• My Westinghouse L2410NM LCD monitor arrived at Westinghouse's factory, according to UPS tracking, on Thursday at 10AM. Thus the clock starts. In one week I'll begin periodic phone calls to Westinghouse requesting updates on the status of my RMA. I know that every phone call you make to a call center costs the company money; it's in Westinghouse's best interests as well as my own to give me good information and satisfy my curiosity.

• Yet another reason Vista sucks: trying to get VPN to work. Took me a week and the help of many people from my company's IT dept. before I even got close. The Control Panel UI philosophy of Vista seems to have been to take the XP Control Panel and scatter the options to the four winds; then build an insultingly dumbed-down GUI that has lots and lots of links to all those scattered pieces. Any kind of network configuration takes twice as long and twice as much navigation through a maze of windows and tabs and icons and links than it did in XP. And XP wasn't all that great to begin with.

• My Ruby on Rails project for work is turning out well. Deploying Rails is a bit easier than the last time I had to do it over a year ago. Apache's mod_proxy + Mongrel makes things pretty easy. Getting it to work with SSL is also doable; as per these lengthy instructions you have to put

  RequestHeader set X_FORWARDED_PROTO 'https'

  in your Apache config (this line requires Apache's mod_headers).

• Ruby on Ubuntu / Debian still sucks. I don't like how they break standard Ruby up into many parts and different packages. You kind of expect Ruby to come with rdoc and ri, not to have to install them separately.

(Read the whole crappy story of Westinghouse's dishonesty and horrible customer service: The beginning, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5, Update 6, Update 7, Update 8, Update 9, VICTORY, aftermath.)

"Goes bad" meaning "breaks". My beloved 22" monitor has died on me. I've gone from 1920x1200 pixels of widescreen goodness to an old 1024x768 CRT that they were going to throw in the trash at work.

The good thing is that now I can see for sure whether all of my web sites look OK in 1024x768 resolution. The bad thing is EVERYTHING ELSE. Oh god it burns. I can feel a headache coming on from squinting. Already I miss having 3 terminal windows right beside my Gvim. My conky display runs 2 feet off the bottom of my screen. Short of my HD exploding and losing all my files, this is my worst nightmare.

I'm debating whether I should format my laptop and dual-boot some Linux distro on there or something. Vista is such a dog. The only time I touch Vista is when I have to do something for work or when I want to play a game, which is very seldom, and I feel so unclean afterwards.

(Read the entire Westinghouse saga, if you dare: The beginning, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5, Update 6, Update 7, Update 8, Update 9, VICTORY, aftermath.)