Blessed by the Potato

Well, I called London Hydro today about where all my electricity was going, and to see if they would check that my meter was working right. They said that that usage was typical for this property (i.e., similar to what a family with two kids was using before we moved in), and said that when meters break they tend to underrecord (or slow down) so they wouldn’t check on it. Naturally, they have a disincentive to check it if it’s overrecording, but saying that wasn’t going to help me any.

She basically said that yes, we’re using more than 3 times the electricity as the old place, and our stuff is mostly the same, but that the stuff in the house may account for that: older stove or fridge (though they look to be about the same vintage), the fan in the furnace (I told her the furnace & water heater were gas). The thing is, we still used all that electricity when we were gone, which pretty much narrows it down to the furnace (though the thermostat was turned down and the fan only runs when the furnace does), the fridge (though it doesn’t sound sickly and it would have to use ten times the power it’s rated for on the energuide sticker), the security light, or the mysterious “sump pump” (there’s a switch on the circuit breaker for one, but I’ve never heard one running).

So, since they won’t check my meter (or see if there’s a grow-op leeching power nearby), pretty much the only thing I’ve got left to do is to just start throwing switches on the circuit breaker to see if I can isolate one circuit that’s drawing too much juice.

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.

For years my parents have raved about “Oliver’s” (Oliver & Bonacini) at Bayview Village [Sheppard & Bayview, North York]; my mom goes there for lunch so often the staff come up to her to say hi when she’s out shopping (or when they’re on their way out if she goes for dinner). Today they dragged me there for a nice family dinner (which the siblings were smart enough to duck out of at the last minute).

I have to say I wasn’t very impressed with the place. Well, the place was actually quite nice: it was quiet, well lit, and had inoffensive decor. The staff was nice and friendly, though we happened to arrive right between the lunch and dinner rush so they were short-handed and didn’t have a clean table ready for us (even though it was only about 10% full). Once seated we had to wait a long while before our waiter came onto his shift, too.

The food all looked excellent, but didn’t seem all that tasty. My dad had the halibut special, and said it was a very good piece of fish that was cooked well, but just didn’t have any outstanding flavour. It was just fish with lemon. I had spring rolls and bruscetta, usually a safe choice for my very limited palette. Both were very oily and relatively tasteless (there weren’t even any onions in the bruscetta!). I was also a little miffed at the pizza: we ordered a “Prosciutto” which has “vine ripened tomatoes, bocconcini & tomato sauce” sounded like a nice, plain pizza for me. It sounded just like the “Margherita” above it, except it also had tomato sauce (and how I hate “gourmet” pizza that just puts globs of cheese down amongst tomatoes and considers it worthy of the name “pizza”). I knew already that bocconcini is a type of soft cheese similiar to that holiest of pizza holies, mozzarella; while I tend to prefer old-fashioned mozzarella, this would probably be a type of pizza I could eat. When it came, it was absolutely smothered in ham: turns out “Prosciutto” is a type of ham. Who knew? It’s something that I’ve found annoying in the pizza world: giving pizzas names on the menu, and then just hoping that you can get the kind you want. Often people will get extra things added or something held off, and in this case what seems like a name (“Margherita”, “Roma”, “Tuscan”, “Sofia”, “Prosciutto”) is actually one of the ingredients, but not included in the list of ingredients below the name. Though I suppose it can help indecisive people put together a set of toppings, and suggest extra toppings for adventurous people to put together (which usually helps the pizza place push more toppings).

