Customer e-mail to ISP...

Subject: websites
how do i build a website for the wilco midget leauge

o_O

* waves vaguely in the direction of techcomedy.com's "Customer E-mail" section *

People with too much time on their hands and half-decent colour management...

(goes to buy bulk quantities of apple crumble, lolololol)

Is uselessness validation anything like SGML validation?

Grin. Some of the entries in here are so true. Worth1000 being politically incorrect in the best way they know how.

This is a great idea; it's a day out for kids where they can put bits of old toys together to make brand new ones. They, er, get a bit weird, though.

And on another blort related note, this is great. Whilst the whole "his name is Mr. Gay" thing isn't really funny at all, 1930s people with moustaches feeding lion cubs are brilliant.

Looking through the Blort(warning, lots of NSFW stuff linked off that page) mascots page I found a few...

Guess the person: one two three four

We (quite who "we" were, I can't remember exactly) did discuss the idea of "avatars" when originally setting up the second Warbeck; it was decided against. It's only a tiny change to the php to put them in, so if everyone can come up with one, and everyone wants them, they can be put in. Myself - I vote *no* - we'd only end up with stupid ones.

As for smilies - wasn't Rob working on something like that for the warbeck about three years ago?

I wasn't aware you needed validation to be useless - I've managed perfectly for years without an excuse :P

Hmm... Methinks some abstract, possibly customized, but definitely Warbeck-esque smiley images are needed rather than the textual ":)" form. Minimalist (or non-existant) ones for Rob, Brass-effect ones with strategically placed extra limbs for Jimmy, Surrealist line-art ones for Ben... The possibilities are endless.

Or possibly not.

Ah! He's finished it!

Now I can feel properly useless, rather than a grey faded half-uselessness.

(looks about)

I'm ok. Anyone else?

(waits for brother to get back so I can watch *him* playing the HL2 demo... my life being *that* interesting.)

hello people :) Easter hols at last :D hope you're all ok *hugs everyone*

And lo, we observeth the lack of postage. Lo, we log into Blogger and discover the slothfulness of the postage. And lo, the enlightenment dawns.

Rob, finish BIAS will you, so we don't have to wait for bloody Blogger? :P

Heh, www.tallyhall.com is almost permanently Farked ATM, due to albinoblacksheep posting a link to their Banana Man music video. Mmm... insta-meme, just add surfers.

If you do manage to load it, the video is worth watching - methinks Jimmy and Rob may approve.

On a related note, it appears Fark is Farked for the time being - some of the RAM in the CGI server decided to make crispy fries.

Not a clue, dear boy, but since I've been ill for the past week I haven't really had a chance to notice.

Someone is leafleting the campus. With fake "vote for me in the students union elections" flyers. Can't decide what I think. Their leaflets aren't funny - but they make a point that really needed to be made - but the website veers wildly between nonsense, deliberate political incorrectness, and insane beauty (WMA file, VERY slow server).

Toby - know anything about this? At least one of them appears to be a student here.

The monitor in question is the white plasic version of the AL1711s . They're the same RRP and the manufacturer's specs should be identical for both.

To explain a litle further - I was sat behind one of the displays that ISS believe are perfectly reasonable to use whilst I wrote that. As a result, it might just be a *little* biased towards the type of display I *wasn't* using at that point. :p It is difficult to describe how truly awful that particular type of monitor is.

And, yeah, that looks like a pretty decent monitor. The only thing I can suggest is that it might not be ideal for watching dvd on, if you ever do that. (Lots of people seem to nowadays, which is rather odd as for £20 you can go and buy a proper dvd player and plug it into a screen that was actually *meant* for displaying video...)

Yeah, that one's pretty good :)

You might want to check what graphics card you've got too, just in case. If it's too old it won't like driving a 75Hz display. Most should be fine though - I've run an LCD off an 8 meg Trident card before now :P Ask Windows what it thinks the card is (under Device Manager).

so this is a fairly good one then?

lol, um, many essays :P methinks i generally only use my computer for msm/internet purposes, viewing photos and occasional word processing so there shouldn't be much of a problem :P

right...

I awoke and coughed slightly, rubbing the bump where the hypodermic needle had slept me for days; fever was eating the bottom half of me, and the better half wanted to surgery. I stood up, and immediately wished I was dead again. I was plastered against the side of a skyscraper, ripped-apart cities screaming past my face, a thin layer of dust and glass particles scraping the skin of my cheek away.

the sky rolled open, revealing some sickeningly bright blue smile which made my fever curl in and die as principalities streaked across the sky, several of them falling to dent glass steel earth further down the skyscraper. somewhere in the distance the top half of a university was opened, spraying bricks and buttresses into the other side of my refuge.

they smelt like gunpowder and smiled gently.

