Why is buying a TV so hard?

Buying a TV is incredibly complicated these days. Tracy and I spent most of the day trying to figure out what our solution should be. We have some space limitations, but we want cable/satellite, HDTV, DVR. The array of options and acronyms is enormous, plus each provider has limitations. HD-Ready vs HD-Tuner, LCD vs Plasma vs Rear Projection, DirecTV vs Dish vs Comcast vs Echostar vs Voom, Tivo vs Replay vs other DVR, 5.1 vs 6.1 vs THX, 1080i vs 720p vs 420i, HDTV vs EDTV vs TV.

A normally intelligent friend of mine who shall remain nameless(Dave) suggested that we play all Mississippi Stud and Mississippi Stud/8 or better for a whole poker session. This was profitable for me because I won. But the idea was widely disparaged by all players involved as being a bad idea and indeed we were right. It's a bad game, far less interesting than Hold'em. It's not the worst game ever to be widely played in casinos(silly home games like Anaconda don't count). The worst game award probably goes to Razz.

Perl Threads are cool. I'd never looked at them in depth until today.

Blogger shenanigans

I finally finished most of my blogger changes. Hope you like the new format. I put up a newer picture and made some minor tweaks. I improved the archive page, but it still needs some fixes.

I'm not sure if I want to keep the blogger navigation bar though. It's amusing to click through to the next blog every once in a while, but it suffers from the following problems: About 10% blogs are spam blogs, another %10 have less than 5 posts total on them, another %20-30 are not in English(it's possible some of those have interesting images that I might want to browse, but that's very rare), another %20 are not that interesting to me. So if you add it up it's pretty rare that I look at another person's blog for more than 10 seconds.

It's also annoying that the blogger search toolbar doesn't come up with the same search results that I expect. It is labelled "Search" and it's supposed to search the site you're on with google, but it doesn't do what I expect at all. When you type "site:www.chen.net linux" into a regular google search, it shows all the occurences of "linux" on "www.chen.net", which is a terrific feature. The Blogger toolbar does not do this unfortunately. It comes up with no hits when I just type in "linux".

I'll keep up the blogger navbar for a while longer, if anyone has opinions, feel free to share.