Those of you used to chatting with me on AIM may have noticed that I haven't been around too much lately. That is because I'd kind of gotten used to using the laptop as my primary computing device, and then I discovered... a stuck/dead pixel. Actually, there may be several of them in the same vicinity, but one is darker than the others and really really bugs me. Could it always have been there? I don't know, but now that I've noticed it I can't take my bloody eyes off of it. Hell, it's basically rendered the rightmost 150 pixels of my monitor useless, since I'm running all of my program windows dragged that much to the left to avoid making it show up on white backgrounds. I hate it. But as far as I've been able to discern, there's nothing that can be done about it. So I haven't been using the laptop much and have only been using the desktop for work (not much these days) and to check e-mail. It kinda sucks -- this thing cost $4K and I can hardly stand to use it now. What a waste.

Anyway, since my laptop looks almost exactly like Foamy's laptop and is (also) a Dell, I found the latest Ill Will Press cartoon (Tech-Support III) to be especially relevant (and fairly humorous, especially given that I have had similarly infuriating experiences with outsourced Dell tech support since getting the laptop). Unfortunately, the creator isn't taking e-mails so I can't ask him if Dell actually gave him a working solution.

Don't buy a Dell.