My New Jabra

Got this as my birthday present from my dearest. I have been looking around for a Bluetooth handsfree to go with my V9 for quite some time now. Actually we came across this Jabra BT3030 sometime ago in a newspaper ad I think. I did have a look at it during one of my trips to KL but did not commit to buy. I really liked the way it looked but it did not have the radio function like one of the Moto bluetooth set. For those using Moto phones, you would know that MOST, if not all Moto phones do not have the radio function built into the phone. :(

Now for the pics!

Its the “dog tag” style set. Has the dog tag look with V3 like buttons on it. I really like it. And since it has that V3 keypad look, it glows like it as well!! :)

The lights dim off when the buttons are not pressed and only the Jabra words blink to indicate it is connected to the phone. BTW the word Jabra blinks in different color according to the battery level. Blue when its above 70% full, orange in between and red when its less than 20%. And while charging the word blinks green and stays green once fully charged.

It comes with a chain as well as a clip (which I did not attach to yet) – so that you can clip it on your clothes instead of wearing it as a necklace. The thing is you can’t put the tag too far away from your face as the mic is on the tag and not on the earphones – unless you don’t mind taking out the tag and speaking into it every time a call comes in.

I did test the sound and mic quality while wearing the tag as a pendant. Apparently the mic quality is really good. No difference from speaking directly to the phone – according to the person on the other end of the line. And you can trust this person as she is the one whom I speak to most often over the phone – my dearest BB! :)

Listening to music from the phone is now so convenient as I just need to press play on the tag and my Moto starts playing from the last song I’ve listened to. Basic functions like FF, FW and volume works as it should.

If only Moto has its voice dial function better, this would have been a superb handsfree for me – calling from phonebook without the need to access the phone.

New Furniture

Had a bit of time on my hands…. so I decided to make some minor changes to my room. Just minor minor ones… specifically my PC and TV area :)

I have been know to like to change the orientation of my room every few years. It makes the room feel “nicer” with a new breath of “freshness”. Have something in my mind now but we’ll just see how it goes later on.

The room originally looked like this.

Bought a rack, some drawers and a notice board from Tesco. Did a little modification and now it looks like this

You can never have enough place to store everything, especially if you keep almost everything like me!!! Gonna make a light feature / shelf for the bed in a day or two. Just can’t seem to figure out how I like the design best. Will post once its up.

PC Upgrades!!

It has been some time since I've done anything to my PC..... Needed to do some upgrades in the graphics department so that I can at least play SOME of the graphics intensive PC games :)

Bought a new graphics card.... not the latest model by a far shot, but will serve my purpose. Its a Palit nvidia 9800GT 512MB card.


Very basic "stuffs" included....


The driver CD, manual, spdif cable, molex to pcie power and of course the card itself.

So all set??? No. Coz then I remembered I had to upgrade my PSU as well. The original 300W PSU wasn't going to cut it and so I bought a Acbel E2 510.


The real watage of this is around 450W and this will be enough to power the new card together with my 3 HDDs, DVD Rom and some fans.

With the basic stuff ready I began to dismantle my PC to install the new stuffs. Some pics so show the process....

PSU installed.... had to tidy up the "snaking" cables.....

TADA!!!! all neat and tidy..... but I HAVE NOT INSTALLED THE GRAPHICS CARD!!!! %^&%^^&%^$%$^$^$^$^^@##@@

So I took out the older nvidia 8600GS.... and tried to put the new card in.... OPS! Problem....
Apparently the manufacturer of my mobo either did not expect graphics card to be able to grow to the length they are now or the did not expect users of a mATX mobo to slot in a full length PCIe card. The SATA ports were in the way of the card!!

What to do???? In the end I had to bend the end of the new card a little so that it slots in between the 2 rows of SATA ports. Here's how it looks like:
A closer look......
Was advised its not good the bend the card so I'll have to shop for a PCIe 1x SATA controller. Found out where to buy it but have not done so :P At least the rig works.

But I am satisfied for the time being. :) 3Dmark06 gave a score of about 12k so I'm happy.

Assurance or Lies?

Hmmmmm.... when does assurance become a lie?

When you assure someone about something that even you are not 50% sure?

When you assure just to be able to get away from the persistent asking and questioning?

Who is to be blamed? The one who lies or the one who keeps on "forcing" for the assurance?

The general reasoning is, "Don't bug me consistently and at the wrong time and I will not need to give you false assurance"

Quite often the one who seeks assurance do not even know what they are asking for. They want this, they need that. All without even going through their minds HOW is it going to be possible at the first place. When other people feel that you are plainly asking for the impossible and apparently they have no way or no mood to argue with you, they give false assurance.

But that is not to say the liar is not in the wrong. If your version of the truth is so important or the issue involved is quite serious, then there is no reason to give false assurance as the whole matter will fall apart soon enough.

But in general, I feel that people in either of these two categories match well with each other. One often needs to be lied to while the other lies so that everyone can get on with their lives.

Wake up people. Both "assurance seeker" and "fake assurance giver" is not going to get anything out of this.

:P

Home-made Lamp

BB and me decided to get a little hands-on to make our own lamp. Actually its more like a modification of my existing (also self-made) lamp.

To put it simply, I had two bamboo candle holder as the stand, drilled some holes so that I can put in the bulb holder, reused the metal frame from 2 old lamp shades and a few pieces of bamboo sheets. Put them all together with strings and glue.... WALA... 2 nice bedside lamps!!!!



The shades were almost done when we realised we did not take any photos of the process..... :)


We took turns to sew the bamboo sheets together as each shade took slightly more than a piece of the the sheet. The finished product looked like this:


A closer look at the finished shade.....


And this is what is looks like when its lighted! Not bad huh??? :)

Messy Hotel Room

Just look at how messy the room is after one night!!!! Hahahaha.....

We were preparing to go for the wedding dinner. BB is putting her make up on.

CNY and New Stuffs!!!

Chinese New Year has just passed and I'm back to work today.

It was a good time for me to have some well deserved rest as work was terribly busy before the CNY and will continue to be in the coming weeks.

BB and me went to the Nando's at the Zon. To think that we had an unpleasant experience at the Nando's at Plaza Pelangi, this should be better. But we were wrong. It seems that Nando's sucks at customer service. I'll spare everyone the details and go to the happy part :P



Hehehehe both BB and me were wearing stripes on that day :) The next day I was at BB's place. Was tired though.... and was playing with her phone..... :P

Went shopping for a laptop backpack.... BB and me were at the Nike shop for quite a while coz we were trying to decide which back was nicer. Any comments? I haven't bought the backpack yet, but I tend to like the one in the 1st photo. Small, and made of thicker material with some leather.

I like this... RM129

This is also RM129. It has a small opening near the top so that earphones can slip out there and into the ears.

This one is the most expensive. RM219!!!! Suppose to be the latest model, with some "AIR" technology on the straps and back pads. :)

BTW my laptop's only 12" so I don't need a big bag to fit. Just to carry an additional A4 file and the usual laptop accessories. Anyone with other suggestions???

Dell Vostro 1200

Finally its here!!!

Imagine the frustration with Dell when I placed the order on the 11 January and a few days later they told me due to multiple part shortage, the shipment date is pushed to 28 January!!!!

Thank goodness it arrived on the 25th instead.

No doubt this is a company laptop and so I'm constrained by a little budget. Otherwise I would have gotten the XPS 1330 with LED screen. But my boss would kill me by then....... :P

All that said, I'm actually very pleased with this baby. The specs which I got was:

• Core 2 Duo 7250
• 2 gb RAM
• 160GB HDD
• 1200x800 Truelife screen
• Intel X3100 Graphics
  
• 2MP camera and fingerprint scanner
• WIFI a/g/n
• Bluetooth 2.0
• 6 cell battery
  
• Vista Business edition
  
• "Small" Dell carrying bag
• 2GB Thumbdrive

The first thing I noticed was that its quite fast. I have a Core 2 Duo 6300 PC at home running Vista Home Premium and the Vostro IS noticeably faster during startup/shutdowns as well as when doing graphical "stuffs".

If you haven't noticed, the battery has a section that "sticks" out from the chassis. Not particularly good looking. :P

The keyboard is acceptable but the ".", "," and "/" keys are half sized. So it takes a while to get used to. Also the function key is on the right side of the right ctrl key so you tend to press the func key when you are trying to press ctrl.

Whats cool and what I liked most was that all the indicator lights and media keys are in blue!!!! :D Even the LED for webcam and the indicator on the adaptor are blue. Hahahahhaha !!! I love it!!!
















Battery life should be ok as I was on WIFI, surfing while doing some Word and Excel files and iTunes playing in the background for slightly over 2 hours and the capacity was 49% remaining.

This is how it looks like in a dark environment. Imagine if all the keys are lighted up in blue too!!!! Hahahahaha that would be TOO much for me!!!!












I've yet to test the WIFI N connection. I'm thinking of getting the Belkin N router. I've seen it at the shops selling for about RM380. I think the price can be bargained a little. :)


Till then I'll be "messing" with this baby for most of my working hours. In short I am happy with this baby.

Update on my new Aztech modem/router....

Its wonderful!!! Very fast... almost twice faster in downloading speeds than my precious modem. Initially I kept on experiencing intermittent disconnection from the web, especially my MSN and Google sidebar. However after fiddling with some settings (both modem and PC side), everything's smooth now. And the download speed is just incredible.

Hmmm.... I also reformatted by c: drive as too many "unforced" errors have begun to crop up from my XP system recently. I guess thats to be expected since I install and uninstall plenty of programs constantly, not to mention tweaking of the UI, settings, etc etc.... I guess there comes a time when everything has its limits! No amount of registry cleaning, optimizing could have saved my system :)

Since almost everything was gonna start from fresh, I thought it will be a good idea to have a new Visual Style to my XP system. I don't use the popular WindowBlinds, as no matter how little resources they claim it uses, I just didn't like the idea of the need to run a background program for cosmetic purposes. I prefer the normal VS edits.

I like BLACK.... so this is another black VS that I found. But I have to say, this is also the BEST VS I've found to date. Kudos to the creator!!!

Check it out!!!

Lightning Fried My Modem This Afternoon!!!! :(

Its the end of the year again when we are greeted by the annual monsoon season.

This afternoon was greeted by the typical thunderstorm - heavy rains with lightning and thunder!! Unfortunately my PC and modem were on and online.... so the unfortunate happened. The lightning fried my modem.....

When I found that I was offline and the modem's DSL light was not on, I knew the lightning had done its job. At first I was worried that my Ethernet port on the PC might be fried as well but thank goodness after checking I found that only the modem has kaput-ed.

RIP my trusty modem.... its has been serving me for about a year, and tirelessly too since my PC is very very seldom offline.

I depend a lot on the internet as it is where I play my games, find my info, do my blogging and most importantly keep in touch with my BB across the causeway. So I had to find a replacement fast.

So after the rain stopped I got to the local PC store and bought a new modem :)

Its a Aztech 2 port router/modem. You may be wondering why not go for the Wifi Router/Modem combo since I'm buying a new modem. First, I only have one PC at home. No laptop... so theoritically a normal modem would suffice. The extra port in the new modem was for BB to be able to connect through USB whenever she brought her laptop to my place. Secondly, with the new Wifi n specification in draft, I was hoping to get a router with the new specs instead of the regular b/g specs.

All in all I'm very pleased with the new modem. It looks nice and setup was also a breeze. Here's how it looks on my PC.

Hehehehe the stand is included so that the modem can be arranged vertically.... AND its WHITE in color!!! Nice....

I guess I'll just have to disconnect the next time there is a thunderstorm, although the one year warranty for the new modem SPECIFICALLY states that it is "inclusive of damage caused by lightning strikes" :D

A Pleasant Surprise!!!

Came back after sending BB to the taxi station today and my mom came into my room to talk to me. She told me,

"It would be a good thing to think more of you uncle and appear in his dreams more often."

I was like, "HUH??? What are you talking about??"

So my mom showed me a present that this uncle gave me.




Apparently, this uncle of mine dreamt that he was looking at this watch and I was beside him, and kept telling him that the watch is "gorgeous". You see, my uncle is a watch collector, and he collects all sorts of watches, not just those expensive one.... whatever watch that he comes across and finds it nice, he will buy it. So anything from tens to thousands of ringgit would be equally appealling to him.

My lousy handphone wouldn't take a clear picture of a close up object, so I had to get the picture from the net.












Its actually a Citizen dual time watch. It actually has 2 clock faces so that you could have 2 different times on the same watch face.

I like the watch!!! Although the watch face is a little big for my small wrist ( I have very small wrists for a guy), I still like it a lot.

So thank you to my beloved uncle, and the "me" in his dream who kept on saying the watch looked gorgeous to have made this happen!!!! LOL!!!!