My Arabian Family

Meet my Arabian family.

Playstation 3

I had the chance to get close to a PS3 unit (somewhere in Megamall's Cyberzone). The console looks ok, but the black glossy finish makes dust and oil very visible on the surface so you have to keep it really clean. It has wireless control pads which can be recharged via cables to the console and the buttons are pretty much the same except for L2/R2 which are slightly slanted now. The graphics are really crisp, but I think some game makers have not done a good job of utilizing the powerful PS3's processor. The 3D objects are more defined because of the higher resolution, but the textures in the racing game I played are still awfully unrealistic that you can achieve the same level of entertainment when played in the good old PS2. I'll have to wait until either this, Nintendo's Wii, or Xbox 360 reaches mainstream.

I want a dSLR Camera...

I was tempted to buy a Canon EOS 400D last Saturday when I saw the billboard at Megamall. I'm glad I didn't bring enough money or a credit card to buy it.

I might not be an aspiring photographer, but the first time I visited Flickr I couldn't stop looking at all those nice photos and wondering how exactly they were done. I want to keep a record of the nice things I see or experience, and I want these images to be very well composed so I can look back or show these while I tell stories behind them. My dad has a point-and-shoot camera so I tried to experiment with the manual settings but it was not flexible enough to give me the images I wanted.

49,000 pesos for this camera? This has got to be a serious hobby... for now I'll have to stick with my 0.3 megapixel Nokia 6600.

Suzhou Dimsum, Lucky Food!

Mom was out during lunchtime so I had to find my own food. I did a short drive to Suzhou Dimsum Restaurant to get my usual order. I ordered their Eggplant with Pork, which is by the way the only eggplant dish that I crave for because of the meaty spicy flavor from the sauce that seeps into the vegetable. I also had my usual 4-piece juicy Xiaolongpao (think of pork dumplings with soup inside), and until today I find its taste unbeaten by any "meat-wrapped-in-starch" food.

For those who want to try it out, they have a nice selection of stir-fry noodles, and some more traditional Chinese meat/fish dishes above the value meal price range. They also have this thing called Shallot Pie which other people have been saying is ok - the taste is interesting, but it felt like eating one whole pizza crust. You can find Suzhou Dimsum in Promenade Greenhills, just at the ground floor beside Gonuts Donuts.

Anyway, after my meal, mom called. She reminded me that the car I used to get to the restaurant was on coding! I was lucky though that I reached home without getting caught.

How to Wake Up Early

I'm a busy person who loses morning time because I don't wake up early. There are a lot of things I'm missing by not starting my day at 5 or 6am -- no traffic, sunrise, lower temperatures, day planning, breakfast, newspapers, and even blogging. I want to become a morning person so I looked up some ideas to change my life's time zone. It takes habit to build a natural rhythm so I need to pick the right pattern for sleep:

1) Sleep early, wake up early -- I can choose to sleep by 10pm everyday to give me 8 hours of sleep and get up at 6am. This does the job but I'm not an NS-5, and a lot of little events can break this pattern.

2) Follow natural sleep pattern -- If I choose to sleep only when I'm tired and feeling sleepy, I'll probably continue to sleep late and wake up late. I have plenty of reserve energy towards the end of the day because I eat heavy meals, so I don't think this works too.

3) Natural pattern + alarm clock in the morning -- ok, but I'm not sure if I'll wake up at the sound of the alarm. I tend to snooze a couple of times until I get annoyed. Sometimes my tolerance goes too far and I spend over an hour snoozing. It also means that I'll have to start sleep at reasonable times, but getting up on time isn't assured.

4) Natural pattern + alarm clock away from bed -- ok, I'll be forced to get up, but what if someone else turns it off?!?!

5) Natural pattern + alarm clock away from bed + message -- Let's say I put a message near the clock to wake me up in case my brother turns off the alarm. If the other person is sleepy, he might ignore the message and get back to sleep. On the other hand I can just tell the folks at home to wake me up when they hear it, the rest is a matter of trust.

6) 6am splash of water alarm -- definitely not good and can cause bacteria growth on the bed. Can also ruin my PC because it's just beside the bed.

7) Imagine/visualize waking up at 6 before sleep -- I heard this technique works for some people. They tell themselves to wake up at a certain time before they sleep and it just happens.

8) Find a 5am TV show or watch DVDs at this time + alarm -- if you set up a reward for getting up early like this, maybe it will work. I still have a couple of series stored at home so maybe this is enough motivation. This way it would cost me up to 60 pesos a day to wake up.

9) Schedule exercise in the morning -- I don't do this. I'm not Manny Pacquiao, and I'm not an old man looking for tai-chi.

After going through the list, what I'm looking for is: a way to sleep anytime I want, get up at the same early time everyday, and have a good reason to get up. It's going to be a combination of #5 and #8 with a little tweak. I'll set up the alarm at 5am, put the clock at least a meter away from my bed, I'll 'align' with the folks at home to wake me up (mom/dad wake up at this time anyway), and I'll plan ahead at night to do something nice at 5am.

I'll write more about it when I become a successful morning person.

Fresh Blog Design

Welcome 2007! After hours of hard work and studying a little of CSS, I finally got to build my own template under the new Blogger scheme. I'm still looking for tweaks to make this page more useful for me (access to Blogger was extremely slow the past few days because of the Taiwan earthquake). After some time I'm expecting my calendar and to-do lists to flow here. I already spent too much time on this, and just wanted to note when I last changed my Blog template.