Monitor on its way out...

My beautiful Planar monitor that some of you know and love is on its way out. In fact, it's been messing with me in small ways for a couple months now and it finally took a big plunge. The screen would freeze on occasion and power cycling the monitor wouldn't fix it. Sometimes the screen would be monochromatic and wouldn't reset until I plugged in another input (Nick's laptop). After a reset, it would work fine for an undefined period of time. I currently have my CRT monitor that I've been trying to get rid of hooked up as my computer's monitor. I actually had to move my desk out from the wall in order to get it to fit.

I'm kind of disappointed that my monitor has died after only 5 and a half years of use. When I got my computer upon graduating high school, I planned on having it for the next 8 years. I meant the tower-monitor combo for 8 years. I was thinking about it, though and it's been moved around a lot (possibly incurring small damages each time) and it was one of the early flat panels. Hopefully now they're built to last longer.

I'm replacing the monitor with this one from Planar. I hear that widescreens can increase your productivity, which would be pretty sweet. I also thought about watching movies on it being cool, but now that I have a TV, that's not such an issue anymore. I'm looking forward to having the extra screen room (and higher resolution).

New Weekly Feature?

I think it would be cool to add another weekly feature to the blog, aside from the "Pick of the Week" song. Leave a comment with any suggestions. BTW, make it something that you think would be "Austin" enough for me to cover.

Corner Gas

Superstation WGN is airing Canadian sitcom Corner Gas at midnight Sunday through Thursday (maybe Friday too). It's a show about the small town of Dog River, Saskatchewan, Canada. Basically nothing big ever goes down and the episodes focus on one or 2 out-of-the-ordinary events that pop up. I like the humor. I think that most of those things are funny because they're things that I imagine myself doing. I recommend you give it a watch. BTW, there's a hot chick on there...Lacey the diner-owner-lady is played by the beautiful Gabrielle Miller. I don't think I could date her character, though.

Also impressive is that they get high ranking members of the Canadian government to be on the show. Two ACTING Prime Ministers have appeared on the show, and at least one (what-do-you-call the head of province dudes??) was on there. If you don't like your first episode, give it one more chance before giving up on it.

Pick #49

Lazlo Bane - Overkill, featuring Colin Hay

it's a cover of the Men at Work song, but Lazlo Bane got Colin Hay (singer of M@W) to collaborate on this song. I really liked it when it came out, but forgot about it for years. I saw it last week on Scrubs and was reminded of how awesome a song it is.

Abbey Likes Running

Umm...Limited

There is NO SUCH THING as unlimited cell phone minutes. The claim that someone can use an "unlimited" amount of airtime in a month is preposterous. Of course the amount they can use is limited by the number of minutes in a month (on the order or 43,000).

Subscribe to MY Atom Posts

Alright, if you have a feed reader, I just put up an Atom feed. Go to the bottom of my page and click the subscribe button! Then you'll be able to see ~ the first paragraph of a post, but you just click the link to go to my site and read the whole thing.

If you don't know what I just said, let me explain. A feed reader is a program (like Google Reader) that searches (multiple) webpages and lets you know which ones are updated. Pretty much, you can check a program that checks multiple sources and lets you know which ones are updated. This beats surfing to my page and just checking if it's updated or not. I don't know a whole lot else about it, but I just had my last midterm of the semester today and decided to goof around online.

I've already subscribed to a couple blogs, including my own. Hopefully that way I'll be able to see if it's doing what I think it should.

I'm not sure what the advantages/disadvantages are to using Atom vs. RSS. I don't know if it's possible to output feeds in both formats for the same blog or not. If you know anything and have a suggestion, let me know.