Blessed by the Potato

It’s hard to think of a good introduction to this sort of news, so instead I’ll just get into the nitty-gritty: 3 cars were stolen out of our driveway this morning.

The thieves broke into the house through the side door, took the car keys off the hall table, and just drove off into the night. They didn’t touch anything else in the house, not even my dad’s wallet which was also on the hall table, which sort of indicates that this is a pretty professional operation. The bulldog was asleep on the couch downstairs, not 10 feet from the table and never made a sound. I think she’s fired from guard dog duties now.

So, as we woke up and looked outside this morning, the driveway was empty. Gone was my brother’s ’03 Accord, my dad’s ’04 Mercedes sedan (a nice one), and my mom’s brand new ’06 Mercedes SUV. My car was still there, thanks in part to being shitty, and thanks in part to the fact that I never leave my keys on the hall table. I wonder if some of the other cars would have been spared if we had left my car closer to the street like it usually is (my mom was planning on driving somewhere first thing in the morning and so we swapped cars around just before bed).

The police came shortly after we called, but didn’t find anything useful around the hall table or back door. We went through the process of giving descriptions of the cars and their contents, then tried to call Mercedes to activate the GPS tracking on my dad’s car. That was a complete farce. First, we tried calling the dealership, but they were closed. Then we called the roadside assistance number, and they told us that the tracking would be done through the dealership and they couldn’t help us. We told them that time was of the essence and the dealership was closed, so they gave us another number to try, which just had a recording that business hours are monday to friday, 9 am to 5 pm…

We let the police try after that, and they managed to get someone else (I think it was at the dealership and it was just getting close enough to 10 am that someone was there to pick up). This person was also somewhat useless, needing both my dad’s security word (which was set 2 years ago and tough to remember) as well as a police case number. The officer told him that we didn’t have a case number yet and gave him her name and precinct #, but it wasn’t good enough, so she had to call back to the station to get them to open an empty case report for us (I gather that typically the report is only opened after the cops get back to the station with our statements). “Useless.” she said “Just useless.” We then had a discussion of how such a high-end car company could have such terrible service. Their website wasn’t really any help either (it didn’t even have a search box!)

We still haven’t heard back from them if they found it or not (and going on 5 hours now), so I suspect that we won’t ever see that car again. My dad made a good point: Mercedes has a bit of a vested interest in not recovering the car since if it’s gone it amounts to a sale of a new car on insurance replacement (and as much of a piss-off as this is, and as much as I try to steer my parents towards a more sensible car, they’re already looking for which Mercedes they want to get to replace it).

At this point I’d like to give out the number the police called, in case it helps other Mercedes drivers in the future (not that any of them read my site): 1-800-750-9018 (I can’t quite read her handwriting, it may be 1-800-756-9018). The (useless) operator she spoke to was #8070, though she didn’t give me her name. (I asked her for all this information so I could write a nasty letter to Mercedes, which will basically be a cut & paste of this entry).

Then it was time to call the insurance company (also in the hopes that they would have contacts at Mercedes to light a fire under their asses about tracking the cars). They were also pretty useless. Chubb not only couldn’t tell us how long it might be before we could look at getting replacement cars (whether we would have to wait until they were gone for 2 weeks, or if the police report indicating it was professional and we probably wouldn’t see them again would be enough to start shopping on Monday)… not only that, but they also couldn’t tell us if we were covered at all, so we’d have to wait until Monday to find out. My dad knows that we are covered to some degree, but he doesn’t know if only the market/depreciated value of the cars is covered, or if their new value or replacement value is. He knows that he upgraded to new coverage for the new year that had more than replacement costs (purchase value plus an allowance for a rental car and to cover taxes, etc), but that policy won’t take effect until January 25. They did say it was unbelieveable that 3 cars were stolen at once like that (5 thefts in a year if you count my car going missing twice — I should start a new category for car theft here). At least we were told that they would cover a rental car for over a week, so my parents have a Jeep Cherokee for the next little while. (My dad’s review: “It drives like a North American piece of shit.”)

