Little Bits Here and There

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Had some nice vibrant blue skies on my walk with Alfie and I decided to turn it into a black and white photo and really love the results.

Really hoping for another upgrade to the sensor and lens of the next iPhone. Heh, it’s as much a camera to me as it is a phone and I like the camera function so much, even if the 28mm equivalent focal length is a bit wide for my tastes.

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Back to normal scheduling I suppose. Diablo 3 was released on Tuesday and I think I’ve spent a little too much time playing it. Heh, it’s been 12 years since Diablo 2 and that was also a big time sink. The formula of gameplay is almost the same, but there’s some streamlining to make it more accessible.

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Celebrated Alfie’s 2nd birthday on Saturday. Well, the humans celebrated it, he just got to eat a lot of goodies from everyone around. He’s very affectionate and will follow you round. He even came down to the living room to watch the Champion’s League final with me, although both of us ended up sleeping through bits of the match.

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Moving along with related work. Still lots of things to figure out. Back to getting stuff done.

Intensity

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Getting better luck with images I like from my phone these days. Sometimes it’s good to be able to do some quick tweaks from my phone to get an interesting image out.

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I am so glad that I have finished my CPA papers and I really hope that this is the last formal exam I have to sit through for the rest of my life.

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Feeling a little tired, only because I was overdid yesterday. Was up at 8 to play basketball with some friends and that was 2 hours of physical activity. Heh, I manage to contribute a little more each time I go as I alter my approach to the game, and my muscles are aching today as I haven’t really been mobile or stretching muscles as much as I should be on a regular basis.

Helped out a friend with her new place and assembled some furniture as well as doing some painting. Heh, the experiences from moving into my current place came back, and it was good that I could be efficient going about helping out.

Finished the day playing some Catan with friends and watching the FA cup final between Chelsea and Liverpool. My friends were disappointed that Liverpool lost, but I was impressed with how Chelsea got into the game and held on towards the very end when Liverpool started their siege towards the Chelsea goal.

The match ended at 420am, and while I did nap through some of the match, was pretty tired by the end of it.

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Heh, so it was a little too intense with the amount of activity from yesterday. Need to get back to a schedule of doing things starting Monday. There’s plenty of things I’ve promised various people over the last couple of weeks, so it’s going to be pretty hectic and I’ll need to balance between learning new things to do stuff and just getting on with getting the work done.

Mismatched Technology

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Some grass growing out of the ground just beside my garage. A picture before I chopped it down. As nice as it looks, I’d prefer not to have too much overgrown stuff on my compound.

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Having a case of insomnia at the moment, so I might as well spend the time doing something productive. Heh, and the rain decides to fall now.

Did some studying and accounting does have its allure from time to time. I love hindsight, and how I should have approached things differently. Then again, as I always think to myself, have I had a clearer purpose in life, I would not have experienced some of the things I did. Then again, I wonder if I had picked my purpose more clearly, on whether I would have had a fuller experience of it. Sometimes reviewing life is like an onion, you go through one layer being satisfied with your perception of it until you think a little more and find that maybe it wasn’t so clear cut. Having said that, I don’t think I had the mental capacity to pull off what I’m doing now. Fear of failure was a very big part of me and I’m slowly trying to overcome that.

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I like the challenge of having to do something for others. It’s like when I’m fixing someone’s computer, you don’t think it’s a problem until you see it firsthand, as I rarely come across said problems because I have a logical way of avoiding issues with my own computers.

As usual I try to make something simplified to use for a friend. I need to get media on a DVD that would play on a regular DVD player. Simple enough but we are in 2012, where HD content is common place, but the DVD format does not support 720p and above resolutions. So you pretty much need to down res your video to 480p to get it to work. Then I ask myself, why suffer the quality loss? I’d chuck it on a Blu-ray disc, but unlike DVD, that didn’t really become a mainstream format due to competing technologies like video streaming when bandwidth on the Internet became common place and relatively cheap.

Heh, so I’ve been facing a mismatch of technologies, looking at Blu-ray drives, dual layer DVD discs for the increased storage and also having the option of Lightscribe, something I discovered only a day ago. As usual, getting compatibility for all of that required me to look on eBay, the local shops etc and that’s why Apple and Amazon is such a big hit with most consumers these days. It’s a one stop solution for pretty much most of what you want to do.

It also makes me wonder if optical discs are going the way of the floppy, and soon to be extinct. It is physical media, but most people can afford large hard drives these days that pretty much keep your life story on it with space to spare. Not to mention cloud technologies which offer a simple backup solution. Heh, although not everyone my generation is familiar with all the new methods of keeping your data intact.

Anyhow, it’s just my personal rant, I’m sure I’ll figure something out soon enough. I like how all the ideas come pouring forth from my mind when I have an exam to study for. Heh.