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Mod Breakdown:
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+2159 / +1263 |
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Karma Level:
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+ 50
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| Signed up: |
5 years ago (10/04/04) |
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Last signed in:
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2 months ago |
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Total time online:
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92d 16h 30m |
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Oh yeah
So about two months ago, I happened to be browsing the Newegg daily deals (which usually last at least a week) and noticed a 42" LG TV at a huge discount - $1400 off. I thought "Wow, that would be great to have. Oh well."
A week later it was still in the daily deals. $999 for a $2399 1080p LCD TV. I really wished I could have it.
A week after that it was still in the daily deals. Such a huge discount, and a seriously sweet 2" thick TV. So I discussed it with Leen and we decided that it was totally worth it. We bought it, and a few days later it arrived in an enormous box. It's a beautiful TV - it looks very sleek and the picture is amazing. The "120 Hz Truemotion" feature takes some getting used to, but it's not that bad (and it can be disabled if you really can't stand it). All in all, for that price, it's an incredible deal. In fact, it's still on sale at Newegg (I suspect they're trying to clear stock to bring in the new line of LG TVs) so if you're in the market for a new TV then you should really go check it out. The only disadvantage is that the built-in speakers, while being invisible as advertised, sound awful. But honestly... I wasn't expecting much.
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There's a zombie on your lawn
We don't want zombies on the lawn
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New Firefox extension
Haven't decided if I like it or not yet, but it's definitely a cool idea so I thought I'd share: Mouseless Browsing. I came across it whilst trying to add vi key movement keybindings to Firefox (because yes, I'm too lazy to move my hands to the arrow keys when they're already on the home row). The idea is exactly what it sounds like - being able to navigate web pages without using a mouse. It's especially useful when using a laptop, but I generally prefer to use the keyboard rather than the mouse anyway. It works by assigning a unique id to each link on the page, and putting that in a little box next to the link (which you can choose to hide by default if that's your thing). To 'click' on the link, you simply type the number. I'm normally a big fan of using ' and / to search the page for what I need, but this is very useful for those pesky websites that use images for links, as well as those that have multiple links with the same text. Between that and the built-in useful keyboard shortcuts, it's possible to do nearly anything without a mouse (though ironically, navigating the options menu of Mouseless Browsing still requires a mouse  ).
The one shortcut I haven't managed to find, though, is one that will focus the current tab (similar to how Ctrl-L focuses the location bar and Ctrl-K focuses the search bar).
On a lighter note...
Did you hear about the viagra shipment that got stolen?
No, who they think did that?
Well they don't know, but they're on the lookout for hardened criminals.
(joke shamelessly borrowed from Bad Jokes)
Is that enough links yet?
LINKED MEDIA
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Apparently the gov't CAN learn
...from its mistakes.
So yesterday at work someone came on the intercom to tell us that in about half an hour, there would be military aircraft flying low over the Hudson River as part of some event, and we shouldn't be alarmed. In fact, these maneuvers would continue through Tuesday, and we should continue to not be alarmed. Second mass panic in New York: averted.
And what's the only thing cooler than a river view hotel room? Military aircraft doing maneuvers over the river outside your window. So far it's just helicopters (which are still very cool), but I'm hoping to see some other aircraft before I go to work.
So why am I in Jersey City anyway? The answer is quite simple: Bank of America willed it to be so. No, really. I'm changing teams within Bank of America to work on retiring some legacy Merrill Lynch systems, and my new team is based mostly in Jersey City. So I'm here to meet everyone and get myself set up to work on their team. Nothing too exciting, although the hotel's nice. It's always amused me that the more expensive a hotel is, the more they try to squeeze you for money. Take, for example, my current hotel - a Hyatt - and a hotel that I would consider to be nice but nothing special, like a Holiday Inn Express.
Cost of stay...
Hyatt: $229/night (and that's a negotiated rate from B of A... I'm sure these rooms normally cost much more)
Holiday Inn Express: $113/night for a similar room in a similar location
Internet...
Hyatt: $10/day
Holiday Inn Express: Free!
Breakfast...
Hyatt: $20 and up
Holiday Inn Express: Free! (though admittedly less tasty)
Room Service...
Hyatt: $9+ for appetizers, $18+ for breakfast, $15+ for meals ($15 is a sandwich with no sides), $5 service fee, 21% gratuity, $9+ for dessert
Holiday Inn Express: Okay I've never had room service there, but I'm sure it's much less expensive.
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Been a while
You guys are probably pretty surprised to see an alert from me. Surprise!
