zerolight

My VGA lead arrived today. I have no reason to believe that it’s in any way different to the official VGA lead. Of course it cost less than half the price. My impressions are mixed. I bought this lead to use my 360 with my PC LCD monitor because my HDTV is still at Philips for repair.

The first thing I noticed is that the image is a lot darker and softer than before. I imagine this is because my PC monitor is optimised for DVI-D connections rather than the lesser VGA. Still it’s acceptable. If you have a good plain old CRT monitor then it’s bound to look even better. On the downside, not all games seem to support letterboxed widescreen at 1280×1024. Well, PGR3 doesn’t anyway, the rest seem to. In order to play PGR3 without the aspect ratio stretching all over the place you need to run the 360 at 1024×768 instead. I’m assuming this is a bug in PGR3 as PDZ was perfect.

Anyway, as Dire Straits said on Money for Nothing, “I want my HDTV”. Philips, are you listening?

In true Britney fashion, I did it again. 3 months ago I upgraded the OS on the PC, forgetting to backup Zee’s bulging Inbox first. Result? She lost all her emails and her entire address book. You can imagine that made me popular. So yesterday, I decided to clean up the server. And I accidentally wiped her MySQL database which contains all the content for her website. ALL of it.

Did I have a backup strategy in place for our sites? Of course. Once a month I’d run the Generate Full Backup in cPanel which generates a backup of the entire site, compresses it, and dumps it in the home directory of zerolight.co.uk. Did I check the backups were successful? Unfortunately for me, Ace-Host attempts to keep their servers running smoothly by killing off any backup request. They don’t disable the option, they just kill off the process when it runs. A helpful email comes along letting you know the backup was successful. Grrr. Net result. No backup. Didn’t take more than an hr to restore Zee’s site to it’s formal glory though, albeit with nothing in it. I’ve since implemented a different backup strategy.

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… yeah. OK. I let him at my keyboard!

Ian tagged me. I’m guessing this is some craze in blog-ville. Oh well… I can play along.

So my TV has been away at Philips for over 3 weeks now. The HD input displaying the picture shunted off the right of the screen. I had initially been told a maximum of 4 weeks turn around. Today I called Philips for an update. Screen says it failed it’s Consumer Tests Sir. It’s being repaired. When asked for an estimated turn around time, pointing out the 4 week time I’d been promised, I was told that I can’t give you an estimate Sir. It’s being repaired. I can’t tell you anything else.

Given the cost of a 37 LCD, I’d expectPhilips to have a little more information available as to the status and location of my TV, which when sent for repair was just over 6 months old, and clearly had the fault from day one. If only I’d known. At the very least it would be nice to know what the hold up is, are they waiting on parts, a replacement TV, are their developers frantically (doubtfully) writing new firmware, what? It’s being repaired doesn’t cut it. Neither does the fact that I’ve been without a TV since the 3rd Jan. Most annoying given that my new Xbox 360 sits unplayed other than the 2 short time I was around (with a TV) over the Christmas period. And 24’s back! We’re watching it on a laptop.