Kudos to wls_xenolith (my cousin Kurt) for blogging about (and therefore calling my attention to) this monitor, which I turned around and bought for $279 from Amazon.

I’ve only had it for a couple of days, and it’s working out really well. I checked Amazon, though, and it’s no longer available. They have the “gamer” version” of the monitor, which costs $100 more, and which I decided wasn’t worth the extra $100 to me. Interestingly, when I unpacked my cheaper monitor there was a sticker on it that said “fast 8ms response time,” which I couldn’t figure out. I didn’t PAY for that kind of response time. Maybe the sticker was just there to make me feel good.

Sandra has been watching episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on my PC some evenings, and this new monitor ghosts LESS than my old tube did — a true technical accomplishment, especially when you consider that the scenes shot in the dark come out looking clear, too.

The monitor I replaced was an NEC Accusync 19″ monitor whose brightness was starting to go, and which was getting blurry down towards the bottom of the screen. Since I sit in front of a computer every day, that would just never do. So now I have a monstrous-footprint monitor on the floor in the corner of my office, heavy enough (but not dense enough) to be a boat anchor. If I could figure out how to turn it into $50, I’d buy some more books to teach me how to draw.

So… Kudos to Kurt. He may wonder whether anybody pays attention to his blog — I certainly do, if only to see what kind of weird image he’ll dig up next.

We all know that Alexa ratings are “tainted” at best. Alexa requires a browser plug-in that most folks would call spyware, and that only runs under Win32 and Internet Explorer. That skews the ratings pretty hard for audiences full of technical types (though that doesn’t stop Slashdot from having a great Alexa rating), and we can only assume that there are other statistical shortcomings.

Okay, fine. But today, ladies and gentlemen, Schlock Mercenary’s Alexa Rating for both “rank” and “page views” beats the Alexa rating for Sluggy Freelance.

Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that because the sample size is small, there are dramatic peaks and valleys in both our graphs, and they are not in phase. But part of this is ALSO due to the fact that my Alexa ranking has been on the rise for two months now.

Pete’s work was part of what inspired me to head down this crazy path six years ago, and this little patch of graph shows us like we’re EQUALS. I feel a little bit like Sandra felt a few years back when she realized that we were making more money than her parents were (and oh, the fall from THAT patch of hubris… try an 80% salary cut sometime, Dad!)

So… for today, anyway, I love Alexa.

People tell me Schlock brings them happiness in the morning. This is nice. But where am *I* supposed to get *MY* morning happy from?

Answer — Today I get it from Penny Arcade. (The permalink to today’s strip will likely be here)

And in a very related note, “It’s like drinking unicorn giggles” is the phrase that pays. Or at least it should be. If you’re running a radio station, please see to that.

The sewer guys are out front with the manhole cover up. As a male, I was REQUIRED to walk out and look down the hole to see if there was poo in it.

As it turns out, there was no poo, but there WAS a television camera “robot” on a cable. They’ve been filming our sewers (report at 11:00!) in an effort to update the maps the city keeps of the sewage system. This was quite cool.

They also had a tool there called a something-or-other cutter (where “something-or-other” is the name of the pipe that runs from the house to the sewer line, which name I’ve inconveniently forgotten, and which pipe often sticks so far into the sewer pipe that it blocks the camera-bot). Apparently they used it yesterday to remove a nail.

One thing I learned about the sewer while looking down that hole — do NOT dispose bodies there… not unless they’re in very small pieces. The manhole is person-sized, but the flow-pipe is only about 9 inches in diameter. The manhole is there for access only.

I now return you to my regularly scheduled silence while I finish coloring the bonus materials for Book I.