Anyhow, I don’t really know what else to say at this time. We’re all safe and alive (and were actually going to have a celebration dinner for my dad, since he got his CT results yesterday and doesn’t have a cancer relapse), though the stress has kind of wiped us out for the moment. My car is still here, and as much as I keep offering it to my parents to use for the rest of the week, they keep insisting that I can’t get back to London without it (there are trains). It was a bit of a pain of the butt trying to book a rental car for them, since there wasn’t anything available at the Discount close to us, so I booked one at Yorkdale. My dad blew up at me when I told him, saying it was too bloody far to go to rent a car, even though he wanted to then drive straight to the cottage to see if his insurance policy was there, and even though it’s the second-closest location to us. I ended up cancelling the reservation and we went with Budget, who we’ve had problems with in the past, but at least they’re closer. (I don’t know why closer matters though, since it’s not like my dad is going to walk there).

Well, it looks like in the future Rogers is going to try to break into the home security market (if you’ll pardon the pun). This is kind of interesting because not too long ago we were debating about whether or not to get a security system for the house here. Part of the issue is that it is a pretty safe neighbourhood. There are a lot of students around, but that also means that there are people out and about at all hours of the night and day. It’s also a rental house, so we don’t have quite as much of a home insurance burden that this would help with, and it would also mean paying an installation fee to improve our landlord’s property…

Anyhow, all that aside I find it funny that I find out about these moves by Rogers not by their press releases, or leaks from within the company, but by being invited to take surveys asking how much I’d be willing to pay for this new service from Rogers (it’s the exact same way I found out about Extreme and Elite before they were announced, though the survey for home phone didn’t come around until after that service had already launched).

Well, my new monitor arrived from Dell today, and I wasted no time in setting it up. A first-pass review:

First, the good: the monitor is big, and it was cheap. There also aren’t any stuck pixels as far as I can tell, which is a welcome relief (Wayfare’s has one and it drives me crazy)

Unfortunately, as I came to suspect after I had put the order in (I’m not usually so quick to rush into these things!) this is not the same type of monitor I have at work; it’s a much, much cheaper monitor. First off, the stand is pretty cheap, it only rotates up/down a little bit. There’s no height adjust or the cool rotate to portrait mode function I was hoping for (nor a way to rotate left/right without dragging the base across the desk). The back only has VGA, DVI, and power connectors: no USB hub or memory card reader (though the last part is a bit excessive on the screen I have at work). The included power cord is fairly short (though the power is on the wrong side of the desk here).

The picture is also not as good as I was hoping for. It looks really washed out somehow, but I can’t quite put my finger on how, exactly. Playing with the brightness and contrast seems to help a bit, but it still doesn’t look as good as my laptop’s screen. The viewing angle isn’t great, either. By 45 degrees off centre the colours start to go wonky, giving about 90 degrees total viewing angle. IIRC (the page is gone, so I have to go by memory) the viewing angle is reported as 160 degrees. That may be the point at which you can’t see anything, but image quality is in the pits long before that (the colours fade out to brown).

Reading up on the technology some more, I found that it has “6-bit colour” (over 3 colour channels, that should be 18-bit colour if my math is right, as compared to most LCDs which have 24-bit colour, or CRTs which display 32-bit colour), a trade-off for the very fast response time (good for gaming, or so I’m told). Since people can actually notice the difference between 18- and 24-bit colour (whereas 24 to 32 bit is harder to notice), this screen uses some sort of dithering to fake its way towards true colour. Looking at text I can’t really tell, but when I fired up a movie or an image, it seemed to shimmer a bit; perhaps that effect is a result of that.

Going to the Dell website, it looks like this monitor is no longer listed/available (it was just introduced a week or two ago). I wonder if that’s telling me something…

Now I have to wonder if I should return it or keep it. It is big, and it was cheap, and returning it would hit me for a 15% restocking fee plus shipping, so there’s some motivation to get used to it… on the other hand, it’s not quite the awesome upgrade to my CRT I was hoping for. (There’s a third option, of course: try to sell it and recover the $342 incl. taxes I spent. While it would be hard to find a buyer for a “used” screen that I’m not totally happy with at a price that would make it worth the effort, it might be possible since the normal list for this monitor is $400…).

