Back to the dinner series. Tonight’s meal was burger and fries. It was kind of simple, just peeled the potatoes, cut them into wedges and fried them in oil. Heh, although one should really eat their food as soon as it’s prepared as things go cold quite fast. The burger had salad, cheddar, ketchup and raw onions, for the zing. Usually I’d butter the bread buns, but just only heated them in the pan today.

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This was last week’s acquisition, the Eee PC on the right, next to my 12″ laptop. Heh, I know I said it wasn’t quite right for me, but while at the Apple Store on 14th St and playing with the iPhone a bit, I realised that even with a smallish screen, web browsing was very much doable. Firefox 3 (in beta as I write this) has the same capability as Safari and Opera to zoom in and out of pages to fit your screen size, so this left me with only one worry for the Eee PC. I wasn’t sure if the keyboard would be too small for me. When it finally arrived on Tuesday, I plucked it out from it’s packaging and tried my hand at typing stuff. It’s 2/3 the size of a regular keyboard but my not so giant Asian hands fit it quite nicely, and typing at the regular 70 words per minute wasn’t too difficult.

The Eee PC comes with the Xandros Linux operating system. My short week with it has allowed me to discover how fun Linux is as an operating system. If all I did was email, surf the web, do instant messaging, watched videos and listened to music, I think Linux would be the easy way to go. Unfortunately, there is still a steep learning curve, and I’d still need to know how things work before I’m comfortable migrating over to it as a daily operating system. One thing that impressed me was the responsiveness of the system (it’s a lowly 900MHz Celeron which has been underclocked) and eventhough I upgraded the internal memory to 2GB, for once I think that this is overkill for a system. Starting up, running Firefox, Skype and Pidgin (instant messenger) barely used up 250MB of RAM. Talk about efficient. Heh.

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Heh, sort of dragging myself towards the finishing line of this marathon race that is at the moment. It’s nearly a year now I’ve been here and I am quite happy to go back to Melbourne. Heh, other than the many great options of being a consumer here in the States (you get cheap electronics, speedy internet, cheap food), I’m quite happy to just go back to Melbourne. Sure it doesn’t rain as much and we have water restrictions, and it’s ok that things are higher priced due to logistics (and apparently they researched that Australians were more willing to tolerate higher prices, I’m like what????) as most things are imported anyway. It’s also okay that Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure is quite backward (due to the vastness of land here, it’s not feasible to spend so much on it, or some other reasons), meaning we get crappy Internet where I stay. It’s just a happier place to be at the moment. I can go for weekend brunches, do my grocery shopping at various outlets, get the freshest foods, do my own cooking, invite friends/relatives over for meals, go out with them to try new restaurants or just hang out. Heh, having a beer and watching soccer together with people is one of the simplest pleasures that I enjoy. Quite happy being simple.