My new addiction is on my new PSP game, Patapon, a well spent $19.99, which take my nights away, leaving me with puffy eyes and a rhythmic daze. Patapon is a new PSP game just release a month ago which shares the same art director as Loco Roco. It is a 2D game, where you only go forward to the left, you guide a bunch of eyeball warriors moving forward to the right fighting other enemy pons and monsters, destroying walls, buildings and rocks. Unlike Loco Roco, which I loved the gameplay, this game test your patience and keeping your cool in rhythm. I have been playing the game for a week, and I am stuck at level 8, and I am giving up. God of War has been released, and I got my sights set on it. I will most probably go back and play loco roco till God of War arrives.

You can try the flash game here.
Watch how it looks like in youtube.

Well, maybe not the current version, but I believe in time, we will have one macbook that is lighter than the feather. I woke up this morning going along my day and when I power up my Safari and Bam! Apple have released a new Macbook Air. First impression was it looked like an UFO, especially on the side view. After browsing further, it looks so great that I drooled for one imediately. It comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo, 1.6Ghz or 1.8Ghz processor. I don’t recognize the processor at all. After reading from some of the Tech sites, I found out that the processor is a custom design that Intel does for Apple. When you are the industry leader in style, design and performance, big companies are willing to bend a little to cater for you. On the ram arena, it comes with a 2Gig of ram, which is a good start. With the price of rams droping so rapidly, many of the industry laptop leaders are moving towards 4G as basic offering. 2Gig is a modest start. The option to upgrade to an 64Gig of Solid State Drive on the other hand obsoleted the need for the 4 Gig of Ram. Lighter and quieter laptop you can expect with the 64Gig of solid state drive. The battery life boast an awsome 5 hours of wireless play, meaning if you are just doing normal computing with screen brightness turn to low, it will last longer. Say goodbye to bulky and heavy battery extension. Not only less power consumption and lighter, this new macbook comes with a list of nifty innovasions. Firstly, the touchpad. I remember 10 years back, I was looking at my friend’s macbook that has a touchpad and i was like WOW, it was my first time seeing a touchpad. Others in the industry was using the nipple tug between the keyboard for mouse control, Apple has the touchpad. Today, the touchpad have been improved with multi-touch, where it could recongize pinch, swipe, etc, mimicking the way we read books. On wireless, the macbook supports the 802.11n, with a max datarate of 248Mbit/s, its the fastest in it’s class. Now, if only the SuperDrive could be wireless, then this is truely innovation. With a weight of 3 pounds and 0.76 inch in height, it would be a hit to the college students. Then again with a $1799 price tag for a basic Macbook air it might not fly off the shelves just yet. This would be my wishlist for this year’s Christmas present. Maybe with a price reduction by next year college starts we can see this in the lecture halls.

I have been in the company for almost 3 weeks now, and I have not seen a single techqie yet. I have seen quite a lot of fasionable people, but none that are hung up on gadgets nor computers. I was working with one of the manufacturing expert asking her if she has found the thumb scanner next to the laptop screen useful? And her response was like, eh, what’s that thing? When I explain what it was, I can see the amazement on her eyes that her 1 year old laptop has this feature. I have also notice that 50% of the population uses WinXP default theme and color scheme, and 50% of the population uses the windows classic look. I was surprise that they know how to use the window classic to speed up their computer. I was in a discussion with one of the program manager and I commented him on how smart he is to use windows classic to speed up the laptop. He noted that he was thought to do it by someone, but didn’t know the purpose. Anyway, his laptop was only a little over a year old, and didn’t need the speed boost anyway. Everyone seams to use the computer for its intention and none did any personalization. None has any sticker on their laptop as well. How boring. Well, this is going to change. I will be the first to have stickers and the minute I get my new laptop, I will pimp it up with OSx theme. Lets see if I manage to get some heads turn and poison them to modify the desktop like I did with my previous company.

Well, Gigabyte is not that new to me, I have seen their motherboards in the market for quite some time, but Amtek is totally new to me. These two companies have recently launch their UMPC (Ultra Mobile Personal Computer) at Cebit, and its spanking hot. What could be the next hot thing after Digital Cameras and Portable MP3 players? To me UMPC will be the hot future. With the introduction of 3G and WiMax, this enable high speed internet connection anywhere within a given city and this will help to push UMPC from the techno geek to the average user. Imagine, lost in a city, just pop up your UMPC for a google map. Need Cash, and need a PC to make money transfer? Just pop up your UMPC to do the transaction and withdraw from the nearest ATM machine. Applications are limitless. The biggest challenge to the UMPC makers are how to make the device powerful and yet lightweight and cool looking. Imagine the UMPC released by Gigabyte and Amtek, as thin as the Motorola Razr Phone, how hot is that…

On my recent trip to Bukit Larut, my digital camera failed to operate a couple of times with the error message E18. This Canon A95 of mine is already 2 years old, and incidentally my first digital camera Nikon 2500 also broke down 2 years plus. It looks like digital cameras don’t last that long do they, at least from my perspective they don’t. The Nikon 2500 had a sensor problem, and I did not send the camera for repair at that time, mainly because I was in the US. I got the Canon A95 as a replacement. This time round, I sent the Canon for repair, because I could not afford a new camera at the moment and also I wanted to test out the how was it like to service camera.

I sent the A95 to the closest Canon branch, and they said the camera will have to be sent to KL. It will take 3-4 weeks to repair, and should not exceed 4 weeks as stated in the receipt. The camera can also be tracked through an online ticket, to find out where or what’s the status of the repair (awesome). One could option to check the repair status online, or through the mobile phone. If only other service industry have this tracking system. Its kinda like tracking UPS shipment, however, there are not that many check points, and so, what it says is just “Repair in Progress”, like this will help a lot, but having a system like this is the first step. The dreaded part is no photo taking for one full month, and I don’t think the service industry have gone that far as providing a temporary replacement.

Update: Got the camera back within 3 weeks, fixed, and best of all FOC… yeahoo…