Something else that really grated me was the notice on the bottom of the menu that “for the sake of all our customers, we cannot allow substitutions”. It just seems so arrogant to me that the chefs could think that the dish they put together would be absolutely perfect for everyone, and that they aren’t willing to go to the extra work to customize it for each person. It’s like the restaurant is saying that the ego of the chefs is more important than the preference of the customer. And oddly enough, it tends to only be these hoity-toity places that have those sorts of rules. You can almost imagine one of the annoying chefs from the food network (there are lots of good hosts on TV too, don’t get me wrong, but you all know there are a few chefs on that network that just make you cringe and your stomach turn at what they throw together) coming out to lecture you about how the saltiness of the anchovies will play nicely against the bitterness of the balsamic vinegar and refuse to take no for an answer, no matter how much you try to tell them that anchovies and vinegar in pasta is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

While I’m on the subject of poor menu descriptions, I’ll talk about Symposium, a cute little place in London where you eat from these big armchairs. They have fairly good bruscetta (or they did 2 out of 3 times I was there), but you can find it in two different places in the menu. In the appetizers section, it’s billed as tomatoes and goat cheese on bread, which is sort of… ugh. Later on, with their pastas, it’s billed as garlic, tomatoes, and onions lightly covered in mozzarella and parmasean, which sounds much better. I don’t know if they have two different types, or if it’s just a mistake on the menu, or what the story is, but I’m always careful to point to the one in the pasta section, just in case.

Anyhow, to finish off my review of Oliver’s, I’d have to say that if you want to go to a swanky/trendy, downtown restaurant with decent (though not great) food, and show off big bills ($90 for the three of us) without actually having to go downtown, then Oliver’s is the place for you.

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…

One of the most amazing things about the SETI project is that there may be any hope at all of understanding alien transmissions that are anything beyond prime numbers blipped out the long way. After all, we can barely get our TVs to talk to each other. NTSC vs PAL, cable/HDMI/DVI/VGA/S-video/and two different types of RCA-like connections (composite and this newfangled Y/Pr/Pb component stuff). Who knows what sort of format an alien signal may arrive in?

Anyhow, as you can probably tell we’re having some issues with our new HDTV over here. The whole thing really makes me think that the technology was released to the market prematurely; couldn’t take an extra few months to hammer out a standard? Or a few years to develop the technology enough to have a single resolution for “HD” rather than this crazy hodgepodge of incremental improvements?. Or get some better widescreen vs. not detection or broadcasting so I’m not staring at grey bars on the side of the TV to square it off to 4:3, then black bars within that because the TV station is broadcasting its “widescreen” format with the black bars as part of the content, leaving me watching a 27″ picture on a 42″ screen…

The first issue is a matter of a defective box: our Scientific Atlanta 8300HD box has a wonky Pb out channel, which means that when we use the component input to the TV, every now and then the picture turns pink (since the only colour channel left is the red one). It can stay this way for a really long time… I wasn’t home when this happened, but my parents did call someone in to fix it. Their solution was to change to using the HDMI connection, which worked rather well… for a time. Then if the TV is turned off, the cable box will turn itself off (which loses the channel you were just on). Fortunately, there is a (rather deeply hidden) setting to get the box to remember which channel you were last on and restart to that one, but it’s still a bit of a pain. However, for some reason with that connector the cable box thinks that my parents’ brand new 1080i TV is only capable of standard definition (over an HDMI connection no less!). We can force it to go back into 1080i (i.e. HD) mode by going back to the initial setup menu, but the bloody thing forgets that setting every time it turns off — which is every time the TV turns off! It’s so frustrating. Even if I could figure a way to make the cable box stay on past the TV’s power-down, I noticed that it has an automatic sleep-mode “feature” so it would turn off an hour after I left it alone anyway.

I’m freaking loving analog cable back in London at the moment.

Anyhow, tomorrow is Christmas Eve and a Sunday to boot, so I don’t know if we can do much at the moment, but I think sometime next week we’ll be trading this puppy in for a replacement.

Update: Well, we called Rogers and they told me that the HDMI signals are buggy that way and that they don’t support them on many of their HD boxes. After power cycling the tuner/DVR a few times the component input went back to showing colours, and I’ll just have to call back later if it goes on the fritz again. For now though, it looks pretty good!

Update 2: The display went pink again. A hard power cycle seems to fix it for a short while, but nevertheless, we’ll be exchanging the HD tuner at a Rogers store in a few days.