My first girlfriend

Since my polytechnic days, I’ve wanted to have my own laptop. But I never got around to buying it because I was too poor.

Then after I started working and could afford one, I didn’t buy because the laptops back then were heavy, bulky, slow, ugly and still expensive.

Fast forward a few more years, there’s a lot of good laptops now but because there’s so many choices, and it’s so much trouble to compare all of them, I gave up.

And at this time, I don’t know if I will make good use of it even if I have one. So I borrowed a laptop from work to use. I went to a StarBucks outlet, ordered coffee and went on to catch up on articles that I’ve accumulated through the people I follow on twitter and stored at Read-it-Later.

It proved to be a good experience. I could focus on my what I want to do and not get distracted by that silly MMORPG I’ve installed on my home computer. Most importantly, there’s air-con. It can be so warm at home I don’t feel like getting work done.

And now, after much research, I’ve decided to go with a Dell m301z. It costs SGD $1199 (USD $870).

  • It’s within my budget.
  • Acceptable screen resolution, touchpad design and keyboard layout.
  • Has bluetooth so I can tether to my iPhone and surf the net.
  • Has good battery life. Easily lasts me 2-3 hours.
  • A dual core 64bit CPU with virtualization support so I can try out MacOSX on a VirtualBox.
  • 4GB ram.

So far it’s working really great. Everything’s smooth despite not having a dedicated graphics board. I don’t need one because I don’t intend to game on this laptop.

I wanted a dual core 64bit CPU with 4GB ram because I know I’ll be running lots of apps as I do development work on my personal website projects.

It comes installed with Windows7 64bit Home Premium. And we all know Windows 7 is the best OS Microsoft has made since the 3.1 days.

Yesterday and today, I spent 2 hours at Burger King getting all the things I’ve wanted to do, done. I’ve organized and synchronized my browser bookmarks between 2 computers at home, 1 at work and this new laptop.

I’m also done setting up apache/mysql/php so I can start working on a new version of Tarutarutimes-Online.

Just 2 days and I know that my money has been well spent. I just love this laptop! I named it Kanojo (Girlfriend in Japanese) after the female character in Houkago Play. In the 4-square comic, she doesn’t have a name and is just referred to as “Kanojo”. Sort of like “The Girlfriend”.

KANOJO

After almost 2 years exploring photography…

I strongly do not believe the saying that you don’t need a good camera/lens to take good photos.

Well, if you don’t care about the quality but just the composition, yes.

But in order to take photos with sharp quality, nice background blur, under various lighting conditions, you really need a good camera and lens. A good camera that will cost at least SG$3000 and lens at least SG$1000.

I may be wrong, but I would still stubbornly disagree until someone is able to convince me that I can take “National Geographic”-like photos with a Nikon D80 and cheap 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 VR lens.