Heh, this story could almost have written by me. It's the reason I held out so long on getting an LCD instead, and why I have my beloved Samsung CRT sitting still in the loft.

I was actually quite surprised that ZSNES at 640x480 fullscreen mode, whilst there is a small noticeable interpolation effect, looked quite good. Perfectly playable once you have the graphics being displayed... I almost forget I'm not on a CRT.

What has been a problem, though, is fast movement. This seems to be a problem inherent to LCDs. :-( Try emulating Sonic 1 (MegaDrive/Genesis) on a CRT vs an LCD. On the CRT, no problems. On the LCD, the rings in particular look fainter, and darker... well, everything seems to look a bit darker as you're running. I guess this is a small form of ghosting, and I don't think there's any way to get round it on an LCD. Any tips would be appreciated. But, I'd say that if you wanna play Sonic or the like, use a CRT.

By the way, I'm using an NEC MultiSync EA191M.

On the other hand, the list of societies that have been irreparably damaged by westerners who thought they knew better trying to 'civilise the barbarians' is long.

Yeah. Thank god Westerners didn't go into South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, North America, Mexico, or Honk Kong. Those places are much better off right now, not having had our terrible influence.

I condemn all software patents.

Are you seriously saying that the identity of anyone who calls someone names on the internet should be revealed by force of law?

Yeah, but you can't pick it up and maintain it, thereby improving CPAN. You have to rename it and upload it as something else, leaving an orphaned, old, unmaintained module lying around for people to find.

And every Perl module I've pulled from CPAN has been well documented.

What packages have you pulled in from CPAN? As much as I like Perl and as painful as this is to say, CPAN is a fucking abomination. There is basically zero quality control, anyone can put any module up they want and use any namespace. They don't have to offer ANY documentation and if they go AWOL and stop maintaining the module, it just stays there, festering.

Agrd.2 much txt is bd,we nd 2 mk stf + concise,btr 4 usng storage.

I always mentally read the show's title as 'Paranoia' whenever I see it.

Socialized news!!!

*shiver*

even internally if a reporter wants something old he usually has to go to the archive (read basement) and digg for hours.

Someone's been spending too much time online.

Second major weight loss is from 108kg to 94kg. It's still ongoing, with the final goal being 80kg again. This time I didn't want to loose muscle, so joined the local gym and took professional advise.

You know what I do? Play squash once or twice a week.

Seriously, I don't get all these people paying a fucking fortune to join a gym and get 'professional advice' when there's a sport out there that effectively exercises just about every muscle in your body, intensely, for an hour, as well as giving your heart a good workout. And, it's fun to play. And, it's a damn sight cheaper than a gym.

Go play squash, people. You'll enjoy it!

I changed the amount of food I ate from large dishes to normal dishes

How do you do that with US restaurant portions?

"I'd like a small meal, please."
"OK, one supersized-mega kids' meal coming right up!"

The only effective glasses for viewing "Chuck" are ones that make you blind.

My mom used to say 'Want in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.'

Ah, so now we know the identity of Tubgirl.

The European Council is indeed a democratic institution: it's comprised of the heads of state or government of the member states, all of whom are elected (in the case of monarchies, the Prime Minister sits on the Council).

That's not good enough. You know as well as I do that heads of state tend to be pretty disconnected from the people - in countries like the UK, with our electoral system, they're in no real danger of even losing their seat, as they're likely to be in a very safe seat. They can get away with kowtowing to rich business interests and bullshitting the people about it (they're usually very experienced with that). Nobody's even been able to explain to me why the Council needs to exist. I say scrap it and just have the Parliament, an institution which is elected by a much better PR system and where members face the real risk of losing their seats if they piss people off.