Acer monitor "No signal" workaround

Another "tech support" post: 2 months after I bought my new Acer 24" LCD monitor, I ran into the infamous "No signal" problem which seems to be a common one for Acer LCD owners. And I found the workaround from these customer reviews, i.e., unplug the mon for 1 min and try again.

It worked for me twice so far. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Outlook import workaround

My previous post "My X'mas Present" inspired me to write more "tech support" related post. Hopefully this is going to drive more traffic to my blog >:)

I'd like to share with the public a solution to this Outlook 2002 import problem I ran into: when I imported my address book from Outlook Express to Outlook 2002 following this instruction, all my entries appears as last name followed by first name with no space in between, for example, "GatesWilliam", which just look strange! I'd prefer "Gates, William" instead. (BTW, importing from CSV file has the same problem too)

And my search for this solution wasted 3 hours of my precious time :( Apparently it is not a very common problem. (Or people just don't care!) Finally I found this USENET news posting, which led me to the workaround. It is based on VBScript but don't worry if you don't write BASIC. All you need to do is cut-and-paste.

Now I'm one happy Outlook Address book owner!

You might wonder why I couldn't just use the Outlook Express Address book and forget about Outlook. Well, it's because my new Pocket PC only sync with Outlook, but not Outlook Express. BTW, this step completed my long overdued personal project: address book consolidation. I no longer have to live with all slightly different and somwhat outdated info in my Palm/Phone/Webmail address books!

Queen Mary II

She is in San Francisco today. This is the biggest ship I've ever seen!

From Wikipedia:
"At the time of her construction in 2003, the QM2 was the longest, widest and tallest passenger ship ever built, and at 148,528 gross tons, was also the largest. She lost that last distinction to Royal Caribbean International's 154,407 gross ton Freedom of the Seas in April 2006, but QM2 remains the largest ocean liner (as opposed to cruise ship) ever built, and her height, length, and waterline breadth are unsurpassed by any other passenger ship. QM2's luxuries include 15 restaurants and bars, five swimming pools, a casino, a ballroom, a theatre, and a planetarium."

My Xmas present

... is this 24" LCD monitor

Also I upgraded my video card (way overdue) to a XFX GeForce 6200 to take advantage of this new monitor. I got it for under <$40 at Buy.com. That's a pretty good deal. And it's good enough for me since I don't play much games on my PC. All I care is smooth playback of DVD and streaming video!

However, this upgrade was not without challenge: My motherboard ASUS A7V8X-X was a few year old and doesn't have any PCI-Express slot which is used by most of the new video cards. It does have an AGP-8x slot. So I bought the AGP-8x version of the GeForce 6200. And the installation instruction says XP is supposed to be able to detect new hardware and start the new video card driver installation after I put it in the AGP-8x slot but instead XP chose a generic VGA driver for display and that's it. I tried manually installing the GeForce 6200 driver but got an error saying the computer cannot find the hardware, i.e., the new video card!

Usually the best thing to do at this point is to upgrade all software that is too old and could potentially be conflicting with new hardware. In this case, I upgraded the 4-in-1 driver of my mobo (4-in-1 includes the AGP-8x driver) And the problem was solved after reboot! XP detected the card! I'm writing this so that someone who run into this same problem in the future might come across this post by Googling.

Now I'm enjoying full 24" 1920x1200 pixels of DirecTV sling-ed at ~3Mbps! (Oh yeah, I had to upgrade the firmware on my Slingbox to achieve this, of course)

The Environment-friendly McDonald

Well, at least it's hedgehog-friendly. McD has redesigned, i.e., narrowed the opening of the container of my favourite dessert: McFlurry so that hedgehog's head won't get stucked inside. The article is from London so I wonder if the new design in coming to the States too.

The Kobe Experience

My wife took me to Alexander's Steakhouse in Cupertino on Saturday night for my b-day.

The menu 

Australian Kobe Steak 

Dessert #2 

Quail egg and kobe chuckroll 

Our appetizers 

Hamachi Shots 

Australian Kobe Steak 

Dessert 

My wife + Prime Ribs 

Japanese Kobe Steak 

She can't teach

"A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."

Who said so? Of course, not me. Paul said so. Which Paul? The apostle of Jesus. See Timothy 2:11-14.

And it is quoted by a pastor in his dismissal letter to a female Sunday school teacher in his church.

Maybe he has read too much bible?

Is this censorship?

By now every web surfer must have become familiar with Google's ubiquitous advertisement boxes. Many websites are supported by revenue from Google's ad these days.

My favorite free newspaper Easy Bay Express has this article: "Publishers vs. the Censorbot", about Google pulling ad when it sees sensitive keywords on the page where ad supposed to appear and thus indirectly censoring contents of websites using its ad program.

I'm all against censorship (see my previous posts) I have never been a fan of Google and enjoy reading every bit of criticism on its practice. However, in this case I think it's just a technology issue: while a news report about porn and a story which is porn share some keywords, there must be some that only appears on the latter but not the former. Google's filter is simply not good enough to identify them.

What I'm really curious about is now that my page has the keyword "porn," will Google pull its ad? (i.e., show "public service announcement" instead of revenue generating ad)

Hollywood vs. Censors

Hollywood studios and the Directors Guild of America sued Utah-based CleanFlicks, CleanFilms and Play It Clean Video, Arizona-based Family Flix USA and CleanFlicks of Colorado for providing "edited" copies of their movies on DVD. The "sanitized" copies are supposed to have scenes with sex, nudity, violence and profanity removed.

This is the type of fight that I hope both sides lose but of course one side must win.

And the winner is ...... Hollywood! Well, I guess I would be more upset if they lost (surprise surprise!) 'coz censorship is a worse enemy to our civilization. From an artist's point of view, I certainly don't want to see my work being altered and re-published in any way without my consent so that my artistic values won't be jeopardized.

Of course artistic values have nothing to do with why the censors lost. Remember MP3.com? They got sued and lost for providing "online digital locker of MP3" to users who already own the CDs. The moral of that story was: if any additional money is to be made from copyrighted work, the copyright holder would want it. Not only did the censors not seem to have learned this lesson, but also they gave away a free lesson to Hollywood: there's a market for "sanitized" copies of their movies!

Remember this: Homezone and U-verse

I'll make sure I remember NOT to signup for their services. Here's why: both of these video services are provided by AT&T and AT&T's new privacy policy says AT&T will collect "information about viewing, game, recording and other navigation choices that you and those in your household make when using Homezone or AT&T U-verse TV Services."

So AT&T is expecting me to pay them to spy on me? No thanks. Not even if it is free! After all, there are enough free video entertainment from YouTubes already.