Update: Well, I set it up with Wayfare, and I’m leaning towards keeping it. I will miss not being able to put it in portrait mode (I think I might be the only person in the city who would use that, too), but the “shimmering” that it does to get colours isn’t really all that noticeable if I stay an armlength or two away. When I had first set it up, I put it on the edge of the desk, but that only put it about a foot from my face, instead of something more like 3′, and it was fairly annoying that close. I think I’ll be satisfied with it as long as I remember not to put my nose up against it.

Update 2: I’m back in London and have it set up on my desk now. First, another complaint: the DVI cable has a big, rounded plastic bit on the connector. That is to say, the plastic part of the connector, the part just behind the pins, the part where the thumbscrews and all that are, is larger than normal, and curved instead of squared off. This makes it taller when trying to go into the port, so much so that it hit the part of the case just above the video card and wouldn’t go in! This is stupid design on two fronts: first, on my computer’s case for having this metal part (where the on-board network and USB and what not are) stick out right above the video port. I’ve had this sort of problem with PCI cards before, where adjacent cards interfered. In that case, you just move them. However, an AGP video card only goes into one slot, so if there’s an obstruction there, you’re SOL if there’s a fat ass cable like this trying to squeeze in. Of course, the other half of the stupid design comes from Dell. Why the heck did they make the connector so huge? What’s wrong with making it the same size as everyone else’s connector? Geez…

Anyhow, I ran up to work and swapped cables there, and have it hooked up now. For the moment, I’m running in dual-monitor configuration, which makes it really easy to compare the two side-by-side. The LCD is definitely “washed-out” compared to my old screen, but the shimmering hasn’t bothered me with it at a proper distance.

Also, the driver CD has the drivers for it (really only needed if your system doesn’t already have an option for the native resolution of 1680×1050), but the documentation for another screen entirely.

It is a fact of life:

• Anything invented before you were born is old and cruddy.
• Anything invented while you’re young is exciting and the way of the future.
• Anything invented after that is against the natural order of things and will doubtlessly kill us all.

[modified from Douglas Adams]

I find I’m feeling very old lately, and that’s partly due to experiencing a lot of that “this new technology just isn’t right” lately when it comes to TVs/monitors, particularly widescreen ones.

Widescreen, as much as I hate it, seems to be the way of the future. Its proponents claim that it is more immersive, that looking at something in a “landscape” format makes you feel more like you’re actually there than if you spread your screen area around more evenly. Perhaps I spent too much time as a kid inside watching TV rather than outside tracking antelope across the horizon, but I just don’t really find that’s the case. I have terrible peripheral vision, so that may play a large role in that. I have to constantly track my eyes across the screen, and when it’s nicely compact around the centre, then I can keep my eyes roughly near the centre with less movement overall to follow the action — widescreen stretches things out so I have to track further horizontally (though less up&down) which I just don’t care for quite as much.

A lot of this is because I deal with a lot of text, or small detailed graphics (ship icons, etc). Perversely, it was the immersive wide-screen movies that really drove the recent widescreen craze, and you can probably still see a number of demonstrations of why watching a movie in widescreen (as it was meant to be) is better, showing the action that was cut out by fitting to your 4:3 TV screen. I say this is perverse because many of those movies were actually shot on cameras with 4:3 aspect ratios, and they simply used fancy lenses to get a wide picture (typically compressing the horizontal, so that even though you get more scenery side-to-side, the resolution is worse), or crudely cut away the top and bottom (which reminds me of a counter-ad I thought of a long time ago: rather than showing the two bad guys on either side of Jackie Chan that would be cut out if widescreen were adapted for 4:3, instead show a picture of an actress in a close-up that only goes down to the collarbone, and how if it had been in 4:3 rather than letterboxed, you could have had cleavage in the shot).

