Johann Low

日曜日, 1月 27, 2008

[approaching CNY]

As it is, CNY's footsteps is drawing near and my hair needs a good trim. I rem my last cut was at the end of November and right after that cut I had food poisoning cos I had lor-mee for lunch and I swallowed some rotten meat in it. My stylist had his bookings full to almost the whole week! Thus I could only manage to get a time slot at 5.30pm ytd. I reached too early and waited nearly an hour before he could attend to me.

Anyway here it is hehe.

I think the cut is quite nice, longer fringe this time. I wish I could style like they do.

Sat was bright and sunny, good weather for those who wanna do their CNY's shopping. The sky had such a nice shade of blue that I could not resist taking pictures of it.

From my room's window,

From the kitchen's window,

Boss made an announcement on Friday about the bonus, supporting staff like myself will receive an average of 1.5 month bonus. That said, it is an average and it will differ from person from person.

My current mac has turned 3 years old and I feel it is time to replace it. Initially, I wanred to get imac because I think the current specs are good enough for my usage which are mainly surfing the net, mp3s, anime, prawns and the occasionally photo editing. Then I got distracted by the new Macpro which comes standard with 2 X quadcore Xeon processors and 2GB of RAM. I kept thinking of it for some time and then I realised, my bonus is not that much, buying a macpro will be quite a heavy burden. I dun need 8 cores of computing power, tho I must admit the expandability of the macpro is very alluring. Then I thought, how much will I upgrade? At most I will add 1 or 2 hdd at most and at that price tag, seems too much.

I dun need a workstation just to surf net, listen to mp3s and watching videos. + the price tag issue.

So I decided to get the imac instead cos it is the most reasonable thing to do, I could save up some cash for an external hdd and more RAM. Current imacs run on C2D processors which means it runs cooler. Current mac is a powermac, the ancestor of the macpro and it is hot. The amount of hot air blowing out is quite annoying and my room is quite warm because of it. The imac 3 years ago has pathetic specs. Now I am deciding to aim for the 20' or 24' imac hehe. 24' will be a blast! I can watch all the HD shit in full screen! And the current mac's pathetic gfx card is too slow to watch full HD trailers w/o dropping frame rates.

I hope I will be able to get a good price to sell of my pmac to offset the new imac.

elow at 10:45 午後 | (0) comments

月曜日, 1月 21, 2008

[CNY]

I have been counting down for CNY and it seems to take forever. 3 more weeks to CNY!! Still I cannot feel any CNY mood? Or is it I too cooped up at home and too busy with work?

Work has been rather hectic, juggling between the ops side and the design side is not easy. Anyway finally 'rushed' out the Jpn catalogue for the Osaka exhibition. Some time was wasted thanks to the non native support of Asian text in Indesign CS2, but I was lucky to find a template created by someone to help display and lay out the text properly. But even with the template, it is not without problems, sometimes the Jpn text cannot be displayed properly in pdf format.

The final pdf format in high quality print was sent to China in a cd. Hope this time round, there will not be any problems with the printing.

So the weekends ended just as it did every weekends. Anyway, I bought 2 pants for work which came with a free shirt haha.

Today was quite busy, the Jpn colleague did not prepare his stuff in advance and I had to make a much smaller version of the Jpn catalogue for him, smlj and he also did not bring any of the e-catalogues cds with him! WTF. And I thought those were urgent.

I will feel so

everytime after work.

elow at 12:21 午前 | (0) comments

日曜日, 1月 06, 2008

[2008]

2008 came in a jiffy and with a big delivery. My Wii Fit came on Fri after a few days of being 'processed'. Anyway it is not cheap cos the shipping alone (thanks to the bulk of this thing) costed me 7000 yen which is around SGD91+.

Anyway here it is.

The box which housed the actual product.

It is quite a nice box actually with all the Jpn printings and it is a Wii Fit box!! Too bad mum was making too much noise abt the cleanliness of the box and it was thrown away this evening.

The actual product; Wii Fit.

This is one of the coolest game/gadget ever. It is designed for easy and fun healthy living in the living room. The box is huge and heavy because of the balance board where u need to stand on it to perform exercises haha. There are 4 main type of exercises for the player.Balance games, Aerobic, Yoga and Muscle training. U really have to try it to know how fun it is. I sweated it out for ard 30 min doing the hoola hoop (614 rounds) ahha and a bit of running.

As for my PS3, I wanted to get a simple 5.1 setup for the longest time. I find it is a waste for such a capable system to be only using the feeble tv speakers for gaming when it is fully capable of 5.1 surround. After some effort of searching, I bought it from a online seller who was looking to sell off his Pioneer HTP-330 which was a free gift from his Pioneer 42" Kuro Plasma TV. After looking at his own setup in his room, I know why he wanna sell this off cos his setup belongs to those mid-range-high end type, consisting of a Onkyo SR605 A/V receiver ($749 iirc), a pair of floor-standing KEF speakers ($1800) and a center speaker ($400). Well, this was my ideal setup too but I dun have the $ or the place to house all these.

Here's the setup:

Sound connection is via toslink cable from PS3 to speakers. Video is via HDMI.

It was raining cats and dogs when I met up with the buyer ( just grad from a US Uni) Anyway the 2 boxes were rather bulky so I took a cab home. It was raining rather heavily too and I got soaked when I carried the boxes to my block. After unpacking, I realised I left out the remote control. PHUQ! After reading the manual, I realised I cannot do a proper setup without the remote! Double phuq~ So I met him again today and finally got the remote + one plastic plug which was actually needed to secure the connection of the speakers behind the sub-woofer.

Initial setup failed, some speaker connection error. I turned off the system and tried again. Same thing happened. Then I rewired the center speaker and same thing happened! But last try it worked and the setup was completed. I tested the sound with Ninja Gaiden and the movie Letters from Iwo Jima. I was very impressed with the sound from the movie. So much details from the sound of the waves hitting the shores, the rustling of the sand, the rattling of the guns, the explosion from the bombs etc. Of cos, this is nothing compared to those mid-range-high end system as some people have. But for the price I paid for this system, I am pretty satisfied.

A poor man like me cannot ask for much right? hehe.

elow at 11:53 午後 | (0) comments