on the futility of finding a new non-widescreen LCD.

Why is it that nobody makes an LCD in 4:3 format anymore?

Robin upgraded her monitor to a lovely 22″ AOC widescreen. I am still using one of the 19″ LCDs we bought back in Knoxville in oh-six or so. Lately, it has been showing its age a bit, so it’s time for me to move on as well. Trouble is, all I can find is 16:9 widescreen, which I greatly dislike.

16:9 is ducky for movies, but it’s exactly the wrong format for displaying text on screen. Its saving grace is that the bigger widescreen flat panels are usually wide enough to nicely display two pages side by side, but when I compose in full-screen view, wide text columns don’t scan well to the human eye. Also, when I play a game on a widescreen in that size, I feel like I’m constantly panning my view, like I’m watching a tennis match. But since absolutely nobody makes new LED LCDs in 4:3 format anymore, I guess that’s what I’ll be buying.

<grumble>Kids and your wide-screens and cassette tapes and Intertweets these days. Why, in my day, we didn’t have monitors! We had shadow boxes. And we was thankful!</grumble>

highly he continued glasses purse.

Sometimes, you find a gem among all the really boring generic “Loved this post!” spam caught in the filter. The following piece of clickbait has a surreal stream-of-consciousness quality that reminded me of the Cylon hybrids running the baseships:

“There began the handbag with their main black replica about vuitton else – finger workboat loved scarred on its blueblack. He began about the tiffany, replica as marking you. Walkie had his talkie. Highly he continued glasses purse – now, was the replica. The coach quality replica so. Esq oily. Twice. The chopard began forgotten. John, unknowing a special player watches. You turned you little to continue his he’d swiss, no numerous army above watches above. Me had of coach nodded of handbag, and i focus should’ve to be this replica – scar hand in the. I closed being i’d. A zenith was the adjoining replica – to the distant rolex in suspect watches the most surprising din from the features into delgado – and he must impatiently fold and sleep, relatively focus columns. Also him looked to stonehenge and finally to replica zealand, how them had unexpectedly of two on the executive, lowering, for a lips – still as of way, and fully in after a new night. He could clear become the watches for we removed known the women never to line, and they could throw mocked talking the safety with the atomic eye at the nose and telling his arrival. Rolex said his watches. He don’t tooted. We was he to him nowhere, perhaps very in i went it, into her bangs his that rolx. I began gliding the quality.”

(I took out the clickable links.)

That is so full of meme gold I don’t even know where to start. Walkie had his talkie! He must impatiently fold and sleep! I began gliding the quality.

what you can’t see is the dinosaur piloting it.

Quinn painted this rocket ship in watercolors yesterday. I thought it turned out pretty good, in an abstract sort of way. It would make a sweet cover image for a SF novel.

not photoshopped.

It’s April 23rd. This is the scene outside this morning:

No, it’s not going to stick. It’s just a subtle reminder from Mother Nature that in New England, you can’t be sure you’ve seen the last of the season’s snow until you can smell the sausages on the grill for the Fourth of July cookout.

thursday randomosity.

Random bullet points from the ongoing week of My Exciting Life!™:

• The snow is gone just about everywhere in the area, EXCEPT OUR PROPERTY. I’m not even kidding—we’re like Garfield’s little house in the suburbs that’s the only one with a cloud above it. There’s no other property on the way to town that has any white stuff left on it. The snow plow guy said it’s something about the location of the property, which sits on an east-facing slope at the eastern edge of town. It looks like we bought a patch of land that is to snow what a litter box is to cat poop.
• The new DSL is working great, except when it drops the PPP connection. That happened about six times on Day 1, twice on Day 2, and only once yesterday, and it never takes more than a few minutes for the modem to reconnect to the Great Link, but it’s still annoying. The telco is sending out a tech on Friday to wave dead poultry and light black candles over the line, and we’ll see how it goes from there. Other than that, it’s a huge increase in bandwidth—exactly three times faster than the WISP we’ve been using, and really low-latency. I’ve been dusting off my first-person online shooters again (helloooo again, Battlefield 2 and Team Fortress 2), and even though I don’t have a ton of time to play them, it’s nice to know that I once again have the option of a quick round of BOOM HEDSHOT when I need a bit of stress relief.
• Also much improved: Skype and Netflix streaming video. I can actually use the Interskypes properly now, although I haven’t done any extensive testing due to the fact that NONE OF MY SKYPE CONTACTS ARE EVER ONLINE. If you’re one of them, and you see me online, feel free to hit me up for a quick palaver, so I can test the DSL line some more. Robin will need to use Skype from home for professional reasons soon, and I want to make sure everything works hunky-dory.
• The annual rite known as the Cleaning of the Spring is in progress here at the Castle. I just finished excavating the playroom, and found toys with Neanderthal teeth marks in them. Next up: cleaning the battlewagon, and swapping out the snowblower with the lawnmower.
• Wanna see a random artifact from my childhood? A friend reminded me of a kids’ cartoon from 1970s Germany, Vicky the Viking, and I was able to recall most of the theme song, even though I haven’t watched that show since I was in elementary school. Here’s the title song from the start of the show (in German.) You want to take a freaky trip down Memory Lane, look up the shows you used to watch as a kid. Seeing those visuals again after three decades really made my brain do a double-take. It’s a funky sort of déjà vu.
• If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?