So a couple of weeks ago my wife Charleen sent me a text message at work to tell me that she'd done something bad, but wouldn't say what. It took a little while, but I finally managed to dig it out of her. She'd accidentally spilled water on our laptop - a LOT of water. It went completely through and soaked the sofa beneath. She told me later that she actually had to tip it on one side to pour all the water out. I told her not to worry about it; leave it off, and I'd take it apart later to dry it out. Which I did, and already it was mostly dry. I wasn't too worried. I let it dry for 24 hours, then put everything back together. But when I turned it on, it beeped a bunch of times (about 10 beeps, a pause, then about 10 more beeps - I never counted the same number twice; Phoenix BIOS for those of you who are wondering). And then started normally. But the beeps worried me, and after a bit of digging (okay: a LOT of digging - those beeps don't match any post codes I know of) I discovered that a few sectors on the hard drive had gone bad. Coincidence? ...Probably. My wife knows where the hard drive is, and says the water was only on the opposite end. Those things are sealed up pretty tight anyway. And after 5 years, it's not too surprising that the hard drive might be wearing out. But either way, I now have a problem on my hands. Only 9 sectors of the disk are bad (4.5KB), but more could go bad at any time, and you only have to lose a few critical operating system files for Windows to stop booting. It could die tomorrow, or it could last me another year - there's no way to know. Time to start looking at new laptops, though...
Also, just for a change of pace, I'm actually in New Jersey right now. Why New Jersey? Stay tuned to find out!
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Geeeeeeeeek
So an interesting problem came up at work yesterday... our production database has 3 copies: the database that's actually used by the application, and two more that are updated live by replication (which just means that any changes made to the first database are made to the other 2 as well). And it turns out that one of the systems sending us information started sending "NaN" (Not a Number, e.g. 0 / 0) values for one of its fields. These NaN values made it all the way into the database, where they proceeded to break replication. But what made it really interesting is that there is no easy way to find NaN values in a Sybase database using SQL queries. I couldn't find anything about it online, and even our database architect didn't know how to do it. But I finally figured out a way:
select * from Leg where reverse(str(leg.fixedRate)) like "NaN%"
That works because the string value of NaN is something like " -NaN" (for Sybase 12, anyway). Of course it's not an ideal solution since the table has about 4.5 million rows and the index on fixedRate doesn't help when it has to be converted to a string... but there are other ways of optimizing the query, and finding the NaN values was the important part.
In (slightly) less geeky news, Fallout 3 has consumed me. It's at least as addicting as Fable II was, but with a much more massive map.
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Lots of stuff
So, lots of stuff has been happening lately. I'll try to sum it up:
-Work is going well. I've gotten settled in, and there's plenty of work to do. My manager decided that I should be in charge of our current software release, which has been interesting at times. But since we're not supposed to do the actual release ourselves (for audit purposes), managing a release consists mainly of writing up some instructions and listening to someone else follow them. Not too hard.
-We finally caved in and bought an XBox 360, which will probably be our Christmas presents to each other, and possibly birthday presents as well (we've spent over $500 so far, and we still want a couple more games and 2 Live Gold accounts). Now we're both addicted to Fable 2, but that's okay because it's a really great game. Seriously. We used to have some problems with it freezing during play, but installing it on the hard drive seems to have fixed that. We really want Left 4 Dead too... we played a demo and it is awesome. And it's very re-playable, since the location of weapons and zombies are randomized each time you play.
-We just got back from Texas, where we spent Thanksgiving with Charleen's family. That was a lot of fun. But we needed to bring a bunch of stuff for people down there, plus we were trying to save money, which meant that we needed to drive there. We've driven there from Champaign before (a ~13 hour drive), and that was bad enough, but this time we drove from Naperville and brought our dogs with us. On the way down we left at 6am and didn't arrive until midnight (18 hours for those of you who hate math). On the way back we left around 6am again, made fewer stops, and managed to get here by 11pm. I don't want to do that ever again, but I'm sure this won't be the last time. But I am thankful for 3 things: (1) our dogs were very well behaved, and didn't really cause us any problems during the trip; (2) gas prices are really really low; and (3) our car gets about 40mpg when we're driving on the highway. It's about 1000mi, and we only had to stop for gas twice each way.
-We've decided that we hate Arkansas. Our route took us diagonally through that state, and it felt like we were in that state forever.
-I still spend hardly any time on the internet - even email only gets checked every once in a while. I probably will be on XBL a fair amount though, especially once we get Left 4 Dead, and if my wife has her way, Phantasy Star Online.
-We're always open to new games, and we're a few years behind the times - what games would you recommend?
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