I broke down and bought a Dell 2407WFP monitor on Monday. It arrived this afternoon. I have read plenty of complaints and negative things about this monitor, and while some of them are true, it’s still a gorgeous piece of equipment.

I have an A02 revision, which is the version that fixes the color banding and blurry text issues that have been widely reported. I've only been using it for a day, but I have not noticed a hint of banding or blurred text in my daily use. And no dead/stuck pixels to boot!

The problems that do exist are not deal-breakers for me. First, there appears to be a bug in the firmware that makes it impossible to display 1600x1200 mode without stretching to fill the screen. I'm not a PC big game player, and the monitor runs natively at 1920x1200, so I can't imagine this would affect me.

Everyone else in the universe has probably already figured this out, but in case they haven’t…

I'm currently consulting on a farily large C# project using Visual Studio 2005. By fairly large, I mean about 27 projects in the main solution.

There are over one hundred custom controls contained across these projects. When the application is built and I go to a design surface, VS2005 likes to update the toolbox with every possible drag-and-drop control it can find. As you might imagine, this takes a very long time complete, even on my 3.6GHz dual-core HT processor (Intel 840 EE).

Well, I finally figured out how to stop it from happening: From the IDE's main menu, click Tools -> Options -> Windows Forms Designer -> AutoToolboxPopulate = False . Additionally, there's an option there to turn off the refactor when renaming a control, which also used to piss me off to no end.

Ok, it’s on.

For the past 2 or 3 weeks, FireFox has decided to start randomly locking up on both my desktop PC and my laptop. It sometimes takes 3 or 4 tries to get it up and running from a closed slate.  I'm sure it's just some unhappy extension breaking it, but it's given me a reason to try something new.

So, I've decided to try the latest beta (beta 3 for those of you keeping score at home) of IE7 for a while to see how it fares against what I've come to know and love about FireFox.

After the IE7 base install, the stupid thing wouldn't even even allow me to navigate to a page. After clicking the new "Reset..." button from the Internet Options control panel, things started up and are now running.

I tried the original IE7 beta and liked it. Microsoft finally decided to catch up to the rest of the world. But I'm very curious to see if it will get me to switch back permanently.

Here goes nothing...

Is anybody else watchg the abortion known as Gameshow Marathon on CBS?  We’ve seen The Price is Right, Let’s Make a Deal, Beat the Clock, and now Press Your Luck.  The sets and games are sorta’ close to the originals.  But that’s not the problem.  The problem is the “contestants” are “celebrities”.  Who the hell wants to watch Kathy Najimy play Press Your Luck when she has no friggin’ idea what the hell she’s doing or how to play the game?  Why couldn’t they have used real contestants playing for the prizes in the games?  And come on, Ricki Lake as host?  If they had hired a burlap sack filled with potatoes to host the games, it would have just as much personality.  And it would be far less noisy…all she does is SCREAM during every game she’s hosting.

Tonight was the Press Your Luck remake.  The beginning of each of these shows contains a short retrospective of the original game, which is the best part.  But no mention of Peter Tomarken’s recent death during the Press Your Luck segment?  Come on!

Bah.  I had high expectations for this series and I am nothing but disappointed.

We went to the Albany Institute of History and Art today and saw the Excavating Egypt exhibit. There were over 200 artifacts from ancient Egypt on display including 2 mummies! I find it amazing that the items were so well preserved, given the fact that they are 4000 years old (and older). There are some pics of the mummies over in the photos section…take a look.