From PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, re leadership:
1. Do it now.
2. Communicate, communicate, communicate.
3. Seek consensus, but recognize when to sacrifice unanimity for decisiveness.
4. Remember that, as a leader of a team, you are also a member of that team.
5. Take what you do seriously, but not yourself.
Apple made the latest version a public beta today. It is quite sleek especially with the cover-flow history. It also is the first browser to pass the acidtest 3, I noticed – which means it truly conforms to known standards.
The moral of this story – find out the panel type before you buy that cheap LCD monitor, and avoid TN type at all cost.
I tried out a new 24-inch Dell LCD monitor at work: the model name is S2409W. For some reason I just don’t like it as my eyes hurt. So I switched back to my old 20-inch 2005FPW. While the 2005FPW is smaller in size, it is much more expensive at new than the S2409W. Other than that, nothing else provided by Dell would indicate there’s something wrong with the S2409W. But,
Now I know the reason, thanks to these two wiki pages:
The first page identifies the panel types of various Dell LCD monitors. The S2409W uses the TN type, while the 2005FPW is of the S-IPS type.
The second page explains the difference between these and other LCD panel types. Apparently the TN type is the cheapo type. It stands for Twisted Nematic. It has limited viewing angle and only 6bit true color resolution. Because of the latter reason, it uses a dithering method to simulate true 24bit color used by most modern UI. This dithering method apparently produces bothersome viewing experience to some, myself included. The S-IPS panels are much more expensive and have much better viewing experience. Dell calls these LCD products the Ultrasharp series.
While my lovely 24inch iMac uses the latest greatest of IPS – the H-IPS panel, the 20inch version is being sued for the cheapo TN type panel it uses. H-IPS is the next evolution of S-IPS. From my experience using it, I have no complaints whatsoever. If you want to see the true colors of your family picture, this is the best. In fact, I was pretty shocked to see how much worse my digital pictures looked on the LCD screen of my Dell Latitude laptop – particularly the color range is atrocious.
Just found out that I’ve always been a lucid dreamer – I knew that but didn’t know there’s a name for it. I always thought subconsciously that everyone does that and it’s not a big deal.
But aparently there’re groups and information about lucid dreaming and dream control. Internet is a great place to find any peculiar topics and like minded people.
Ever since I upgraded to V 2.0.1, I have experienced 3 times of complete system freeze of my OS X. I’m not 100% sure but VMWare is only program upgraded right before those system crashes. And it always happened in the Unity mode. Maybe the Unity mode is particularly unstable…
Apparently toddlers are the best QA engineers. Our house has one vulnerability and it didn’t take our 2.5 year-old very long to find it – she locked the door to the garage. And since all my tools and the garage remotes are all locked in, there’s no way to get into the garage anymore. Usually there’s a back door, but in this case it is an old house and we didn’t bother to get the side door re-keyed.
Fortunately it didn’t happen in the rush hour of morning and she didn’t lock herself or someone even younger into it. It could be a lot worse. In this case, all it takes is to go knock the neighbor’s door and borrow and small flat-headed screwdriver. Thanks, neighbor!
Needless to say, I now have a small screwdriver in the living room, just in case next she locks one of the other three similar doors in the house, during funny hours.
iPhone 2.2 Firmware upgrade is a big dud for me. 10 minutes after I agreed to upgrade, my iPhone (3G, less than 2 months old) was completely unusable. So the entire Saturday was almost all wasted on trying to fix this issue. The symptom:
First made a couple of tech support calls to Apple. The first rep suggested the usual reboot, hard-reset, reinsert Sim card steps; the second rep suggested restoring to factory default setting. None of these made any change. Finally Apple tech support concluded that the 2.2 firmware probably disabled/corrupted the SIM card. So a trip to the AT&T store ensued.
AT&T store determined it wasn’t the SIM card, as a new card and restore process failed to make any difference.
So finally to the Apple store. After some paperwork, a replacement iPhone works just fine with the SIM card and the new 2.2 firmware.
Total cost: $0;
Time spent: 4 hours.
Here is another sign of credit crunch hitting credit cards. We just received a letter from Citibank informing us that the purchase APR has been raised to 13.99% + prime with a minimum of 19.99%. The same day we got a letter from an affiliated card (store credit card) that GE (the issuing bank backing those store cards) is reducing the credit limit by 40%. Last time we checked not so long ago, we have 800 credit score. So I don’t know what would be the rate or credit limit cut for people having average credit scores.
It doesn’t affect us in either cases since we never use up the credit limit or carry a revolving balance. But for people really need the money, life will become even more difficult. As traditional banks falter, maybe this will create more openings for new payment management solutions – Paypal, Amazon etc – to grab more market share.
The economy is pretty bad, but we can all dream. So here is my Black Friday wish list: