On the nth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me nx, (n-1)x, (n-2)x…
The start of the December holidays always begins with a guilt struck period of procrastination. Then you realise when you get back your exams are just around the corner and you panic. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. It shouldn’t, it can’t. Uhoh, braindump in progress.
Anyhow, this Christmas I’m going to be hopping over to Canada to catch up with my relatives – first Toronto, then a bit in Quebec. Living on the other side of the world keeps our visits rare and therefore quite action-packed. Not to mention the complete change in weather – snow is a rarity in Malaysia.
Doing some Christmas shopping yielded a lovely blouse and camera (combined present) for my mum. Due to computer literacy of my other two family members I won’t yet reveal what I got the others. It also lost my faith in Malaysian technology awareness. It seems as though in some areas of technology Malaysia seems to be lagging far behind.
The first example was when I was searching for an ebook reader (mainly out of curiosity). I could only find one, at MPH (a popular bookstore), and it turned out that even they had just begun selling it. It had a hefty pricetag of 1200RM (~equal purchasing power of 1200USD in the US) and featured a lagtastic interface marketed by a guy who didn’t even know how to turn the thing on. Definitely not worth the price – it won’t be surprising if as a result MPH decides it was a bad decision and stops selling it.
The second came when I attempted to find out if the ZuneHD had come out in Malaysia yet – apparently not. The ZuneHD, for those that don’t already know, is a music player by Microsoft apparently rivaling the iPod. WIth an NVidia Tegra chipset, it’s supposed to be blazing fast and it’s interface is apparently a pleasure to use – not to mention an amazing screen. Of course like Apple, it’s locked into some proprietary Windows-only music management application which makes it useless to me. However I didn’t get to check it out as – yep, it doesn’t exist in Malaysia.
In unrelated news, I am now an idea moderator on the KDE forums. That means I take a peek at the upcoming killer-features KDE will have in the brainstorm section and approve them. The brainstorm is one of the best things any software should have – it gives users a voice – someplace where they can say "hey, could you create/improve this?". Other people can chip in and vote and ultimately a developer will pick one up for his next task. If you’re a KDE user, go and throw in your vote.
Merry Christmas everybody, I’ll hopefully have a real update in January.
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Josh Wilkinson says: (18 December 2009)
p. says: (19 December 2009)
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