Anyhow, the point is made: I have some reservations about the widescreen craze, and kind of like my 4:3 monitor, particularly for all the text work I do (such as writing my website here). Recently though, I’ve thought about getting a new monitor, and it might just make a weird kind of sense to get a widescreen one, since that seems to be where everything is going nowadays. My reservations, aside from a personal and partially irrational distaste for the format, is that a lot of old content just doesn’t look very good on a widescreen monitor (many games are simply stretched to fit, rather than resizing or adding black bars at the side), and more bafflingly, that there seem to be multiple widescreen aspect ratios (16:9, 2.35:1, 1.85:1, and I’m sure, somehow, the French have invented a metric one like 2:1. Bloody French).

Why you ask, would I be interested in a new monitor when my gianormous flat screen CRT monitor is still in good shape and produces rather excellent pictures in my antiquated yet preferred aspect ratio? Partly, to have something new and cool (both in the sense of being nifty and in producing less heat). Partly because I would get a bigger screen than the one I have now (even if just off to the sides). And partly because of this awesome boxing day sale. A 22″ monitor with <8 ms response time for $300 with free shipping? Hell, yes. Plus I can get a… relatively paltry, in comparison to the cost of the monitor… bonus 33 Air Miles by going via airmilesshops.ca. Plus, 22″ (widescreen) is just about the perfect size for me because the vertical dimension is just about exactly the same as my 19″ (18″ viewable) CRT, which means that it’s really just getting wider, instead of trading height for width like I would have if I went for the 20″ one I was initially looking at.

For a while now, I’ve had my “price point” for a new monitor set at about $300, so this looks like the time, even if I may not be completely ready for widescreen (luddite that I am). I’ve also been really impressed with the Dell monitors at work. While I’ve had some serious reservations about Dell in the past for their computers (proprietary parts, skimping on certain things, tech support, etc.), their monitors have always been decent, and their LCD panels seem to be top-of-the-line, so I’m hoping that’ll be the case with this screen. Look for a review after it arrives.

Update: After sucumbing to Boxing Day fever and placing the order for the laptop, I noticed a comment about it: it’s in a strange 16:10 aspect ratio. For the love of… Ah well, we’ll see what happens when it gets here. Also, one thing I was looking forward to with a Dell is that their monitors have USB ports and the ability to swivel 90 degrees into portrait mode, both nice “plus” features that really helped sell it, but this one doesn’t mention those on its details page. Hopefully they’ll be there anyway, but I’ll have to wait a week or so for it to get here…

Life in the new house has been pretty good so far. Our first few utility bills have been pretty sobering though. The gas bill came first, and it was quite a bit higher than we were expecting, especially since it only covered a few days where we actually lived in the house, and most of that time was unseasonably warm so the heat was barely on.

Our electricity bill came yesterday, and it was even more of a shock. We really weren’t expecting the hydro bill to be too much more than it was in our old place. We have a few more lights, and a few more appliances (dishwasher, clothes washer/dryer), but other than that all our stuff is the same (computers, lamps, microwave, etc.) and the fridge and stove are pretty similar to our old ones. All the other new things in the house run on gas (water heater, heat). Yet somehow we roughly tripled our electricity consumption. And this was for a 12-day period where we only lived in the house for 4 of them!

It’s driving me batty trying to figure out what’s eating all the juice. Is it a faulty device somewhere? Does the fan on the otherwise gas-powered furnace really use that much electricity? Is the change from using mostly natural light in the day and having 4-5 incandescents on at night to using 1-2 incandescents during the day (the house doesn’t get as much natural light) and 6-10 at night really use that much more? (A quick calculation says that lights alone, especially since we’re good at turning them off when not in the room, should only be an extra 6 kWh/day or so; we’re trying to account for a difference of more like 30 kWh/day). Does a once-weekly run through of the dishwasher and washing machine really bump the daily average up that much? I happened to have a load of dishes to do so I checked: I ran the oven for about 20 minutes, and then the dishwasher plus whatever else in the house was on (a few lights, computers, but no TV or anything) and checked the meter on the side of the house. 3 hours with that consumption ran me 8 kWh, as compared to an average of 15 kWh for the whole day in the apartment…

Unfortunately, it’s really hard to keep up the morale to conserve when the bill is going to be astronomical no matter what. Why save 30 cents a day by turning off the lights when some mystery device in the house is just going to burn through $1.50 no matter what we do?