Rants

Yesterday morning I wiped the dust off my monitor with a damp cloth. A few minutes later I noticed a bright green dot 1/3 over from the right and about half way up while the screen saver was running. I run an adjusted version of Euphoria and the background is mostly black, so that bright green dot was very visible. It doesn’t get any better when I’m working either because I draw in AutoCAD with a black background and that green is the color I use for dimensions.

I Googled “dead pixel” and found a few places that offered methods to fix them. But the first thing I learned is I didn’t have a dead pixel, but I had a stuck pixel. *The title of this post wouldn’t have sounded near as cute if I used stuck instead of dead.

I tried two different software methods and maybe I didn’t let them run long enough, only about 15 minutes, but neither had any success. I then moved onto the more dangerous physical methods. The pencil point directly applied to the stuck pixel insulated by a couple sheets of paper fixed the problem, for about 2 minutes. Then we moved on to the tapping of the screen on the pixel with a Sharpie, with the cap on, this worked too. For about 15 minutes. By the afternoon I was coming to the realization that I was going to have to live with that one bright green spot and maybe change my AutoCAD background to white.

At the 2 o’clock break, with the usual gang gathered in my cube, I was regaling folks with my attempts to fix the stuck pixel. As I was demonstrating the tapping technique that had worked for the relatively longest time, I picked a random spot on the screen and practiced hitting it with the right pressure, just enough to make a nice white halo around the cap of the Sharpie, when my stuck pixel unstuck. I was about 4 or 5 inches away from it, but on the second or third tap it winked off. Hasn’t returned since.

The plans for next year’s trip to New Mexico is in the very early nebulous state. One week or two? Fly or drive? Fly partway and drive in the middle? Drive the Miata or rent a car for the drive?

Plan A is to fly to Albuquerque for just a week and rent a car. Stumbling block number 1, but not a deal breaker, is you can’t rent a convertible there. Only one company, Budget, even listed one, but claims they are sold out. I can rent a convertible in Phoenix (465 miles away) for $560 a week or Denver (462 miles away) for $400 a week, heck we can rent one in Augusta, GA (1532 miles away), but that would mean a 2 week trip and the car rental would be $1,300.

You would think that New Mexico would be a great place for convertible rentals.

Our new TV is your basic LCD wide screen and it has four display modes 4:3, Zoom, Just and Full. 4:3 is for basic TV and leaves black bars on the sides, Zoom makes HD cable shows that have black bars all around the picture fill the screen, Full stretches the 4:3 picture horizontally to fill the screen and Just does something similar to Full except that the middle of the picture doesn’t get as distorted as the edges.

I hate the stretched look that everyone and or thing gets when a normal sized TV picture is stretched to fit the wide screen, so most of the time when I’m watching the tube I will keep it set to 4:3.

I want my HDTV. I think. I sit here watching House and wonder why I’m getting a pan and scan image without the pan, the left and right edges of peoples headed are chopped off.

House gets broadcast in HD, so I’m betting if I paid the cable company extra I could get the full image, but that ain’t happening. I wonder if I bought some of those new fangled rabbit ears I could pick up the Augusta FOX channel in HD?

There is no baseball game tonight, the regular season is over. The playoffs start Wed/Thurs, but it is the beginning of the end.

Today was a rainy, damp and relatively cold day (only got to around 60.) The leaves haven’t started changing yet, but they will. And then they’ll fall.

It is only 7:30 and the sun set nearly a half hour ago, it is fast becoming dark too soon.

I can hardly wait until spring…