Dell 3008WFP Input Lag

I've been watching the 3008WFP monitor like a hawk on Dell's website, and it's price has never dropped below $2000. I've also called Dell to order it twice, but gave up after only managing to negotiate the price down a measly $50. Even after pointing them to this forum thread where people were getting $400 discounts and more. I'm pretty bad at negotiating.

So I'm about ready to just give in and order the 3007WFP HC, which can be had for $1200. It doesn't have as wide a color gamut, and it only has DVI input, but other than that, it's about the same. In fact, you could say it's better since it has less input lag. That extra 30ms input lag could mean the difference between life and death when playing TF2 right?

I know, sour grapes...

Ubuntu

Yet another reason why Ubuntu 8.04 is teh awesome.

Rock Band

OMG this game is addictive. After the first time I played, I had a crazy dream about playing the Rock Band drum set. The very next day (a Saturday), I went to work with some friends just to play Rock Band. We must have played for about 10 hours straight.

Camp Muir

The 4.5 mile, 6 hour climb up to Camp Muir was a long excruciating journey, but I did it!

Some lessons I learned:

• Get more than 3 hours of sleep the night before.
• Bring only the essentials. No more, no less.
  
• Waterproof boots are essential.

Pictures to prove it.

Java Color Console

Here's a Java snippet that prints color output to the console (in a VT100 emulating terminal, i.e., in linux only):

for (int i = 30; i < 38; i++) {
System.out.println("\033[" + i + "mHello " +
 "\033[1;" + i + "mWorld!\033[m");
}

It works by "printing" special terminal control commands that change the color. There are other VT100 terminal control commands that let you move the cursor around, clear the screen, and other things.

Who needs Swing, when you can make old-school ASCII interfaces, right? No fancy libraries required either.

Water Sport Progression

I've spent the last few weekends doing various water related activities.

1. Canoeing on Union Bay
   
2. Kayaking at Deception Pass
   
3. Whitewater Rafting the Skagit River (Class 3)

As you can see, I'm trying progressively more extreme activities. The logical question is: what even more dangerous activity involving water should I do next?

Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony

...was pure awesomeness! I think the people complaining about how fake it was are just jealous. More high res photos.