Lazy daisy

One of the things the package from Uncle Butch and Auntie Carole had inside it, aside from the usual clothes and foodstuffs, was JB's old PlayStation 2. It had been a while since my beloved PS1 (itself a hand-me-down from Tita Hedwig) bit the dust, and I was getting by using emulation to play my old PS1 favorites.

It's funny how late I am with the console gaming industry party nowadays. Two years since the PS3 came out, I just got my own PS2. Not that I'm complaining. I'd rather have a PS2 than an overheating XBox 360 or a PS3 starved of good games.

Seeing how late I obtained the PS2 I was concerned about getting games for it. I don't mind paying for the legit thing now, but if the games are too hard to find that's it for me right there. Surprisingly, DataBlitz's more popular branches have a healthy catalog of genuine PS2 games. I got Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection, and pretty soon I'll be getting Gran Turismo 4 and the Devil May Cry box set.

Suddenly I've rediscovered lazy Saturday afternoons.

A productive week off?

I've been avoiding blogging for a while, I guess. The magic that used to fill me whenever I updated this piece of online estate seems to have gone. Hmmm.

Basically I took the last week of August off. In that span of time, a lot has happened.

The very first day, my six-year-old computer decided to die. Specifically, the motherboard went kaput and refused to accept RAM DIMMs any more. That 1.7GHz Pentium 4 rig lasted us a good six years. No matter, the next day we went to Market! Market! and had ourselves built a ridiculously quick 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad rig, with 2GB of Kingston RAM running at 800MHz and a 320GB Seagate hard disk. Advised against the pratfalls of Windows Vista, I bought a legit CD of Windows XP---my contribution to the cost of the PhP23,500 system.

Tempting as it is to bump up the cost more, my head just spun from the jargon, terminology and insane prices of graphics cards nowadays. Apparently, if I wanted to play anything decent released in the past year, I'd have to cough up PhP9,000 for Nvidia's or ATI's ridiculously named GPUs and onboard memory.

PJ is now a doting father to Chelsea Nikole, so he's out for the week too. Ronald, my colleague at the church choir, got me as godfather to his own three-month-old bundle of joy, Loraine Jane. After a hiatus of a few months, I showed up at my grandma's in Caloocan with the rest of my mom's family to dispense of my godfatherly duties to my own godchild Mikaila.

Mav and I got along better than I expected, considering I had dealt her a lot of pain. I realize she's my friend after all, and one I don't really want to lose. I guess she's also done likewise. We're cool.

Finally I had the chance to visit Cel in Greenhills and ask her out to what my UK-based employers call "afternoon tea." She's doing well, and we chatted away over Mexican food over her sister's wedding plans, the details of her new job come November (at her uncle's Yokohama Tires distributorship---how timely, I was looking for new rubber for my Jazz), and a little something about work (or what she used to call work).

Was my week off a productive one? I'm not sure, despite Mav's retorts to the contrary. If the week off was supposed to be a restful one, it was way, way off the mark. Even so, I'm still sad it's about to end.

Two birds, one gadget

Some of you may know that since my collection of digital music ripped from my CD collection (and some loaned ones) kept growing and growing, I've had my eyes set on getting a digital audio player. (No iPod was ever in my wish list, though.)

Some of you may also know that I've never really liked my cellphone, my mom's hand-me-down Nokia 6600. It's got a lot of features compared to today's models, but I never took to its soap-bar form factor.

Regular readers will remember at this point last year I was looking to get a Nokia 5300 XpressMusic phone---arguably the first or second in that line. The best of both worlds, right?

No.

It was not without its drawbacks. Dismal battery life, a non-standard 2.5mm audio jack and a fragile screen were livable, but the deal-killer was its lack of support for WMA music files, which most of my music is encoded in. The newer 5700 came, went, and addressed the WMA playback, but it looked much less appealing than the 5300.

I spent 2007 loaning my Tita Vik's trusty CD Walkman and soldiering on with the 6600, while whetting my appetite on Attack of the Show's "Gadget Pr0n" and digital audio player reviews on CNET and Anythingbutipod.com.

While wandering in Power Plant, I saw something very promising and put it on my Christmas wish list...and I got it: the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone.


Next to the chunky 5300, 5700 and my 6600, this thing is so slim it's anorexic. The 5300's side-mounted music buttons remain, now wider and made of textured plastic over aluminum. A standard 3.5mm stereo mini jack takes pride of place on the top, next to the proprietary mini-USB jack. I glossed over the equally new but more expensive 5610 XpressMusic because of that audio jack, and I've developed doubts on the reliability of slider mechanisms after seeing the abused demo units in several Nokia stores. The 5310's even light enough to hang on the neckband of my Creative EP-635 earphones. On these earphones the 5310 has a lot of oomph---listening at the lowest volume is plenty loud enough for my ears, and the music quality's very good.

