Sephy’s Platzish

Granted that this is from 1991, but it’s something that isn’t done enough (or if they do it, like ESPN have for the last couple of weeks in their Busch coverage, they hardly ever use the option and then overhype it). What would happen if you put a live microphone with a driver and let him have discussions with your commentary crew live on air.

(You’ll note that I didn’t mention TNT - that’s because they are going to do something like this for at least one race)

Anyway, back when they had the rights to broadcast these races, Network 7 in Australia would hook up a driver and let them be their (as ESPN put it now) “in-race reporter”. In 1991, it wound up being the Neil Crompton/Brad Jones Telecom Mobilenet Holden. Here are a couple of clips -

By the way, both drivers are involved in racing media - Cromley as the colour commentator for 7 (after a stint with ten) and Jones co-hosting a show with Crompton available on broadband from Bigpond.

Though I’m not exactly certain what I won…

I got an email from Skype saying that they have a “casino” promotion going on; I checked with the site and it is a legitimate promotion. The prizes that they offer aren’t bad either -

“Minor” prizes, at least 3 on offer per day
- 6 months SkypeIn [10/day] (that’s a direct-dial number that you can get anywhere in the US {this is only open to US residents} Retail value listed at $1.00 each, but the price that you’d pay is $25 or so based on €10×2 months)
- Skype Unlimited for a year [3/day] (i.e. free calling with I believe no connection charge to the US and Canada, $29.95)
- 5, 10, or 15 minutes of SkypeOut [1000 each/day] (call phones at a low per-minute charge with a 4¢ connection fee; retail values 10, 21 and 31 cents respectively)

“Major” prizes - 0-2 available per day
- Logitech QuickCam Chat, $29.99
- Logitech USB headset, $49.99
- SMC Phone (only 10 available, including one today), $159.99

And the, as I would term them, “useless” prizes, both available in a quantity of 1000 per day. This is the description from the official rules -
- A RingJacker Ringtone (30,000 available): ARV $1.50 US dollars ea.
- A CrazyTalk Avatar (30,000 available): ARV $1.50 US dollars ea.

So, I figured I’d take a punt. And I did win a prize. A CrazyTalk Avatar. According to the winning page, it is “A tool that makes animated avatars come to life on your Skype video chats”.

Ah well, at least I won *something*

Well, generally you do get both in a short amount of time. For this particular instance, the first spot of bad news appeared yesterday but the good news came up this afternoon.

Yesterday while I was in another part of my house, my monitor (LG L194WT, 19″ widescreen) went off like it usually does after 10 minutes (it used to be that the monitor stayed on, but after getting the LCD screen, I became suddenly concerned about burn-in; actually it’s more that there really is no reason to have the screen *always* on. When I came out to jiggle the mouse to bring the screen back to active, it didn’t go back on right away. Instead, the power indicator flashed rapidly, but after about 30 seconds of being miffed at why it did this, the screen came back on and everything was going well.

That is, until this afternoon when, right in the middle of watching the season opener of the second season of the West Wing (now that I’m addicted to it too) - the screen suddenly went blank again, with the flashing power light. Ever the optimist, I figured that the problem would resolve itself again and I’d see the “f-engine” screen and the picture would come back. But it didn’t. That’s the major bad news; I now have a dead monitor sitting on the floor and getting ready to go back into its original packaging. Of course, I could wait for an identical package to come before packing this monitor away.

Yes, that is the good news. I wound up calling the toll-free number for LG customer service and gave them all the required information - serial number, my name, address etc and the description of the problem. After that, I was given two options -

1. Give a credit card number, have a package with an identical monitor arrive and send back the defective monitor; the card is not charged as the original is returned to the company. This would take two to five days to get a replacement and there are only two areas that could fail.

2. They send me a sticker, I put the monitor back into its original packaging, send it back and they send me a new monitor. This would take somewhere in the range of 10 days to complete, and involves three steps that could falter in this process.

So, I gave them my card number (I hardly use the thing anymore) and I should be expecting a new monitor in the next couple of days.

I have to say that LG’s customer service is quite good (and unless they have **really** good accent training, based stateside still; unlike RealNetworks’ support whose service center is definitely in India - “Jeremy”’s accent didn’t cut it for me back in June). And the fact that the preferred method of dealing with problems like this is to swap the monitor is a great way to get people coming back to their products.

In the meantime, I put the monitor that I had been using for the better part of two years back onto the main desktop system, and I have to admit that it is hard to readjust to a CRT monitor after using an LCD. Not only does everything seem so small (consider that I am using a 17″ CRT), it seems almost out of focus. I think I might just watch some of the stuff that I’d been meaning to on the TV since I do have the DVD player that can play files that I burn to disc

Oh, can I just say that CRTs are evil again? Thanks