CD Burning and Debian

What a pain!

cdrdao, cdrecord, k3b, gnomebaker, argh!

What's the problem? I was using the 2.6.8 kernel! Silly me for using the latest and greatest! :-D Using the 2.4.27 kernel, the CD burning softwares variously picked up the drive perfectly -- go figure!

Sin Emergence First Impressions

Oh -- goodness -- what -- is -- going -- on?

I think that about sums it up -- I'll retry it when I'm more awake, I guess. Not to spoil it too much, but you wake up on an operating table, looking up at a woman who would make Pamela Anderson blush and a man with a "dark soul" patch, to bring in some Oblivion, who then proceeds to curse at you.

I recall Alias from earlier this evening, they finally shot Gina Torres to death -- except she's now played by Jennifer Garner, although, I suppose, they shot Michael Vartan to death and he's still alive, so that's no telling anything, and Sark is back. What? Why haven't they shot him yet?

Back to Emergence: When is a uniform not a uniform? When you're playing a video game! So your minx of a 'rookie' partner springs you from prison, and the bad guy with the soul patch, who had threatened to do you in a little earlier, gets the heebie-jeebies with the unwarranted breaking and entering, and makes like a tree and 'leaves', if I could, rather than pumping your partner full of lead, which, presumably, would be possible, given that she's only one person breaking into a super-secret protected facility.

You then get into her car, as you flash inbetween some rather inappropriate scenes of Pamela Anderson's evil twin and your equally inappropriate partner, only to be thrown onto some docks with absolutely no clue as to what's going on, to then have your meeting with the dude on the docks thrown into chaos by armed gunmen.

It was at that point, thoroughly confused, lacking any sort of direction or helpful introduction to what the hell is going on in this screwed up world, that I decided to call it quits for the evening... well, I'm due for more confusion than a foreign film at the same price :-) Can't complain...

Modern Sci-Fi-esque T.V. shows and German Art-haus directors

So I happened to see an episode of 'Lost' where they find this old slave ship -- in the middle of the pacific -- with TNT. The poor science teacher dun got blowed up right then and there, but it's like, what is this ship doing way up in the middle of the island?

I mean, I'm a big fan of Werner Herzög, but it's like, did the directors or the writers realize that they were like embarking into German-language theatre when they started off on that little story line? I mean, are the people behind Lost really trying to bring in some sort of statement about the futility of western civilization's attempts to dominate nature or about the double-faced attitude of the 'conquistador,' or of the inability of man to adapt to the new reality of their surroundings?

On a further note about Lost, I mean, what was with the people on that plane? There couldn't be more intrigue and subterfuge in any group of passengers on a plane if a group of Nazi spies were flying from Russia to land in Britain on their way to America to meet up with Italian-born Japanese Ninjas -- I mean, it's like, what was going on? And about the Others, I'm only, I guess, around the end of Season 1 / start of Season 2, and it's like, how did the others get there, and then get the gas to power a motorboat to then go off and steal the kid from that raft? What?! And then, with that bunker, it's like, you don't just make a concrete bunker 40 feet down. That requires some serious construction, people! That's not an insignificant amount of concrete! And then, the Nigerian drug runners -- how exactly did they get that little plane to the middle of the Pacific? Where were they going to land, dare we ask? How did they get the gas? I mean, I hate to be all Mad Max with the gas questions here, and I know it's a show, but, well, there it is! Maybe it's a tale about the futility of our gas economy... ;-)

Dell 1907fp mini-review

Well, with a 19" LCD monitor for $220 after all the shenanigans, coming with a three year warranty, it was hard not to jump on the deal, so I bit.

My reticence with getting an LCD was twofold -- first, the ghosting, second, the colors. Both of them play into gaming, the latter plays into everything else. The idea here is that if you wiggle the mouse around, you'll see "streaks" where the LCD monitor hasn't quite caught up with the action that you've done. It isn't a problem with CRT's as they beam electrons at you, but with LCD's, there's actually little switches that are letting light through or not letting light through. the color thing is something else entirely, and the first generations of LCDs had awful color and were "fast", or had decent color and were "slow." I put these in quotes, because to a CRT, which if you have a good Sony or NEC (like moi) everything is instantaneous and the color reproduction is superb.

The third issue here is the "dead pixel" issue. I couldn't imagine spending tons on a monitor only to have it broken and no one would take it back, because it wasn't broken enough.

The difficulty with the CRT, naturally, is that as you get a larger and larger screen, the monitor itself gets excessively large. My 19" CRT must have weighed 50 or 60 pounds and was enormous. Simply enormous. Great color, but man, just huge. As LCD's get bigger, the footprint doesn't necessarily get bigger.

Let's go to the Dell now. It came in a lovely box, packed nicely, with the normal 15 pin analog connection attached. It also came with the DVI, so that immediately went in. It also comes with a little USB hub, and my goodness, what a fabulous idea! Now you don't have to bend down and get to the back of your computer, you can just plug it into the side or your monitor! What "it" is can be anything, but most usually a USB pen drive. Then, you have to factor in that this thing has a height and rotation adjustment -- i.e., you can move the screen up and down, to a point, and physically rotate the thing 90 degrees if you're reading text (you have to manually switch this with the aid of your video card's taskbar icon, but that's quick). What a brilliant idea! It's been around forever, but, what a brilliant idea!

Color isn't a CRT. But it ain't bad. Text is crisper, naturally, since it's not being beamed at the screen but it actually a physical pixel on the screen. When it's not in native resolution, yeah, it's a little griany, but that only affects games that need serious horsepower and my computer won't be able to handle nicely at the native 1280x1024. Back to the color -- as with all LCD's, there is no true "black", since the light is ALWAYS shining from the back of the monitor, and it's just being attempted to be prevented from sort of squeaking through. It's the difference between it being a cloud-covered night outside (a CRT) and pulling down the shades on a sunny day (LCD). It's not awful, but it's noticeable to my sensitive eyes. The color reproduction isn't bad, again, I have no scientific analysis, but the color is certainly vibrant, and while not quite a CRT, you'd be hard pressed to really find flaws with it. I wouldn't use it were I a professional photographer, but for the little editing I do, it's good enough.

Ghosting not so much an issue, again, I have sensitive eyes, but you really have to be working at it (i.e., shaking the mouse violently while playing a game) to notice anything significant while gaming. There is a little streaking while going left to right extremely quickly, but really, it's not quite so bad as I had feared. I can play just as fine on this as I did on the CRT (which ain't too good! ha!), with no fear about ghosting or weird artifacts. This was a concern for me, but it's not anymore. It really does handle this stuff well.

All in all, given the extreme deal, I would give this a 5/5. I paid just a bit less for a 17" NEC Diamondtron CRT a few years back, and given the difference in size, the convenience of the rotation and the USB, the crispness of text, you just can't beat that deal. Recommended -- I am very happy with this purchase.