I watched as they shot everyone I had ever known, and slowly, logically reduced everything I had ever seen to its component pieces and store them with care in arcs tracing to event horizon. I struggled to take off my sandals and armour. I had gotten as far as my bracer when the gravity began.

lance to boil. drain humours. heal patient. smile gently. next please. remove gunpowder. drain humours. next please.

any change in the constant of the universe results in death. please protect the status quo.

part of my leg fell apart, and the principality touched my forehead. I stirred, and grit fell in an arc and twisted into the void. I blinked.

status q

my lungs

i'm sorry

try again

Was just thinking that about mine, too, so you're not alone :p

When you spend 8hrs+ of your day staring at one, a monitor can become quite important to you :p

Hmm... Having looked back at that post, it's perfectly possible to pick holes in some of my technical points, but the ideas are roughly right. I also wonder what the hell possessed me to write quite such an essay... ah well :P

Jimbly: These days LCD quality is less of a problem. Viewing angles for laptop screens are still shocking at the cheaper end of the market, but practically nobody in the desktop PC market would dare release a screen without at least a 30 degree (horizontal and vertical) viewing angle. That tends to be more than adequate for single user usage. If you want to invite people 'round to watch movies, 70 degrees or better is needed, but I doubt Linda will have that issue.

Colour quality can also be sorted (to an adequate degree) in a halfway decent OS. Both Mac and 'Doze can be persuaded into doing hardware per-channel gamma, plus all LCDs I know of have hardware white-point settings in the OSD (on screen display) menu. While this won't give you print-quality colour matching, it suffices for all but the most demanding of tasks. My lappy (which has the most appalling OEM LCD on the planet) can be used just about for Photoshopping using the Adobe Gamma utility - the relative colour matching is acceptable.

The only real issue is contrast. For most people, again, this isn't a priority, but certainly if you do anything graphics intensive the first thing to look for is the luminance rating of the display. LCDs (for those not in the know) cannot as a rule produce both black and white at the same time. You either get black + muddy white (low brightness) or dark grey + white. It isn't possible to get around this without buying a Sony X-Black, which is a prospect your wallet doesn't even want to consider. The best you can do is to buy an LCD with a high contrast difference between what it calls black and white - all reputable manufacturers will list this information in the product specs. The higher the ratio in the rating, the more "real" the picture will look.

As general monitor advice, cheaper screens won't perform well with all screen modes - my advice is match the screen to your needs. 1024x768 is the standard for LCDs these days, so stick to that unless you really need more space on your desktop, in which case it'll cost you more (obviously). Buying a cheap CRT is likely to lumber you with a limited number of screen modes too. If you have to use oddball screen modes, then it is likely that an LCD won't want to play and you'll need to use a CRT. The only programs that will require such modes these days are legacy OSen and programs written in the 1980s for monochrome A4 displays, so using them on modern hardware is entirely at your own risk anyway ;)

Also, use the refresh rate the screen prefers. This was an issue with CRTs (remember whistling monitor syndrome?), but is even more important with LCDs. Many LCDs (as Jimbly hinted at) won't display at anything other than a few fixed refresh rates. Fortunately this isn't as much of a problem as you might think.

CRTs "flicker". They flicker because they have a single beam of electrons energising each phosphor set on the screen in turn. Each phosphor glows for a short while after being hit, but fades quite quickly. The human eye has a maximum "refresh rate" too, beyond which things become blurred, so if the phosphors "refresh" fast enough, the screen doesn't look like a series of flashing phosphors, but rather as a static image. The higher the refresh rate, the better this illusion appears.

With LCDs, there is no electron beam - the pixels on the screen are individually controlled units which only change when they're told to. An LCD therefore doesn't flicker if a static image is put on the screen, regardless of the refresh rate. Refresh rate only becomes an issue if you're displaying high-motion video or animated graphics, but quite honestly 60Hz is fine for almost everything except extreme gaming and video editing work. Jimbly may see the point of an 85Hz LCD, but most users wouldn't bother.

In summary: If you need to do specialist graphical work or run curious screen modes you'll both want and need a CRT. If you're a normal end-user with a bit of cash to spare, get an LCD. They're more convenient for the home or office user (lighter, smaller, less liable to cause eye-strain), but (as with any new technology) you'll need to pay a bit extra for the privilege.

Be careful buying monitors.

LCDs may initially appear to be a better idea, but on top of being *hugely* more expensive, you'll also find them to be noticably lower quality than normal (CRT) monitors. The main problems you'll find are viewing angle, bad reproduction of colours (in many cases not even being able to display standard colour depths properly), strange colour gradients on the screen, blurryness if you're not using the exact resolution the screen wants you to use, and blurryness if there are moving objects on the screen. Additionally, manufacturers fiddle the measurements they use by defining them to deliberately make LCDs look better, so that people buy these more expensive monitors and they get more money.

However, for many uses (web browsing, IM, word processing, etc.) these things aren't problems, so it really does depend on what you want to use it for. Just be aware that you don't magically get better quality because you're paying more.

On the other hand; CRTs are heavy, use loads of power (which in turn is expensive), take up extra space, may or may not shoot out loads of radiation, and tend in my experience to start producing evil grey smoke at random.

Personally, my approach to it is that I can buy three comparable (size and quality) CRTs for the same price as one decent LCD. I'm still using and hating my ancient bulky monitor too; but I'd never buy an LCD to replace it; I'd buy an *even more* bulky, but much better quality, CRT monitor.

want an LCD monitor... need... :P looks like i'm gonna have to save for it. They look so much better and take up less room on my tiny desk. I hate my ancient bulky monitor. Oh dear, i've been around techies too long :P