Ellipsis [...]

My love affair with the tiny pink iPod Nano is over. It belongs to Mama now. My MacBook has a new younger sibling!

Isn’t it so shmexy.

(I hope this is the last of my new “toys” for this year, because I need to put aside cash for shopping in Hong Kong already!)

• Just splurged close to US$90 on a couple of DVDs I’ve wanted for months: 즐거운 인생 First Press Limited Edition DVD and 한성별곡 Director’s Cut DVD. Shucks. Where the hell is my self-restraint?! Jannah, you still want that iPhone / iPod Touch, do you?
• Speaking of which, iPhone 3G is landing in exactly 8 days! Oh gosh, if I end up getting one, please let there not be long queues.
• I really need to book a hotel room for the HK trip, soon.
• Why are IM clients on Windows so damn ugly???
• Going Turkish for team dinner tonight & Italian tomorrow with TKGians, woot!
• I swear, replying emails take up more energy than coding. X_x
• StreetDirectory.com has their maps back, yay!

Took half-day leave on Friday & spent a good part of the day engaging in retail therapy with EB as company. I ended up with a relatively small loot consisting of 2 pairs of jeans, a pair of pants & a pair of shoes. The shoes weren’t even the type I planned to get in the first place. I wanted flat dress shoes in black or white, but they were all either too shiny or too common-looking or too uncomfortable or had bows / ribbons on them. (What IS with all the bows & ribbons on ladies shoes?!)
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The IT Project Management course I’m taking up next semester is actually conducted by International Institute for Learning, in partnership with the university. What’s interesting is, I can opt to be in virtual tutorial group where the training is in the form of live, interactive online sessions. Which means I’d have one less commute to campus every week, saving me some time & energy.

I found out I could reserve an iPhone 3G through SingTel, so I went ahead & did it. Most likely, I will forgo the iPod Touch & opt for the all-in-one iPhone instead. But SingTel will give me a week to decide if I still want the iPhone once it reaches our shores, so we’ll see then. No more shopping for me in the next few months. No more IKEA especially. Everytime I step into that store, there’s always something I want to buy.

Last bit of randomness: YB’s convocation ceremony is in a week, and I’m already excited to attend it.

iPhone 3G will be coming to Singapore! According to the website it’s “coming soon”, but who knows how soon is soon, eh? This makes me torn between the iPhone & the iPod Touch. All-in-one devices usually don’t appeal to me, but the idea of a phone inside an iPod (or an iPod inside a phone, depending on how you look at it) is too irresistable. SingTel, please hurry up and bring iPhone in to Singapore so I can decide which one to buy. Thanks hor.

I pre-ordered a copy of FT Island’s Japanese album a week before the release date, but YesAsia pushed forward the shipping date to June 19th! Grrrr, what is this? And since I have The Nuts’ 3rd album in the same shipment, BOTH my CDs are being held up right now. Boohoo. It’ll be end of June by the time they reach me.

Being the lazy shopper that I am, I even buy all my books online nowadays. Ordered a couple from Sitepoint, and they’re on the way right now all the way from Connecticut! Thanks to coupons & free shipping, you can actually get a better deal purchasing directly compared to buying from local bookstores that import the same books. Yeah, I’ve become a very savvy online shopper over the last few years, as you can tell.

Dear iPhone, please land in Singapore like, NOW can?

I went all out shopping for geek toys on Saturday. When we got home, tired from walking all over Funan (the parents & little brother followed me everywhere; bless their patient hearts), Mama pointed out that I’m only enthusiastic about shopping when it involves technology & gadgets. I couldn’t really argue.

At any rate, it was a fruitful day, as I managed to get all these:

• New aluminium casing for my 2.5-inch hard drive. It’s quite a challenge finding quality casings for SATA HDs, and I spotted a good deal – just $19.00! Speaking of HDs, apparently the Freecom Toughdrive comes in pink now! The pink silicon sleeve is just too pretty. Too bad I only needed a casing, not a HD.
• Pink Audio Technica inner ear headphones. They come in 5 other colours too, if you look at the website. Aren’t they nice?
• Hot pink hard shell for my MacBook. So. Freaking. Expensive. (Don’t ask.) But I’d wanted it even before I considered buying a MacBook. And it was the last piece in the store! And we’d already driven to Suntec City for it, so…
• Black Postball (again, for my MacBook). You know, those half-balls you place under your laptop for heat dissipation purpose. Again, so expensive! But I wanted something that I didn’t have to permanently stick on my MacBook, so… Hehe.
• And of course, the MacBook itself! One word: gorgeous. (Pictures coming up in another post.)

I also played with the iPod Touch at epiCentre@Suntec. This is not good, because now I want it even more. It’s too awesome for words. But I’ll wait a month, like I told YB. If I still want it then, I’ll start putting money aside & buy it only when I can afford it – golden rule of personal finance!

One funny thing I notice whenever I go out shopping with my parents: salespeople expect one of them to be paying, instead of me. Like yesterday, when I’d decided on the MacBook purchase, the salesman looked at Papa & asked, “May I have your card, sir?”. Then the daughter, who looks like she’s school-going age, takes out her card to pay. I felt him taking a good hard look at my face before bringing my card to the cashier. Ohoho. He was probably slightly paiseh over his mistake, but hey, who assumed that my dad was paying when the one haggling with him over the price all along was me?

Not that I was offended. The salesman was great, actually. He approached me first when I looked like I needed attention, and immediately went on to introduce the prices when I said I wanted a MacBook. He could tell I already knew the product, which is great. (One of my pet peeves is salesmen who assume you’re a tech idiot just because you’re young & female.) I got a few freebies from him, including a free upgrade to 3GB RAM costing $99.00! How fantastic is that? I wasn’t even planning to get a RAM upgrade. He even gave a discount on the Postball when I asked for it, even though the price was clearly fixed already. What a nice guy. So tell me if you want to purchase a MacBook, I’ll bring you to the store where he works & we can haggle for a good deal.

I also tweaked the sidebar(s) a bit & added a couple more things, like my wishlist. Hehe. It’s mainly for my own reference. I have wishlists at YesAsia, Amazon, Acmamall & various other sites, so I wanted to bring my most wanted stuff together into one list.

Anyway, I need to do something about that ‘About this blog’ section…