pitumbo.com

I recently purchased the Acer X203W Monitor and have come away very pleased. It looks absolutely fantastic in its native 1680 x 1050 resolution! The colors are crisp and true, the black is very close to black for such an inexpensive monitor, and 5ms response time is adequate. My only minor concerns would be the weak stand and funky buttons (also placed in an inconvenient spot on the underside of the right side of the front panel). Although new, I am happy to report ZERO dead pixels, which is more than I can say for my other LCD, a Viewsonic 2026w. Initially I was considering a second Viewsonic 2026W, but I'm glad I didn't go that route. The Acer X203W costs about $50 less and with free shipping from http://newegg.com, it was really a no brainer.

Edit: It looks like the Acer X203W is now up to around $200 on NewEgg (including shipping which is no longer free). The Viewsonic will run you $210. Neither price includes tax.

I guess I'm not alone in this. My NCAA March Madness bracket got absolutely destroyed on Sunday. I guess I should have spent more than two minutes picking teams. The way we set it up was to have bonus points for calling the upsets -- the bonus equals the amount of the seed, so if a 10 beats a 2 as Davidson did to Georgetown, you get a 10 point bonus. The problem is I picked a lot of upsets, but Davidson over GT wasn't one of them. Though I should have known better. Hibbert is overrated I think. In any event, I foolishly had Georgetown as a Final Four team and now they're kaput. Not good!

Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt told the AP Friday that he had e-mailed Dupre, offering her $1 million to pose nude for his magazine. He said he hadn't heard back.

"It will be something that will very tastefully done," Flynt said of the proposed photo spread, but he added that Dupre would have to appear completely naked and not just topless.

"Hustler readers don't like to compromise," he said. "They want the whole enchilada."

haha, right, because when you think of hustler readers, the first thing you think of is 'uncompromising' !

Funny forward about what us country folk think of when various technological terms are mentioned

This is hilarious!

Well, I wasted yet another day going down memory lane. This time I was playing the Infocom classic Starcross, one of the most difficult interactive fiction titles ever released. What a great game, some of the toughest (but still logical) puzzles you'll ever come across. I only needed to use the invisiclues a few times -- lame I know -- but after looking up the answers I realized I never would have gotten the right answer.

You can check out the catalog of infocom games here:
http://if.illuminion.de/infocom.html

To play them you'll need a z machine interpreter, like gargoyle, available here:
http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

If you get stuck you'll need Invisiclues, from here:
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Invisiclues/

And lastly, if you're curious about the packaging of the game, check this site:
http://gallery.guetech.org/greybox.html

Thanks to all the webmasters above who have made this trip down memory lane possible!

All you need to know about this play: no whistle was blown.

It looks like a freaking end-around for chrissakes!

Warning: This is going to be a nerdy post.

A long, long time ago when I was just a kid, my parents bought me my first computer. It was an Apple //c , and it rocked. Like any kid, my real interest in the machine had nothing to do with education (though I might have hinted that to my parents) and everything to do with video games. I couldn't have convinced them to buy a Nintendo, but I was able to get them to buy this computer. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Anyhow, the first game we got for it had no graphics whatsoever. I'm not sure I knew that when I bought it, I just wanted to play darn it! Whatever disappointment I might have experienced at not getting to see 256 color pixelated images was quickly vanquished once I delved into the Infocom masterpiece: The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy (written by the author of the book by the same name Douglas Adams, and programmed by Steve Meretzky).

Spoiler Warning: I think it was my sister who finally figured out we had to lie down in front of the bulldozer. After having spent hours trying to solve that puzzle it was such a rush of welcome success. Of course, I got killed by space aliens very soon after that.

Well, it turns out on the BBC website you can play this gem, for free, and it even has some clever illustrations added to it. Any fan of Douglas Adams would do well to try it out...it can be maddeningly frustrating, but there's just something so satisfying about figuring out a problem after turning it around in your head for hours. Not the most productive use of time, but still...

