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Tulip Festival

Just a quick entry.

Was at the Tesselaar Tulip Farms near the Dandenong ranges in suburban Melbourne yesterday. It was a disaster of a trip, cause as we just arrived, the rain started to pour like a tropical thunderstorm. There was mud everywhere, it was cold, it was windy and the rain kept us under any roof for a good half hour. Heh, not all doom and gloom, the rain finally lifted for a window of another half hour as we got down to the tulip patches and what a sight to behold. Natural waterdroplets from the rain made the tulips exude a freshness you’d not otherwise find. Very good for photos, but the muddied ground detracted the scenery a bit.

It was Dutch week at the tulip farm (its more like a tulip festival) and the local staff were dressed in dutch attire with wooden clogs and started dancing round and round. Heh, there was lots to see and describe, from the Asian tourists (they had lots of gestures and mumblings) to the local farm dog that was all muddied and carrying around a muddied tennis ball. You could play fetch with the dog as it’d go scampering off for the tennis ball once you hurl it in the air. Good fun.

Bought myself a tulip pot. Said pot was only $6 with 3 bulbs and nearly $30 odd cheaper than a lovely Phalaenopsis orchid, which I’ve been wanting to keep in my room. Heh, it’s sitting there now with three buds (will update a picture tonight) and I hope to be able to make it stay alive for longer than a month. The orchid would have been a better decision to get as orchids are hardy plants and require little attention other than the occasional watering. My jaw nearly dropped at the amount of effort you needed to put in to keep the tulips growing (and that’s not even flowering).

Heh, a stormy Sunday. Something to remember for a while.

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Update: My flower pot!

Spring

• Listening to: Jay Chou - Tui Hou (Still Fantasy)

Spring is my kind of season. There is the annoyance of hay fever if you become allergic to the pollens floating in the air, but other than that, it’s quite nice all over.

The weather’s a little warmer now and it doesn’t get quite as extreme. Sure it can be warm one day, start raining and a little chilly the next, but that’s better than the extreme ends in winter or summer. My favourite thing about spring is that the sun rises roughly around 615am, meaning that I can get back to the habit of getting up early and doing things. Heh, you just don’t feel motivated when you wake up and the sky is still pitch black.

Was angry two weeks ago, fell ill from that and feel much recovered now. Heh, the angst was needed, to review life a little and get a little more punch out of each day. There are times you just wonder where you are heading, and you feel a little lost when the foreseeable future only seems to be the same daily routines. You just want to break away. Heh, not one to complain about what I don’t have and would rather work around personal shortcomings to achieve something. The season change is a personal motivator at the moment and am working a little timetable to get things done.

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Spring is really here. Heh.

Lifecycle of a Whim

Heh, this probably isn’t a post that happens often.

Apple announced their new iPods yesterday and the new line seems to fit my needs personally. I’m talking specifically of the new Nanos, with the aluminium exterior to make it less scratch prone (I haven’t tried, but I believe that if you ran your finger nail through the older Nano, you’d leave a scratch mark on it). It also has an astounding 24 hours of playback time all in that small little package (it really does feel smaller than a credit card) and most importantly, it charges off normal USB connections, so I can basically bring it anywhere and just plug it into someone’s computer for a recharge. All these features, on a 2GB Nano for only $219! That sits inline with my demand and supply curve and would readily appeal to me as an impulse good (gee, all the Economics and Marketing terminology is surfing).

Why do all these details matter to me? I have the older 15GB iPod which is left sitting in a corner more than I have headphones hooked to it playing music in my ear. My original iPod got scratch marks and fingerprints the moment I started using it, but since it’s not supposed to worry as much aesthetically, that didn’t really bug me at the time. Having been around for 2 years or so, the battery has sort of died out, as it now lasts only a meagre two hours at max on a single charge. Due to its clunkiness, I don’t use it often and if it sits idle for more than 36 hours (I think), the iPod turns itself off instead of the normal sleep mode. Starting the iPod from the ground up requires the device to spin up the hard disk and that is basically the most power consuming exercise it can do, taking out half the battery charge when it does that. The benefit of a Nano? Flash memory. Energy usage is mean and lean, that’s why Apple advertises the 24 hour mark (although you take these advertising statements with a pinch of salt, as they are benchmarked under the most ideal conditions). So power is a problem, you should just recharge it more often. That works, if only I remember to do it. I sometimes forget to charge my handphone overnight, but no issues, it charges via a generic USB cable (a few years back, owning a Nokia handphone guaranteed you a 90% success rate in borrowing a same brand charger as most people used their phones back then) so I can just plug it in and forget about it. Being a niche product that it was a few years back, iPods used Firewire cables to recharge and USB did not provide an electric charge to the battery. Firstly, Firewire isn’t standard on ANY PC even to this day (it was an interface designed by Apple, hence royalties need to be paid when implementing said interface in producet, hence increased prices by manufacturers, hence reduced margins, hence why most manufacturers don’t bother with it – gee, Accounting at work here), so it’s rather hard recharging it like I do my phone, and I tend to be forgetful until it’s too late.

Anyway, that mouthful of a paragraph registered in my brain in less than a nano second (no pun intended) and at $219, I was itching to buy the Nano. Other undisclosed benefit was me spending more time listening to music. I went to work, did some comparisons, even went to the local Apple store to see if any where in stock. Nope, the staff didn’t know when they’d arrive, other than a box showing up one day and walla, new iPods. Even made it as far as adding the Nano to a shopping cart on Apple’s own website. 24 hour delivery time, not too bad, at least it satisfies the criteria of being something that I can tangibly hold within said period of time.

This is where I hit an impediment in all my purchase deals. While you do not see physical cash, swiping of plastic cards or keying in numbers on a screen does give you the sense that you are exchanging money for something else. Now, I could go into another nano second paragraph of how I spent money acquiring things only for them to tumble in price later. They’re usually priced pretty well by then but not a mainstream item as yet. I don’t regret those decisions as all my gadgetry and whiz kid knowledge has been acquired from making such tech purchases. Part of the blame for the process not going through was the engraving service Apple provided (a free engraving of some letters on the back of your iPod for personalisation). Firstly I did not know what to write on it, secondly, it has no added value to me, furthermore delaying delivery time by an extra 24 to 48 hours. No thank you I thought, and was about to make the purchase when I was chatting with a friend online. She thought that the whole idea of the iPod was for something personalised and that the engraving service was the neatest part of the entire package. “You don’t want your iPod to be like the billions of other iPods out there do you?”

*sigh*. Succumbed to outside influences, dawdled at the engraving screen a bit, adding to the dilemma of should I spent/not spend the money as I’m buying something useful but not necessary. Heh, finally decided to stop bothering, and there the grand scheme of buying a new iPod Nano fizzled into non existence. All within less than 12 hours, an idea was born, given life and fueled, nearly getting pulled off before its plug was pulled and it disappeared into oblivion. Heh, and thus concludes the Lifecycle of a Whim.