Freddy vs. Jason was the #1 movie at the box office for the second week in a row. Truly, we’ve abandoned all hope of good taste.

Well, I finally won an eBay auction today for a new monitor. It’s a flat-screen Dell UltraSharp 20 incher. Should be pretty nice. I know a bunch of people who have one and they all love them.

$770 seems like a lot to pay for a monitor, but I figure it all works out. The last monitor I bought was in 1998. It was a ViewSonic 20G that I bought from Microsoft out of Firefly’s assets, for only $75. It was a nice big monitor and it could do 1600×1200 at 65hz, though it was very curved on the edges, and huge and heavy. It worked great for a few years, then it started this problem where the guns would be intermittently misalinged on the top or bottom half of the screen. It became very annoying and finally I decided that I had to get something better. I’m now technically and philosophically opposed to CRT monitors and the ViewSonic had spoiled me on 20 inch screens which made all of my options expensive.

Ebay turned out to the be the cheapest option, sometimes. I watched the auctions for a while and found the lowest price I saw one of the Dell monitors close at, $670. Then I started bidding, trying first at $670, then about $700, and then finally $720. You sure can get some cheap deals on Ebay, but it can definitely be a lot of work. I’ve spent the last week scheduling my activities around the closing times of auctions. I found that bidding more than a hour before the auction closed was useless as the price ramped up quickly by ‘snipers’ in the last few seconds. My only choice was to try to snipe myself after I was outbid a few times by only a few dollars. I found myself dreaming of ebay as I worried about waking up in time for the closing of some of the auctions.

I thought I had one snagged at only $569 over the weekend, but it turns out the guy mislisted the monitor he was selling.

I’m anxious to get the monitor now though. Hopefully it’ll help save my eyesight. I can’t believe I’m still the only person in my family still not in need of glasses.

I’m proud to annouce that Yahoo! News is now available as RSS feeds. Please consume.

You’ve got to give a company credit when their PR person can say something like this:

“It’s time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he’s normally accustomed to,” Fox News spokeswoman Irena Steffen said.

Who said only tennis players can have tantrums on the field?

Here’s something that doesn’t happen to me every day: I nearly got arrested.

“I can’t be lactose-intolerant – I’m Dutch!” — Overheard

One of my oldest friends (from high school) told me today that he’s moving from from the Bay Area and back to the east coast. That’s sad news, it was really nice to have someone from NH around here. We had some fun getogethers.

It brings up the issue again of when our west coast expedition will come to a close. The plan, of course, is to get back to New England sometime in the next few years, buy a house in a slightly more reasonable real estate market and settle down permanently.

Now all I need to do is to find a good job there or convince my employer to open up an engineering office in Boston.

Looks like we’ll be here for a while.

One part of The Tech museum yesterday had plaques on the walls with various interesting/amusing quotes about space. A few of them were:

“Don’t kill me, you’re from outer space!” – Alien
“I’m not from outer space, I just work there” – Captain Kirk

“Wherever you go, there you are.” – Buckaroo Banzai

And my favorite was this entire dialogue, “They’re Made Out of Meat!”.
Continue reading ‘They’re Made Out of Meat!’ »

While I was listening to NPR yesterday, I realized that their “ads”, read by NPR staff, are basically the equivalent of the text ads in search engines like Yahoo Search. They’re usually highly relevent to the audience, but subtle enough to not overpower the content.