For the last few years as everyone else has upgraded to fancy, schmancy LCD's I've basically been fishing theirs old CRTs out of the dumpster and using them.  Seriously...ALL of my CRTs are second hand or (mostly) from dumpsters.  But things finally went right and I picked up a nice, new LCD.

Ahhh, so nice.  My old 19inch monitor was a little fuzzy but perfectly readable.  I tried using the 19inch for a secondary but no dice.  When placed next to the super-crisp LCD it makes me keep trying to refocus and gives me a headache.  Odd considering I never had troubles when it was my primary monitor. *shrug*.   Anyway, the new monitor is a 23inch Acer X233Hbd. It has fantastic contrast.  It was pretty cheap too, $170.

Disposable tattoos: I wonder how easy it would be to come up with a family of dye for tattoos based on the same compound (with different groups that change the color).  If they could come up with several families of tattoo dyes like that they might actually be able to simply immunize you against the whole family of dye.  Don't want your tattoo?  No problem, one shot and your immune system destroys them in a matter of days.  Obviously you could never get another with that family of dye after the shot.

Food prices: I do wonder what the food prices are going to be like this year.  We've had extremely late snows (snowed in June in Canada and some of the Northern US) and colder than normal winters.  It's similar to what happened last year (biofuels only made matters worse).

3D Realms, the developer that has been trying to make Duke Nukem forever for over a decade...has gone under.  Call the soup nazi because there's "No Duke Nukem Forever for you!"  It's not just a fail, it might even transcend "epic" failure.  Perhaps we need a new term for consistent, epic failure for years, decades or longer.  So...I call EPOCH failure on 3D Realms.  

I don't know if I've mentioned this before but...I've become fond of flour tortillas.  Flour tortillas are an incredibly functional staple in the lazy person's diet.  They're basically a replacement for bread in sandwiches but there are a few other uses for them.  Here are a few simple sandwich-like (and other) ideas.  Most of this breaks down into meat+tortilla=wrap.

Your basic cold-cut wrap...just add cold cuts, onions, lettuce and cheese.  Some sort of hot (or cold) meat wrap...cook chicken, ground beef, steak (or pull out some refrigerated meat you cooked earlier) and add the previously mentioned onions, lettuce, cheese, etc.  Something you probably never thought of, a fish stick wrap...yep, you guessed it, toss fish sticks, some cheese (I prefer american cheese  on fish stick wraps), lettuce and top it off with tartar sauce.

*sigh* Well I'm having some issues with my current CMS version so I'll have to upgrade.

And now back to what I wanted to post in the first place...it snowed the day before yesterday!  Have some pics

A recent study in florida showed evidence that urban heat island affect is not only real, but potentially the main contribution of mankind to "global warming".

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/10/floridatrend-its-hot-but-dont-blame-global-warming/

Notice that where there was no substantial development the temperatures actually DROPPED.  I realize Florida is only a small part of the planet but if this were the case worldwide, the reality of "global warming" would be radically different and totally incompatible with many of the extreme environmentalists views.  If land use were our only significant contribution then most alternative energy projects would actually make matters WORSE! 

Well, the price of memory is so low that I can't resist the urge to upgrade.  Of course, I've never used all of the 2gig I had originally but I noticed a little boost in how snappy my system was when I bumped it up to 3 gig.  So...I figured I'd give 6gig a shot.  With 6gig I should have so much memory that a large portion of my disk activity will be cached.  To get there I picked up a pair of 2gig sticks. I'm not sure how much benefit I'll get out of 6gig after vista's overhead is factored in but I'm guessing it will seem at least a little snappier. Also, I won't have to buy any more RAM any time soon :D

I keep pondering an overall site update to spruce it up a tiny bit and add some features BUT...it's a lot more involved than you'd think due to version issues.  Even if I do, at my current rate of getting things done it probably wouldn't be implemented until about 2010 :\

I updated the computer parts recommendations...there's another thing I keep meaning to update.  Hmmm, maybe I should make it simpler and add some (technically useless) graphics to it.  I'm still amazed by the incredible performance available at such low prices.  Incredibly fast dual core processors are under $100, quad core processors are under $200 (not that there's any use in them yet) and reasonably good video cards actually start around $50!  Memory is also amazingly cheap...$35ish for 4gig.  I guess it's time to switch to a 64bit OS.

My friend's gone and made yet another spectacular movie called Slick

You should check out the trailer

Well, if I'd thought about it sooner I'd have put this up as a sort of last minute christmas shopping thing but...it's too late.  Still worthy of note.  It's just remarkable how cheap it is to upgrade a PC now with all the price drops in DRAM, CPUs and GPUs.

For instance, getting a 2.5ghz Intel E5200 CPU (or a cheaper 2.2ghz Intel E2200 CPU to shave off $20 bucks) OR a cheap ASRock intel motherboard or if you're an AMD fan, an Athlon X2 5000+ and a cheap ASRock AMD motherboard