Month: May 2005

Toy Feast

Let’s see. Yesterday I got to play with the following toys because they either arrived or I finally got the chance to play with them.

1) Tiger – Borrowed the Tiger DVD from my friend and installed on my PB (Don’t worry, technically I am not pirating because my copy will be arrived tomorrow in the mail). Took me awhile to install because I had to clone the original drive first, installed a fresh new hard drive and then installed Tiger. In fact it took most of the evening, but thankfully I did it while half-watching TV (NCIS and House). Just like with the upgrade from Jaguar to Panther, Tiger has given my aging TiBook a new lease of life with huge gain in speed. Although I think the speed gain is partly due to my new hard drive which has higher spin speed and larger cache. Oh and the new hard drive is bloody quiet!

2) External hard drive enclosure – Why waste a perfectly good hard drive? So I also bought this very nice hard drive enclosure from Other World Computing to “reuse” my old PB hard drive. Installation is child-play even without any instructions.

3) Wireless surround sound headphones – These new Sony headphones kick-ass! My friend Jeronimo has the older DS3000 model and they impressed me when I tried them out at his apartment a few months back. Mine is the newer model, DS4000, and it has a optical pass-through so you don’t need an extra optical output to hook these headphones up. So now I can play Halo 2 into the depth of night without disturbing the neighbour or the “Sleeping Beauty” (a.k.a. the “Princess”, a.k.a the wife).

4) Halo 2 headset – To go with the headphones, I bought these Plantronics game headset so it will fit my ear/head better. I was doubtful for a long time whether they will be indeed more comfortable but they are. And because the microphone broom can be bent to be closer to my face, now I don’t even need to talk as loud to be heard. The only negative thing is that the cable is slightly shorter than the Microsoft’s headset and thus I kept pulling the headset off slightly.

5) New iPod – Not for me, but for Leah. Still not sure why I have bought Leah a new 20GB iPod to replace her ancient 2nd Generation 10GB iPod 😉 But I guess having a nice bonus from work eases the wallet pain…

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Space Exportation

As NASA struggles to get the Space Shuttle back to flight, another side of the US government is hampering private space flight.
Bloody typical of them really…

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Too little too late

With NASA’s announcement of postponing Discovery’s launch date from May to mid-July, Leah and I were thinking about going down to KSC and watch the launch. The last time we went for a launch at KSC more than 3 years ago, bad weather at the backup emergency recovery site at Spain causes the launch to be scrubbed twice. It was a night launch and I was planning to propose to Leah as the shuttle ascends right after it cleared the tower. Alas, I proposed to Leah in a Orlando steak house! Not really the same thing…

But since we left it this late, all the good tickets are already been sold out, and the remaining ones are viewing from the Astronaut Hall of Fame which, although close, is more than a few miles away from the launch pad.

So I am tasked to keep my eyes out for the next space shuttle launch, the Atlantis, around the September time (KSC can only put tickets on sale for the upcoming launch). I guess it works out pretty well since the weather at Orlando around July time isn’t that great, while weather during September is almost perfect. It is a shame though that there will no more night launches due to CAIB recommendation of daylight launch for ideal lighting condition for camera tracking and monitoring.

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