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The Garden of Sinners

The Garden of Sinners aka 空の境界

When you have great works like this anime title, I don’t think the people behind it have any reason to worry about piracy.

Because after watching this, I went through a lot of trouble to locate one of it’s rare 1/8 PVC figurine.

Ryougi Shiki - Garan no dou

At first, a local blogger was selling this at $90 SGD (66USD). I made a bid for it.

Another person decided to contest against me. We both continued out bidding each other for over a week.

The person selling has a rule that if someone offers twice the amount of the original selling price, bidding will end and that person will win the bid.

My rival offered $180. I lost the bid.

This then fueled my desire to obtain it. I asked friends to help me keep and eye out and make forum posts to look for it. Even asked the local figurine sellers to help me look out for it.

And one day, one of them found it in Japan and brought it back to Singapore. His price is $235 SGD (173USD) for it. After receiving news that he had brought it back, I went down to his shop immediately to buy it.

Till now,  I don’t feel a single ounce of regret spending so much on it. Each time I think about that day when I first held it with my hands, I can’t help but smile. That’s how much I love this series.

I’ve even managed to find it’s Japanese novels at Kinokuniya and bought them as well. There’s still copies available at both Liang Court and Orchard stores if anyone’s interested.

There’s a few 4-square comics on this series and I’ve bought a few of them.

I’ve also bought the “Seventh Heaven” album by Kalafina featuring the songs that appeared in this movie series.

Seventh Heaven / Kalafina

In my upcoming trip to Japan in November, I will see if I can find the OSTs in the shops of Akihabara.

And now, with news of it’s Bluray discs coming out next year, I’m prepared to say goodbye to another $800 SGD (626USD) just for it.

[Theatrical Anime] Kara no Kyokai / Animation

And guess what caused all this spending spree?

The internet.

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What’s wrong with having one’s purchasing history stored?

Most people seem to freak out when their purchase history is stored.

I don’t see what’s so bad about it.

In fact, because I’ve signed up for a membership card at Kinokuniya and that I shop from them so often, I’ve always hoped they would store my purchase history.

So I can make sure I won’t purchase a manga that I’ve already did in a previous visit. So they can make recommendations to me when a new series is released that matches the genres of manga I’ve purchased in the past. Or alert me when a new book in the series I’m collecting is out for purchasing.

There’s so many things they could do to make my experience with them a better one. And not just me, but many other manga lovers in Singapore.

But because it’s a Japanese company, and from my own observations, they seem to be afraid of trying such things in case it offends their customers, they probably won’t attempt something like this.

But I’ll drop them an email anyway and pray for the better.

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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

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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.

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Fast music is bad for jogging

I pushed myself a little too hard at jogging today.

To the point I fainted.

Judging from the position of the music on my ipod, I suppose I was out for 5~10 minutes.

I felt comfortable, had a dream. Then the image of my mum popped in and in my less than sub-conscious state, as if my body was moving by itself, got up and lied down on the nearest bench.

With my eyes open, I just stared blankly until I mustered enough strength to sit up. Then sat there for a while before I started walking myself home.

Went to a 24 hour clinic which told me I needed to go to the hospital.

Had a deep cut on my chin and little finger, kept bleeding, need to be stitched.

Doctor said I probably didn’t have enough sugar in my blood.

At least now my fears of being close to diabetic can be dismissed.