the (un)real thoughts of realbt

1. My cellphone emits a lot of light.

That doesn’t mitigate my next point, however:

2. Buy a flashlight.

Thanks to a minor power outage in Vancouver (it took out a big chunk of the city apparently), I lost my awesome uptime on my linux boxes.

On the plus side, the reboot means I have a newer kernel and I’ve fixed some minor issues I was having with my soundcard on my workstation.

The past two days: random spurts of snow. At UBC on Friday morning (~ 9am), there was a couple centimetres of snow on the ground. Two hours later, there was none left. The temperature rose to nearly 10 degrees. It was bright and sunny. And the north shore mountains were clear and you could see the snow-capped trees.

Did you know that the new Tim Horton’s commercial for the roll-up-the-rim-to-win contest is filmed in my home town, Mission BC?

It’s a fact.

My wonderful Nokia 21″ CRT is not happy these days. The picture randomly jumps, in terms of horizontal width, between two fixed points. Sometimes the picture is sized appropriate; other times, it’s very narrow and my text looks rather squished. And there isn’t much I can do about it other than resize the horizontal width manually on the monitor, which gets tedious, as the random jumping/resizing is starting to occur more and more frequently.

It’s disappointing. I love this monitor. If it dies, I’ll likely look for another 21″ CRT. LCDs are nice and small, but they don’t give you the resolution that I want. I can’t live without 1600×1200 anymore, and I’ve had to spend a lot on an LCD to get that. I suppose I could buy two low-end 19″ LCDs and get 1280*1024*2 pixels, which is much more pixel real estate than 1600×1200. But that would probably cost me in the range of $500-600, which seems like a lot of money. And if I were to do that, I think I’d probably look for a nice wide-screen LCD.

Well, it’s a waiting game to see how long this thing will last. My last monitor that did this was a 15″ Proview monitor that I bought with my 486 in 1995 or 96. Luckily that was still under warantee. No such luck on this.