Check out the site at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml

Hmm, well I've read and seen countless trackbacks while surfing the net. But I always wondered how websites 'knew' that the trackbacks existed. I guess from the little bit I read, if you use a particular link to an article (called a trackback link) then the site to which you link will recognize your blog. I suppose if I just linked to the article without using the special trackback link then it wouldn't appear? I'm not certain. This shouldn't be confusing, but maybe I get a pass because I haven't done it before? In any event, I'm going to try linking below and see what happens. Whoopee!

http://nslog.com/2003/03/31/trackbacks_tough_to_understand/trackback

My sister and her boyfriend recently gave me a barely used Gary Fisher bicycle. Because it was shipped from Kentucky, it arrived in pieces and I lacked the proper tools to get it road fit. Besides that, I know nothing about bikes and probably would have hurt myself trying to put it together. So, I did an internet search for bike repair stores in San Diego and came across Bernie's Bike Shop.

This place rocks! The service was outstanding -- all I really needed was a tune and no new parts (since the bike was mint). $30 and 3 days later they had me all set to go. Yasuko helped me both times and she was very friendly.

I don't have any photos, but you can see all you want and learn more about Bernie's Bike Shop by clicking here.

This is pretty cool, Google has a 'book preview' of "The Celebrity Black Book" which lists the addresses of some 50,000 celebrities. Some of the listings are pretty weak though, like Maverick Records for Prodigy, etc. I came across it from reading a sports forum where everyone was harping on this one baseball umpire. It turns out he's in the book, so people were planning on bombarding his house with pizzas, magazine subscriptions, and probably flaming bags of poo as well. I won't say who the umpire is, as I don't think having this information given to a bunch of irate baseball fans is a good idea, but I do believe the book previews on Google are pretty neat. Here's a link as an example:

The Little Black Book

Last weekend my girlfriend and I went over to Cabrillo National Monument. It's located at the tip of Point Loma, jutting out between the San Diego Bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other side.

It was $5 to get in, then we parked and walked over to the lighthouse. Although the park is open 365 days a year, the lighthouse tower is only open twice a year. The rest of the lighthouse is open regular hours, however. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed with the size of the lighthouse itself. I don't know what I was expecting, but the whole structure wasn't much taller than say, 30 feet or so. Still, the historic feel to it made it worth a visit.

After we checked out the lighthouse, we found a great hike that winds down the cliff (on the Coronado side, below the statue of Cabrillo). It is fairly steep, but the footing is not a problem at all. Along the way, we could hear seals on the rocks below, but unfortunately there was no good place to observe them from. The hike back up the hill was pretty tough, especially since I was nursing a wicked hangover.

I should have some photos up soon...hopefully we got some good ones.

Today in Time Magazine is a hilarious recount of the worst cars of all time (at least 50 of them). Besides some obvious choices like the Pinto and the Yugo, there are some real gems. My personal favorite is the Horsey Horseless:

"Somewhere between an early car and the head-in-the-bed scene in The Godfather, the Horsey Horseless, the brainfart of inventor Uriah Smith of Battle Creek, Mich., was intended to soothe the skittish nerves of our equine servants. A wooden horse head was attached to the front of the chuffing buggy in order to make it resemble a horse and carriage (Smith recommended the horse head be hollow to contain volatile fuel — another great idea). "The live horse would be thinking of another horse," said Smith, "and before he could discover his error and see that he had been fooled, the strange carriage would be passed." Stupid horse! It's not clear if the Horsey Horseless was ever actually built or if it is a chimera of auto history, but it reminds us just what a radical, hard-to-conceptualize thing a horseless carriage was."

Read about the rest of the 50 here:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/1,28757,1658545,00.html

The next time you're feeling a bit of road rage (all too common here in Southern California), just be thankful you're not living in India. Why? Well, I think this video sums it up nicely. Although no accidents occur during the brief minute or so that's shown, I have to think it's just a matter of time until one of those Vespa drivers ends up road curry. Take a look:

Driving in India

Wow, so I was checking out the daily headlines yesterday, and guess who I found?

Pikachu!

OK, so it's not really Pikachu, but it sure looks a lot like him, no?

For purposes of comparison:

It's actually a "Dumbo Octopus" from the floor of Monterey Bay.

You can read more about it here