best use of ms paint in recorded history.

Rejoice, brothers and sisters!

Allie Brosh has a new post up at Hyperbole and a Half, which makes today an official Intertubes holiday. (Just put away your beverage before you click on that link.)

best URL ever.

DSL, oh how I’ve missed you.

Oh, frabjous day! The installer dude just left, and Castle Frostbite is now connected to the Intertubes via DSL.

I ran a SpeedTest the second we were up and running, and we’re getting exactly the advertised 1.5Mbps down and 768kbps up. It’s no FiOS, but it’s about 3 times faster than the WISP we’ve been using for over a year now. We are now officially no longer a technological backwater.

Now excuse me while I chat on Skype and stream some Netflix…

beware the fury of a father.

Good morning, Internets. Gather ’round the flicker of the LCD with the backlight that’s about to fail, and listen to this true story from Germany, my ancestral stomping grounds.

In the early 1980s, a 14-year-old girl from France goes to stay with her stepdad in Germany for the summer. Her parents have gotten a divorce, and her mother’s new squeeze is a German cardiologist.

A short time into her stay, she is found dead in her bedroom. There are injection marks found on her arm. The stepdad says that he gave her an iron preparation “to help her with her tan”, and that she most likely had a bad reaction to it. The case is written off as a tragic accident.

A few years later, the German doctor is arrested…for assault and rape. He has raped a patient, a young teenage girl, after injecting her with sedatives. He is found guilty and receives two years in jail.

Based on this new evidence, France (the dead girl’s home country) charges the doctor in absentia with homicide in the 1990s, convicts him, and sentences him to 15 years in prison. Germany refuses to extradite, citing lack of evidence.

The father of the dead girl fights for the shifty doctor’s extradition for two decades without success. Finally–with both men now in their seventies–he decides that he has had enough of the legal wrangling. He hires a few hard-boiled Russian Mafia goons, and has them abduct the shifty rapist-doctor from his home in Germany. The Mafia guys seize him, beat the snot out of him, stuff him into the trunk of a car, and drive him across the border to the French city of Mulhouse, 200 miles away, where they unceremoniously deposit the hog-tied and bruised doctor on the steps of a French courthouse.

After almost thirty years, justice is finally served.

Now, as a supporter of due process and equality before the law, I can’t advocate that sort of vigilante justice. As a father, however, I have to say that if some creep did the same thing to my daughter, with similarly compelling evidence that the accused committed the deed…

Four words: Chechens with pipe cutters.

if i have to get mugshotted to get into a titty bar, the terrorists have won.

San Francisco is considering making all public venues photograph and ID their guests.

Off the top of my head, I can think up about a million different ways this would greatly benefit stalkers, criminals, and law enforcement, and precisely zero ways this would contribute to public safety.

Looks like it’s not just the social conservatives who get all excited about surveillance and police state methods. Not that I’m a fan of Team Red, but some of my liberal friends should remember this one for the next time someone on the left side of the aisle works themselves into a froth about the excesses of the DHS bestowed on us by George II.

Surely, that would have absolutely no effect on the kinds of events where people would rather not make their identities known…like, say, political rallies for radical causes, or sexually-flavored entertainment venues. Because if you want to stay anonymous, you clearly have something to hide.

And I just know that if that proposal had originated with a Republican governor–or worse, a Republican POTUS as part of some Patriot Act overhaul–the folks in SF would be among the first to make signs and clog the streets of Berkeley in protest. Remember, kids–it’s only fascism when the other team proposes it!

At the current rate, I predict that we’ll see those nifty back-scatter Porn-O-Tron scanners on the street within ten years, and mounted on all police cruisers as soon as the technology fits onto a dashboard. And the first ones fielded will be in urban areas that vote blue. You know, to catch bad people with guns, and terrorists. Who could be against that?

The politicians of both major parties have a weird sort of amnesia. They forget that the nifty tools they put in the law enforcement tool shed when their team is in charge stay in the tool shed when the folks from the other team take over the front office.