The phone still isn't perfect, though. On prolonged music-playing periods, battery life won't last you two days, and the loudspeaker is on the weak side. In a perfect example of megapixel count not being everything in digital cameras, the 5310's 2-megapixel unit is slow and isn't very good compared to the old 6600's VGA camera. Finally, when playing music, there are infrequent random times when it stops and reupdates its music library. All are livable quirks, and frankly, you really don't buy a 5310 for its camera---you get it because you love music on the go.
===

Thanks, Mom. I didn't think you'd take me seriously when I told you I wanted the 5310 as a Christmas present---I'd really rather prefer to buy my stuff by myself. That's why I appreciate it all the more.

Aural sanctuary

Spelunking around malls on my frequent window-shopping weekends, I've come across many a gadget store and checked out the wares being sold. Usually the ones I fancy run the gamut of digital audio players, cellphones and computer parts like hard disks and flash drives.

One gadget that can't be ignored as of late: headphones and earphones. Headphones I already know well, but my curiosity got piqued when I found tech stores selling fancy earphones for a whopping PhP21,000. What could be so good about a couple of funny-looking earbuds that, on initial impression, just look like they fit better than normal ones? That most earbuds don't fit my finicky ears doesn't help either.

Lucky for me, not all these so-called canalphones or in-ear monitors (IEMs) sell at such exorbitant prices. I chanced upon Creative's EP-635s, costing a much more reasonable (though still pricey) PhP1,500, and I decided to try these IEMs with their fit-adjusting exchangable tips for myself.

Initially I dreaded I may have wasted my money. Bass was a bit lacking, and high notes seemed a little scratchy. It wasn't until I figured out the proper fit of these 'phones---fitting the biggest silicone rubber tips, then twisting them all the way into my ears for an airtight seal---that I realized what the fuss was about.

Instantly I was 80% isolated from the normal noise of my workplace, with nothing but the music and the sounds of my own breathing and swallowing. The satisfying bass thump on my trance CDs began to fill my head, vocals sounded clearer at just 15% total volume, and I could hear instruments on my rock CDs I never noticed before. This was aural sanctuary, and I loved it!

This doesn't mean I condone spending almost twenty times that amount for a Shure E500PTH, but now I'm a convert and I can see why some people spend serious cash on these tiny things.

Now that I'm not broke...

Just as I was trying my best efforts not to spend, along comes my dear old Dad with a couple issues of T3 magazine.

Great.

I have him to thank for ditching the Nokia 5300 and having a new interest in a different phone: the Nokia 6300. My friend Jared actually already has not one but two of the things, which he brought with him on our last night out. Sleek, slender, simple and sonically inclined---what's not to like? Probably just the non-standard 2.5mm headphone jack, I guess. There's an adaptor here somewhere...

I was also poring over the digital music player section too.

Sheesh. Not a penny spent and I'm feeling guilty already.

Aural gratification finally comes...at a price.

Aural gratification finally comes...at a price.

After six weeks of frustration I finally have my very own Pioneer DEH-P7950UB head unit.

My timing couldn't have come any better: when I drove up to Autoline's shop garage this afternoon with my high school friend Paolo Campos in tow, I would eventually claim the only remaining unit in stock. The installation went very quickly, with the center console totally opened, wiring harness hooked up, head unit installed and everything closed up again in a matter of thirty minutes.

The damage was PhP12,000. Now my wallet definitely needs time to heal. I feel a guilty tinge about this whole purchase, but Paolo comforted me by telling me it's an investment.

It's worth putting in a word about the shop. The owner of Autoline was a nice Chinese guy with a lot of stories about his own ride and equipment. He was trying to sell me on other things such as speakers and tints, but I had to take a rain check on his offer. Still, he had good stuff on sale, such as a set of reverse sensors (very practical on my car!), HID lighting kits and a smattering of component speakers and subwoofers. Those will have to wait until Christmas, I guess.

Anyway, I am definitely going to spend the next few months on "budget meals" mode. In the meantime, it's worth sharing that I had the money for the Pioneer head unit a couple of months in advance. Perhaps due to my frustration of not finding it, and the corruption of having that much money in hand, I ended up spending a lot more than I strictly should have, and that's not cool.

Guys, don't make the same mistake: if you can't find what you're looking for, put it back into your account. Don't let a large sum of money sit idly within easy reach. You don't know how quickly that will get depleted.

Thbbbbbt again.

Thbbbbbt again.

I cranked up the Jazz this morning only to find out the Kenwood's CD player refuses to load...again.

Apparently that new head unit can't wait.

Grrrrr. Talk about getting my hopes up.

Good sound can wait.

Good sound can wait.

Three things:

1. Apparently my Kenwood's CD player actually still works. It's just very picky with what CDs it'll read.

2. The Sony CDX-GT460US head unit I was considering is overpriced and short on features compared to Pioneer's top-flight model, the DEH-P7950UB.

