, I could open Notepad in a full-screen window, and that gave me enough space to create a piece well over the 1,000-word mark. But 1680x1050 full-screen almost feels like having too much space, so what I've done is to use the 'Tile Windows Vertically' feature, which effectively gives me just under half the full horizontal space to work with (not counting the space used by the taskbar at the bottom of the screen). When I wrote the first pieces for this book back in February, I was still volunteering at the achievement center, using an all-in-one PC with a built-in monitor that boasted a 1920x1080 resolution and the same 16:10 aspect ratio. I would open a window of a certain size and type for a while, and before I knew it I had written over 1,000 words. I would then take what I had written in Notepad, transfer it to Microsoft Word or a similar word processing software, and break it down into more digestible paragraphs. I am sure I will easily achieve the word count I was typically getting with a full 1024x768 screen. While reaching a certain word count isn't the goal for me when I write, writing is just one part of my day, and I like to have at least 1,000 before I wrap up a particular piece. It's interesting to now have two views of nature: a portion of the legendary Windows XP Bliss wallpaper, and a view out my windows to the bushes, to the yellow-winged butterfly that just flew to the right. As the original Bliss image was designed to be viewed on 800x600 screens, it looks a bit 'off' when stretched, and while it is possible to get a higher-resolution version of the same image, it would require a bit more memory to display it (and simply tiling the image looks rather strange). I'm content to keep it as is. In less than forty minutes, my friend Evelyn will arrive with an old friend from the achievement center, and we'll head out to lunch; later on today, I will also see a magic show. I've got a feeling it's going to be lame, but even if it is, at least I can have a good laugh about it. Next week is 'Legally Blonde Kids', three words that should never be paired together.