Appassionato

And another Merry Christmas

Categorised as Personal & tagged with apple, holiday, shopping.

I never expected taking up two jobs in the Christmas period to be this tiring! I’ve been working eight days straight but I finally got a break on Christmas day! Because of that I had some trouble getting the Snark Secret Santa present done on time but I got it in yay.

Trip to Asia

Sorry for the immense lack of updates! Right after my last post I took a great 18-day trip to Taiwan and Japan for seeing friends and relatives and maple sight-seeing in Japan.

It was terribly tiring touring with a tour group in Japan (waking up at 6am and getting back to the hotel at 10pm), and I ate like a pig in Taiwan for the love of cheap and godly foods. It was also crazy how the Taiwanese Winter was hotter than our New Zealand Summer. I walked around with sleeve­less clothing in Taiwan and people looked at me like I was mad. No, they were the mental ones wearing scarves and huge coats under such heat!

Photos from Taiwan and Japan.

New MacBook

My lovely new baby. With the low New Zealand Dollar, New Zealand was probably the cheapest place in the world to get the new unibody MacBook. But I bought it in Taiwan during the Info Expo because they had slight discounts and some ‘deals’. I also spent a fortune to get it upgraded to 4GB RAM. However much I spent on it, I feel like every dollar was worth it; fast, pretty and awesome new trackpad ‘moves’. I don’t have a lot of Christmas presents (only two or so because most friends are overseas), but this is the best Christmas present I gave to myself.

Yes I now have my stub­bornly PC-loving friends jealous.

End of 2008

I’ve had a year of mad up’s and down’s, and I’m ready to take on a new year of challenge – I think. I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year.

Geekification step 1

Categorised as Personal & tagged with geek, shopping.

1. What’s the first step to being a geek? Glasses.
2. How do you dress to make people view you as a pro­fes­sional? Office-lady look with glasses.
3. What do glasses give an element of? Trust.
4. If your client trusts you, you get… Money.
5. So if you want big money, you go spend a little sum on? Glasses.

Female Geek Essentials

I in fact have 20/20 eyesight but these framed glasses seem to be “teh fashion” right now. I just had to get a pair after seeing Amber with hers.

Well, it’s fake. The glasses are just plain clear plastic, I got it from a jewellery store where they were selling sunglasses and it costed $20 NZD. My friends think I’m nuts but my sister, also with 20/20 eyesight, likes them too and wore them to hospital yesterday so she’d look more “pro” as well.

I’m blogging with my flash new glasses on but they actually… Make my world look… Small and… Framed…

And unfor­tu­nately, sometimes it gives me gigantic eyes so to avoid that I have to con­stantly smile so my eyes become smaller. All in all, it’s for a good deed, and here’s my theory:

Glasses >> Geek >> “Pro” Image >> Trust >> Money.

*drools*

Damned businessmen

Categorised as Internet, Rants & tagged with Internet, shopping.

Dammit. I busted my monthly Internet bandwidth. Again.

Some of you in the nice Northern Hemi­sphere may be thinking “WTF Internet bandwidth” but yeah, that’s right. Telecom Xtra is the monopoly over our broadband Internet here and we get crap service at high prices. The plan we’re with gives 6 GB Internet bandwidth at the damned rate of $49.95 NZD ($36.00 USD) a month, not to mention we have one of the slowest broadband speeds in the OECD already.

Neither my sister nor I know what we did to suddenly bust the 6 GB bandwidth just four days before the recurring date but right now I’m having to suffer 56K dial-up speed. I can’t even load my site properly in Mozilla Firefox. Actually, let me rephrase that: I can’t load any page properly in Firefox so I’m back to Opera again. It’s killing me.

I had always been com­plain­ing about the crap broadband speed we got – about 150~200 KB/s down­load­ing from most sites – but now I under­stand what real pain-in-the-arse means. Last night, I was down­load­ing a file at 4 KB/s. The second file I down­loaded was pro­gress­ing at 0.5 KB/s. All this is due to the bloody rich firm that provides the bad service. They have no com­pet­i­tion to face in the industry so it doesn’t matter what price they set or what service they give, we all have to pay them. Die.

And to add to all the slow Internet killing my mood, I acci­dent­ally bidded on a 1 GB MP4 player on TradeMe when I thought it was a 2 GB. It wasn’t purely my fault since that auction came up in the search results when I entered “2GB MP4 player”. Anyhow, I won that at $57 NZD and realised I made a mistake fighting over it with another bidder. I then went after the 2 GB one I really wanted and won it at $59 NZD. Yeah. $2 for 1 GB upgrade. I should laugh? Heee. But, no.

It was the same seller that listed the items and I mailed him straight after­wards asking if we could please cancel the trade and I would be willing to pay any costs he had incurred in listing the auction, which would amount to something no more than $3.95. And he replied me:

Please pay $10 (admin and restock­ing charge) to our bank account

“Admin and restock­ing charge” my ass. It was just a Chinese guy bringing cheap MP4 players in from China and reselling here for triple or quadruple the price and he’s charging a sixth of the item’s price for some admin and “restock­ing” crap. The item hasn’t even been dis­patched! I shall now give the 1 GB MP4 player to my friend who doesn’t have one since if I do resell the item, I don’t think I’d find another stupid girl who’d bid up to $57 for it thinking it was a 2 GB.

So now, I am broke again. But at least I’ll now treasure my 200 KB/s download speed to come in two days. (Perhaps only for a week in, though.)