Like the Sony, it's got aux-in and USB ports (albeit at the back I think), and has the neat party trick of taking over a plugged iPod's controls via a special cable. Apparently it's so popular it's flown off shops' shelves and many places have problems keeping stocks. Damage is PhP11,300 for the HU alone, adding PhP1,500 for the iPod direct-connect cable. When you think about Sony's top-flight HUs costing PhP18,000, you can't help but wonder there must be something wrong with this picture.

3. Spending on good car audio can wait.

I was considering all my options after getting an aftermarket head unit, which frankly can now wait because the Kenwood's still fine. Do I get separates or coaxial speakers? If I did, where do I put the tweeters and midrange drivers? Do I get an amplifier? Where should I put the damn thing?

The speed at which I've become a car audio nut has surprised me.

Thbbbbbt.

Thbbbbbt.

Monday morning. I was honking along the street linking the Fort to EDSA, listening to "Clubber's Guide to...Trance" when all of a sudden the electronic beat stopped pouring out of my speakers. The silence that ensued was accompanied by odd mechanical clicks and whirrs.

Argh!

That's it. No more excuses.

I am buying the Sony CDX-GT460US head unit as soon as possible, preferably before April 21 comes around.

I am not wasting any more fuel on the ridiculously long trip to the Kenwood center, at least not in the near future. Sure, there's a three-month warranty on the repair, but it's a drag not having any driving music for a week while it's being repaired yet again. And do I even mention the gas wasted on Saturday morning EDSA traffic?

I have reservations on spending this much over the past three months (the DVD player, the Puma sneakers, the Jazz's tuneup), but I haven't exactly exhausted my 14th-month bonus yet so I think this might be the last major extravagance I'm treating myself to for a while. Besides, with the exception of the Pumas, they've all been necessary purchases.

Now if I can only find a buyer for a cheap, plain-jane CD-playing head unit...

Preparing for April

Preparing for April

I made the 32.5-kilometer drive to Frisco once again this morning. My Kenwood head unit is back, after a week and PhP1,100 of repairs, and its CD player finally works like a charm. I was rocking along to The Darkness, Feeder, David Bowie and Garbage along the horrendous traffic of EDSA southbound.

Tita Vik invited me to lunch at their place, as my dad, Tito Kiko and my grandma were going to Baliwag on their usual weekend jaunt. Around the time I got her text message I was crawling just a few minutes away from White Plains, so that was a nifty bit of perfect timing. Grandma's kare-kare is deelish.

Off I went braving the traffic yet again, this time on C5 southbound. My next stop was Glorietta to buy gifts for my folks. While I scouted for and bought them, I eventually ended up buying myself a little gift for myself: a pair of white and red Puma Fluxion sneakers. They're similar to the Speed Cats I have from a couple years ago, in that they're motorsport-inspired. This time I made sure I'd fit these babies properly before buying, and accordingly I got them in the 9.5 size to fit my larger left foot.

By the way, did I mention the Jazz returned 13 km/L on its last fillup? Despite the traffic and the aggravations of slow drivers I'm slowly recouping my fuel economy.

Little bits of good news...

Little bits of good news...

We have DSL now, which is a pretty good thing. I do notice some strange things happening with its installation, however. I had to restart to get the connection going a few times, and for a while my computer won't even shut down properly. There's also this strange error message that displays a countdown timer to shutdown, but when it does hit zero nothing happens. Weird. I never encountered these when I was still on dialup.

I called up the Kenwood service center this afternoon and my head unit seems to have been repaired already. That's great news for my ears, which are starved of my CD collection. It's not exactly easy driving around with headphones and an MP3 player round your neck, either.

There's hope for my Jazz yet. Despite being stuck in traffic for most of the week and a few high-strung moments, I'm now almost at 400 km with 1/8 of a tank to go. That should return 12 km/L at the very least.

Crap. Obsolescence is going places it shouldn't.

Crap. Obsolescence is going places it shouldn't.

It's been a year since I got the Sony CD-Mavica MVC-CD500 digicam as a graduation present from Auntie Carole and Uncle Butch, and, as my Multiply page will attest, it's seen regular use over the past year. It's actually a pretty good camera: full manual exposure control, decent fixed lens, MPEG-1 short-length video capability and a proper flash hot shoe on a 5-megapixel camera are all hard to beat. Unfortunately this early on I see signs that I won't be able to use it for much longer.

You see, the CD Mavica relies on 8cm (3.5-inch) CD-Rs and CD-RWs to record its images, not on solid-state memory cards like most other digital cameras since 2005. As such, it is limited to a maximum of 156MB per CD, and is also subject to the traditional bugbears of optical media such as long read/write time.

When I got the CD Mavica, I got around 20 CD-Rs and one CD-RW along with it. Since then I've been able to buy two more CD-RWs because I like the rewritability of the medium.

