We definitely get the Netflix slowdown. They always report them back the day after we drop them in the mail, but a lot of times recently, they get one back Monday, and our next movie is "Shipping Tuesday" or even Wednesday.

Here's a pretty neat image of me watching The Inside on my new PDA. Holding a box of Trident White gum up for scale. Picture taken with a camera phone, so the quality isn't great, but trust me: it looks fantastic. The built in speaker is pretty darn good, too - I think it's actually as loud as my laptop. In my quiet little room, it's working as good as a TV in this nice propped-up setup I've got going.

[link]

ETA: Oh yeah. Because the divx player I use has support for this thing's accelerated processor, I can play divx's smoothly even on powersave processor mode. I expect that will make the battery life last quite a while, though I'm subjecting it to an intense check right now. At this moment, one full ep of The Inside dropped it to 85%. If that pattern continues through another playback I'll go to bed and call it about 300 minutes of vid time. Not bad atall. Better than my laptop gets.

ETA2: Looks like 4 hours is a more reasonable estimate. Still, not bad. Better than a lot of portable video players out there.

I'm trying to figure out the easiest way to send my mother what's probably a large MP3 file. Hopefully I will just be able to e-mail it to her, and she will be able to e-mail it to the recipient, but if problems crop up with size, I want to have other options. So far, I have:

1) Upload file to yousendit and hope that both mother and other recipient will be able to manage that. And that the link doesn't go stale before they get to it.

2) Edit file to respectable size, since not all of the song is important.

Anyone have any suggestions how to go about #2? On my computer, I have iTunes, RealPlayer, Quicktime, and Windows Media Player, but I'm guessing none of those allow me to edit music.

Can someone recommend a good economy brand for an LCD monitor? Mother's currently running SVGA 1024x768 17" CRT. She doesn't need anything that special.

I've been happy with the low end 15" and 17" Samsung LCD monitors. I've got three of them in my collection of rental machines.

I've also got a cheap Viewsonic that seems to be holdiing up pretty well.

A Samsung like this, ND? And a Viewsonic like this?

From looking at Tiger Direct, it seems that when it comes to brands I've heard of, $250 is a reasonable price -- that in line with reality?

Dana, you can edit music with Audacity, which is a really cool freeware program.

I have the 19" version of that Samsung, ita, and it's working great for me. I got it through CompUsa with rebates. I think it was around/under $200.00 after the rebates came back.

Thanks, Steph. Bookmarked.

From looking at Tiger Direct, it seems that when it comes to brands I've heard of, $250 is a reasonable price -- that in line with reality?

Yes, for name brand 17" that's about the right range. Occasionally a sale hits and you can get one closer to $200.