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It's probably okay to hum Monty Python's I Like Chinese after eating a delectable lunch of sweet and sour chicken with a big tasty egg roll and some exceptional pork fried rice (it even had bean sprouts in it!). Anyone who recognizes it just by the tune will probably be familiar enough with Monty Python's body of work to not be offended.

I should, however, keep in mind that singing the lyrics to Monty Python's I Like Chinese would most likely get me fired. Such a fine line we walk....

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When checking my mail last night, I found a note from Tiger Direct indicating that all the items in my shipment should have arrived. After a moment, I remembered what shipment it was talking about; I'd traded a laptop to my friend The Dwarf in return for a 17" flatscreen that he bought for me online. I then promptly forgot about it. It turned out, upon looking for it today, that the box had been sitting at the side of my desk since the twenty-third and I'd thought it was a PO for an employee. Oops!

I set it up tonight and had a look. It's a Hanns-G HU171A and it's interesting. Definitely different from the CRT I replaced with it, and I think that, overall, it's better. It was a little bit disappointing though. It's a lot brighter (in fact, at the factory default setting of 100% brightness and 100% contrast, it was too bright) and the color saturation is markedly better, but there was a definite dark spot that went along an entire vertical column of the screen at 1024 x 768. Oddly, the dark spot became almost imperceptible after setting the display to 1280 x 1024. I'm not sure why that is, but I won't complain. The higher resolution also brought out the best feature of the LCD; it's very much sharper at higher resolutions than the CRT was. Not sure if that's just because the CRT was five or six years old at this point, but the LCD is entirely usable at that resolution (I have it set to that now) whereas the CRT just wasn't.

I decided to set up the onboard speakers on the flatscreen to be on the secondary output from my Soundblaster Live (yes, the original Soundsblaster Live), and that lead to a search for a copy of the Liveware package (the one I have inexplicably states that it's only for '95 or '98 despite the fact that I know I've installed it on a 2K machine before), but I didn't manage to locate one. Oh well; installing the latest drivers got the secondary channel working anyway, though I do miss some of the cute bells and whistles of Liveware. Maybe I'll just buy a newer sound card this summer. I guess it doen't matter that much anyway; the speakers on the monitor aren't really any better than the onboard one that seems to be coming in desktops these days. All you can really say about them is that they make noise.

I messed around with getting a secondary video card to work again too, and got just as far as last time; nowhere. A computer came back from one of our branch offices that had a Radeon 9250 128MB PCI card in it. Though my team lead has claimed it for one of his computers at home, he let me borrow just to check on whether a newer PCI card that the ones I have will get along with the AGP Radeon 9550 that's already in my desktop. No such luck; one card or the other simply won't start and throws a code 10 error. I think I may just give up on getting it to work under 2K and break down and install XP. I just have to obtain an installable copy.

I'm still geeking about getting my camera. Someone on the UE forum pointed me to a website where you can actually rent lenses via mail order. That way you can try them out, see which ones match your style and are worth buying and which ones don't. Something like that had never even crossed my mind to look for, but it's a great idea! I'll definitely be taking advantage of the service once I have a camera to use it with.

I have a feeler out to a local camera shop; they didn't have any 20Ds in stock, but they took my name and number so they can call me if something comes in. I also talked to the guy behind the counter about the 20Ds versus comparable Nikon models, what kind of cost range I'm looking at (probably a little bit higher than Ebay, but I expected that. Not sure which way I'm going to go yet since they don't offer any real warranty on used equipment), and how much I'd be shelling out for a decent macro lens for Ebay stuff. He was nice to talk to, pleasant and cute with a scruffy goatee, and he left me with a catalog of Canon's EOS system product line. Wow; there are some expensive lenses in there! Prices aren't actually listed, but I can tell just looking at them. From edbook's journal (his pictures are almost invariably gorgeous and definitely worth a look, by the way), I know that really nice telephotos can be in the $5000 to $10000 range and I will probably never lay hands on one in my life, but they're fun to look at.

I'll stop rambling again. I'll get to a weekend report soon, I promise.