Now, the only way to truly erase content on a CD-RW is via formatting it, ergo wiping the whole CD clean. I found out the hard way just a few minutes ago that formatting can also sometimes render a CD-RW totally useless, like it did to two of my CD-RWs. Nowadays CD-RWs that small are ridiculously hard to find, as most discs that size are now DVD-Rs or DVD-RWs, so buying new ones isn't much of an option. (The ones I bought before I probably just got lucky with.)

Still with me are the 8cm CD-Rs that came with my camera, although I did use a few of them for non-Mavica purposes. That leaves me with 15 blank CD-Rs, and nowadays it's increasingly hard to find them in that size, too.

In a nutshell, I have three problems with the CD Mavica.

1. Increasingly hard-to-find storage media.
2. Lack of repair support here...as it's really a US model.
3. Destroyed CD-RW media due to formatting.

All these basically point to one thing: I'll have to replace it sooner rather than later if I plan to continue being an amateur photographer like I am now. After hearing Tita Vik's news of her getting a brand-new Canon EOS 30D digital SLR for something like PhP60,000, I'm beginning to wonder if getting one of those will be a viable option for myself in the future...

That's the thing I despised with the arrival of digital cameras, particularly digital SLRs. With the Nikon FM, I was confident that as long as there is film, I could use it and not be subject to the obsession with obsolescence the technology world has. Now that film is on the wane and I've succumbed to the lure of digital photography, I'm subject to the same ridiculously short time limits that dictate "your equipment is obsolete" all too soon.

At least Nikon made sure my existing lenses will be future-proof...so if I'm ever in the market for a digital SLR it'll probably be a Nikon for me. I'm suddenly a little jealous of Adrian's Nikon D50...

What happened to my camera?

What happened to my camera?

It's been roughly ten months since I last got to use my dad's old Nikon FM SLR. Ever since Uncle Butch and Auntie Carole gave me that Sony CD Mavica digicam as a belated graduation present, I've mothballed the FM.

Tonight I decided to exercise its internal mechanisms a little. Nothing could prepare me for what my cabinet had in store for me, though.

I was shocked to see blue-green stuff that looked like dried-up toothpaste building on the nooks and crannies of the FM's controls. It certainly looked like either mold or some kind of fungus, which I don't understand because I packed the camera in with packets of dessicant. The bottom had a white powder to it, and some parts of the lower lens mount had become chipped. Apparently this was the result of corrosion damage. The lens-release button had become very hard to push in, and when I did, it wouldn't pop back out on release.

I felt sorry for the FM. I took out the smallest screwdriver from my Swiss Army knife and tried popping open some screws, but I realized a cleanup job should be left to the professionals along Hidalgo St. in Quiapo. Mechanically the internals are fine; the shutter still works, the film still advances as it should, the meter is as reactive as it's ever been and the lens apertures close down upon shutter release.

It's just the shock of the corrosion and mold/mildew that got me. That was just not supposed to happen with all the dessicant I packed in.

My birthday present came a week early.

My birthday present came a week early.

Due to the slightly greater need for watching DVDs—after all, my sister has also been complaining—over getting a music-playing cellphone, I decided to buy the Philips DVP5965K player as my birthday gift a week early. I brought it home by cash and what remained of my SM gift checks from Christmas (I could have sworn I had PhP1,500 of them so why was I missing PhP500?).

The DVD player worked quite well, playing a lot of media in different formats, although I was curiously disappointed as to why some of my DivX material on CD didn’t run. The manual suggested it might have been due to an unfinalized CD-R. Hmmm. At least it has a USB port to test this further, and it’s appreciably lighter and thinner than our old DVD player that now refuses to read any disk laid on its loading tray.

Even so, the hole the DVD player made on my wallet didn’t stop me from window-shopping for the Nokia 5300 even further. It seems like I’ve already found the absolute rock-bottom price it’ll sell for…and maybe I’ll add a little more for a large-capacity MicroSD memory card and those spiffy Bluetooth wireless headphones. All that won’t come in a while, though. I’ll need to recoup my funds again if I don’t intend on blowing my pending bonus in one spurt.

Before blowing my paycheck in the afternoon, I had attended the first session of the chorale singing workshop I had signed up for from the office. It was interesting to see how singing well isn’t just a function of the throat and vocal chords; rather it actually involves the whole body, from head to foot, and it begins with proper posture, breathing and vocal onset. The twenty or so fellows I shared the class with were a nice bunch, too, and so far I don’t have any reservations about spending four more Saturday mornings at MSE.

Finally, I took up Chen and Aileen’s advice. I went to a nearby florist’s and looked for roses for the girl I like.

Hmmm. Maybe the less I talk about this particular tidbit of news, the better. Even a talkative bastard like me knows the value of suspense.