[@505]
A World of Fun

Tonight we're in for a A World of Fun at the Tacoma Dome. Row A, Seats 1 and 2.

This was my Valentine/Anniversary gift.

[@456]
Dude, Where's My Remote?

Late last week, I fell asleep on the couch. Nothing too unusual. It happens quite often when I watch TV before going to bed. I'll wake up a few hours later with the TV on/off and the remote laying on the floor nearby. But this time, the remote is nowhere to be found. We've looked everywhere we could think of, to no avail.

We've had our Home Theater Master SL-9000 for years, and it has never disappeared for this long. I had to dust off the TV, digital cable, VCR and DVD remotes just to get things going. What a pain.

I guess someone is trying to send me a message. Time to upgrade the old beat up remote. I just ordered a Home Theater Master MX-500 which should be here in a few days.

I'm pretty partial to the Home Theater Master remotes. We've used them for years and have always been satisfied. The MX-500 seems to be praised by everyone. I'm just not looking forward to have to reprogram everything.

Now that the new remote is on the way, I'm sure the old one is suddenly going to magically re-appear, right where I left it. I'm starting to get suspicious of the cats. They're looking at me funny…

[@112]
Ordered! It's backordered, so we'll see when I actually get it. [@744]
Vote for Stephanie and Andre Martin's friends Stephanie and Andre are in the final of the Wedding Competition. I just voted for them. [@676]
Seattle Traffic Cams I created a Map for Seattle's Traffic Cams which is now included in Chris' Mobile TrafficCam application. Let me know if you have any suggestions for other cams to be included in the map. There are a lot of them and I just went for the basic ones.
[@432]
Dr. Diego Diego has finally graduated. Welcome to the club! And he's also moving to the States on Tuesday! Congrats!

[@722]
Stuck Pixels I'm pretty happy with my new Dell 2001FP monitor, although I did find a couple dead/stuck pixels. The first one I noticed almost immediately, as it is stuck on green which is visible on a black background. The second one I noticed yesterday, stuck on red. Thankfully, a close DPT inspection did not reveal any more. I really don't care about the green one as it is almost never visible. The red one, on the other hand, is quite prominent. Especially on white backgrounds. I decided to email Dell to see what their exchange policy was. Here's what they replied:

Dear Mr. Thauvin, Thank you for contacting Dell Technical Support. Mr. Thauvin, I would like to inform you that the liquid crystal display (LCD) screen consists of millions of individual dots. These picture elements, or pixels, combine to create the picture on your screen. A pixel is the smallest point in an image displayed on a computer monitor or LCD. Sometimes a pixel will become fixed, or stuck permanently and will appear as one specific light or dark colored dot. A display with one to five fixed pixels is within the industry standards, and is considered an acceptable display. 4 to 5 Defective Pixels anywhere on screen is not terms for flat panel replacement. Do not replace a flat panel if only one or two pixels are out. This also applies to white, black, red, blue, or green pixels. The only exception to the above rule will be if a flat panel has two pixels stuck ON in the center of the screen. The center of the screen is defined as the area of the screen that is four inches horizontally, by three inches vertically. NOTE:-Please note that a replacement flat panel which is dispatched may be the same or worse and as long as it meets or exceeds our guidelines, then Dell will not replace it a second time.

The reason I asked about the exchange policy is that various LCD manufacturers/stores are reportedly offering zero bad pixel policies. Dell's current guidelines are perfectly acceptable. There is really no guarantee that exchaning the monitor will help, it might even be worse. I just have one recommendation, if you don't see anything wrong with your LCD monitor. Don't investigate. Now that I know where the stuck pixels are, I can't help but staring at them.

[@040]
[@973]
Death to MSNBot! I was just looking at my stats for last month, and noticed the following for MSNBot under the Robots/Spiders section:

More than 440MB of bandwidth? That's ten times more than any other bot/spider. I feel so violated.

[@522]
My Dream Phone. Yesterday, Nokia introduced the 6680, which looks very sleek. There are still a few things which I think are missing to make it my ultimate dream phone.

What's with the proprietary connector on Nokia phones? Give me a stereo headphone jack and a standard USB 2.0 port, please. Put a 5GB hard disk in the thing so I don't have to carry my Carbon, iPod or USB stick around, will ya? Let me flash the phone via USB. I don't really want to have to ship my phone overseas to upgrade your buggy firmware. Global Positioning. Can you imagine how much more useful all of these location-based services (directions, maps, etc) would be if they already knew where I was? WiFi. I know you must've heard of it. Voice Tags are really nice, but how about some basic voice-based dialing functionality: "Dial 555 1212". I'm not really dreaming. All of these things are coming in one form or another. The first manufacturer to package everything into one sleek phone is going to be on top for a very, very long time.

[@602]
Nokia 6680/6681   Matt is doing a nice job keeping track of all the 3GSM announcements. [@500]
Valentine/Anniversary

Happy Valentine's Day

Today's is also our Wedding Anniversary. The plan? Dinner at Anthony's. Apart from the usual trinkets, I bought an unusual gift. Something the two of us will, hopefully, enjoy.

[@431]
Planned Outage The power company will be replacing a couple of polls down the street this morning. We have been notified that the power will be out from 9am to 1pm. I guess it'll give the servers some overdue rest.

[@977]
Looks like the power never went out. Typical.