And The Ugly

I finished Looney Tunes issue #11 this weekend and started in on #12 since michaelmink will be in New Jersey and away from his collection of issues for much of the week. Since I won't be able to ask him to refer to that collection if I have any questions, I decided I'd work on an issue not in his collection anyway.

But while the 1995 stuff is a break from the later material and does have its good points, it also has some bad points. Some is a bit more kiddie level, some is just bad, and there was a tendency to have stories that were rather long. That doesn't make for the best combination. Maybe I should do a couple issues from each year after all, using each as a break from the other.

The Bad

I've heard the odd high-voltage *snap* from my monitor at home for a while and it was getting more frequent. Last weekend or such I had had enough and pulled the case off, carefully made sure the high voltage was discharged, and cleaned it out. I had figured that it was just dust that built up providing a low(er) resistance path and cleaning it out would take care of things. No such luck.

Last night it got much worse. Instead of the odd occasional *snap* it became rather regular, and frequent. Shutting the monitor down to let it cool off didn't help. The image got huge, even after setting the controls to minimum. The brightness was dark. The power-on degauss seems to be gone. I shut down the system nearly blind, just to have it be a controlled shutdown. Curiously the on-screen settings were still nice and bright, showing that the tube isn't dead, and the monitor isn't completely gone... yet.

So tonight jmaynard and I will be going to Mankato to check out monitors. I don't know what I'll get. It could be another CRT, it might be an LCD if I see one that looks good and is reasonably priced.

The Good

Last year I read this account of RST's visit to Wichita which included this line: "There weren't clocks in the hotel room, none of us had watches, and for some reason, the time on my cell phone was completely off." A bit later I saw RST at the Nishna faire in western Iowa and asked about things like that and was surprised to find they'd wound up at some place that didn't have clocks in the rooms. I found that rather boggling.

An idea formed and for the past several weeks when I'd stop in at some store or other I'd see if they had any inexpensive alarm clocks. Eventually I collected enough, and a pack of AA cells for completeness. I had planned on bringing a rather unmarked Box-o'-Clocks to the Waterloo faire and springing it on RST myself, perhaps in the morning or maybe just after close Saturday. But Waterloo seemed to be in doubt and it's on the same weekend as Siouxland - which is my "I will NOT miss this" faire.

So I gave away a bit of it to ginafae who found the idea amusing. I sent the box to RST, care of her. The parcel arrived last week. And this weekend, this happened.

One more clock.

While I was looking for a listing of time zones I found this page which tells, at the time of pageload, what the time and date is in several places around the world.

Mission accomplished

The Mankato trip was a success. Supper at Red Lobster was good and even trying not to order too much got too much. Maybe next time I'll just order an appetizer. And there will be a next time as we got a couple coupons or such tonight, possibly because it was our waitress' first night there. She did very well, so it wasn't to offset anything.

Then jmaynard and I went to Computer Renaissance to look at monitors. They had some LCDs but priced more than I cared to spend. The CRTs were both good and inexpensive. For about $100 I walked out with a used/refurb. 17 inch flat-screen Trinitron made by Sony. The only flaw is the Dell name on the case, but that's superficial.

Now I have to get used to a flat screen. It looks bowed-in to me since I'm used to looking at bowed-out screens. I'm not sure if it was my using the old system with rather lower quality monitor or not, but it even seems to be sharper than the Viewsonic that it replaces.