Looks like intense-servers.com had some pretty massive downtime lately. For the past 3 days or so, it, along with all of my domains hosted on it, have been down. Apparently it was a hardware failure, and now it's all good again. As of this point, I'm still not sure if I'm going to stay with intense-servers.com as my webhost. It would probably be more trouble than it's worth to transfer everything over. Then I would have to remake all the passwords, as well as emails and domains. I guess I'll just backup teamslack.net / margulieux.com / pensphreak.com / pens.teamslack.net more often now.

I bought a new LCD monitor today from Costco. I got the Princeton VL1715 (specs here) for around $330. No rebates or anything. So far, I'm so stoked by it. It's seriously one of the coolest things I've bought for my computer so far. Coming from a bulky 17" CRT that could do a max of 1280x1024@60hz, seeing an LCD sit on my desk is truely a thing of beauty. Not only does it take up like 1/10 of the size of my old CRT, but it just makes my desk so much sexier. Any my eyes dont strain while reading text due to the high(er) refresh rate. Another great thing about this is that since I bought it from costco, if I find any cheaper LCDs in the near future, I can always take this back to Costco, no questions asked. I'm also happy that I didn't get any dead pixels, which I hear is common and can be very annoying. Of course, I don't know what's a "good" lcd and what's not. So my new Princeton LCD could in fact be crappy and I don't know any better. That might end up being a problem if I'm stuck with this in the long run and I find out that it does suck, so I'll be on the lookout for any dell deals that come up. Needless to say, I'm hooked on LCD's from now on. Here are the specs, not too bad:

17" TFT Active Matrix LCD
150° Wide Viewing Angle
450:1 High Contrast Ratio**
25ms Response Time (typical)
SXGA 1280 x 1024 Maximum Resolution
SXGA 1280 x 1024 Native Resolution*
Built-in Stereo Speakers
VESA® Wall/Arm Mount Ready
Kensington® Lock Port
Plug & Play Ready

I've been very busy with school lately, so I havn't had time to update the site as might as I would have liked. In one of my classes, ICS 125, I created a website (link here) for our group. Essentially we're making a project for Raytheon that calculates and points a security camera that's tracking people or objects. This is being done in java btw. Anyways, from the looks of it, I won't be applying to grad school at this time. I didn't really plan it out well enough, nor do I think that I took the rest of my college career as serious as I should have. Well, not necessarily SERIOUSLY, but I was never thinking of going to grad school, so I didn't do some things correctly. Anyways, good news is that I don't have to goto my writing class tommorrow. Woo!