educating eric

For no particular reason, I clicked on the article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press | 04/28/2006 | Political e-mail raises eyebrows . The sender of the e-mail in question is "attorney Eric Larson". Something tells me that I'll be hearing about this. But I'm not that Eric Larson.

Check out what the number 1 and 2 results are for MSN Search: Lexmark rebates Yikes!

Yikes! I just downloaded the IE 7 Beta 2, and my first reaction was, "Why is everything so blurry and fuzzy?!?" The answer? ClearType. See the example in ClearType at the Wikipedia . I remember when Apple did something years ago with one of their browsers, and the first step to regaining your sanity was to go in and turn it off. Browsing through some internet posts, folks seem to be saying things like, "Sure, it's blurry, but fonts look so much better now!"... which makes no sense to me. But maybe I could save money on glasses buy not buying any and then pretending that the whole world has ClearType turned on?

Ever seen this error when trying to use the TV recording feature of an ATI All-In-Wonder card? "ATISched.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." I finally found the answer! After hours of installing new versions of ATI's "MultiMedia Center" and the uninstalling them and then runnint Windows System Restore to try and put my system back together... The answer is: Delete all your scheduled recordings. It seems that this problem comes up when there's some sort of problem with a program name. So here's how to fix it: Open the TV viewing program (which should still work okay without the Scheduler running), and click the check-mark box to open the setup window. Then, click the "Schedule" tab, and click the "Delete All" button. If that fixes the problem, then try to add your scheduled programs back in one-by-one and make sure that one of them wasn't triggering the error.

Thanks to my dad for giving me the head's up on this; my first reaction (to be honest) was that it was a (bad) April Fool's joke. But, it seems to be true, according to COAST TO COAST AM WITH GEORGE NOORY : "Art Bell's New Wife, Airyn Ruiz Bell" Suffice to say, there's some chatter out there on the messsage boards about it being just three months since Ramona Bell died, which seems like a fairly short span between the loss of a spouse and a re-marriage. (I talked about the whole thing in a couple episodes of the Ericast at Ericast.com back in January.) But, 1) it's none of our business, and 2) Art really did feel lost and alone without Ramona (based on what he said on-air) and maybe he realizes that life's to short to be unhappy. I hope Art and Airyn have a wonderful life ahead. Wow.

According to the excellent article in Los Gatos Weekly-Times | 0613 | March 22, 2006 : "[Kari Byron] will have her own four-page spread in FHM Magazine in June". If you do a Google search for FHM Magazine... well, head's up that it's probably wouldn't be considered a work-safe site. The article also shares an interesting tidbit about Kari's life -- that ring I've been talking about (the one that shows up on-air every so often) really does mean something! "I get followed around the Home Depot. I'll be there with [my fiancé] Paul looking for something, and fathers and kids will be following us around and watching us." UPDATE (June 2006): I've moved all my Kari Byron commentary over to a different site; you're welcome to browse around here... but for anything new, check out the Kari Byron category on att.ention.net . You heard it here... well, not first. But you heard it here!