Ness’ Outpost

If you are ever wondering how geeky you are just go to an IEEE meeting and you’ll meet the alpha of the flock. I went to the meeting tonight in Burlington at Gennum where the presentation focused on television technologies. The speaker mentioned that rear projection models give the best value over LED and Plasma TV’s currently.

Apparently as TV’s get larger the more noticeable the flaws in the signal become. These flaws are introduced by compression/decompression (up to 50%), signal errors, low bandwidth of HD signals (so providers can squeeze more channels into the signal) and the way film is digitized.

The chips that Gennum creates are able to autosense and correct these errors in the signal as well as having the ability to autodetect 60 of the common signal types (PAL, NTSC, etc.). The chip is able to decode and present at least two independent channels of data including resizing the signal on the fly and overlaying graphics and text on the signal for menus.

Overall the presentation was concise and to the point. I was a little irritated by one audience member who felt it his calling in life to distract the speaker and inturrupt whenever he felt the need. There’s always one in a croud.

At the end of the presentation pens with a blue LED lights in them were given out. Now I am able to write in the dark if the need ever arises.

I bought a 2002 Chevy Cavalier today. It’s a used car so nothing special, fancy or exciting but it is transportation that gives me some independence and the ability to move into my new rental place.

This is my first car. I’ll define that as the first car that is registered under my name with license plates owned by me, insurance, repairs, gas and maintenence all paid by yours truly.

Is it wrong to have not had a car until you are 24? I don’t think so, living two blocks from school saved a tonne of money and provided me with some unique opportunities that sitting in traffic never could.

This isn’t good, the new site format isn’t wide enough to handle a comic strip. No time to fix it now, I’m off car shopping.

UPDATE: I don’t like CSS. I took all the static sizes used and made them dynamic, but I need to mandate a minimum width for all the “cells” - boy do I miss tables. Anyway, to figure out what I’m talking about resize your browser to something smaller than 800px width and see the comic become overlapped by the calendar. Arg.

UPDATE 1.5: There is a min-width tag which I used, but now my web page’s minimum width has been specified at 850 pixles. I need to do something about that in the padding to get it to 800. But I’ll save that for another day.

I started working at ZENON today. I have taken up a project engineer position with them and look forward to the challenges ahead with the services department.

So I survived - including Kevin’s never ending need to drywall his basement as we put a few sheets up this evening. The Dagenais are very kindly letting me stay with them until I find a place to stay in the area and a car to transport me around.

The good news is I think I’ve found an amazing house to stay in. Now I just need the car to get me to work.

I visited the dentist on Monday. It was just a regular cleaning but now that I’m no longer covered by my parents health coverage I have to hand over my credit card after the visit. Ouch.

So not only did I get a clean mouth, but a bill for $105. I guess that’s what being old is all about. Paying bills. I’ll let you know if I discover any other features of being old.