Currently I’m on a dilemma situation, I’ve been thinking to change my babe Macbook to Compaq laptop (Presario V3000). What I experience from Macbook is fine, it’s totally a fine ass machine, but when it comes to softwares, I’m really doubt that, secondly, Mac isn’t that hot in Malaysia yet, so you can imagine how hard I communicate with my friends about softwares and stuff like that.

I’ve been eyeing this machine for sometimes, although it’s a bit old here, but judging from the specification it has, I don’t think it can’t beat a Mac, including the price too. So I sit down and do some revalue management on both Macbook and Compaq…

Macbook Value:
Due to the sky high price, it stop quite a lot of people from buying Mac product, but looking into the life span a Mac has, it’s amazingly long comparing to any PC, be it a desktop or laptop. PC running Pentium 4 is hard to run Vista now, but iBook G4 can run Mac OSX Leopard smoothly. The life span is way longer than PC and hence the price is higher too. Getting a Mac product let say RM5000 can be used up to 5 to 8 years.

PC Value:
Due to the popularity that it has, 80% of the population in this world using it. Price is one thing, familiarity is a bonus. Judging from the life span, as you can see, 3 to 5 years would be the maximum life span for a PC, for example, my friend who bought her laptop 3 years ago, after a few update from Windows XP SP1 to SP3, causing her to have a lagging laptop, in other word, time to change a laptop, it’s just a short 3 years, don’t even try to mention about Vista on her laptop ok?! price tagged at RM3800.

I’m still thinking. Due to my finance difficulty at this moment, I think I’ll stick to what I have now Getting an extra desktop is a dream now…

Few days ago, I went to buy this flexible keyboard, due to the limitation of my table size, I need to get a smaller external keyboard, thinking to get the normal kind of keyboard, but the price was too high for an average people like me to buy it, while flexible mini keyboard has a better price tag compare with the normal mini keyboard, I went for it thinking to give it a try as well…

After trying it out, I’ll have to say, it’s kind of disappointing me, it need a good attention on pressing each keys and not to mention, wrong letter become too common. Maybe due to the fact that it’s too flexible, the space bar is not that easy to be pressed. Well, it depend too. Somehow, I need to be extra careful and watching and feel the keyboard myself, instead of taking time looking at the desktop and what I’ve written, I need to look at the keyboard all the time when I’m typing.

Although the size is satisfying me, but the typing is not, or rather, I haven’t get use to it yet. Just look at it this way, because it’s been long that I’m using the normal keyboard, so the whole layout is a little different and not to mention the feeling of each keys are different too.

This keyboard is definitely not for speedy typist or typing, it needs more attention and slowly press each keys to avoid missing letters!

Galaxy-Webhosting, a host I followed for years, I found them through eBay, when they’re having a promotion giving a very low budget reseller hosting, since I have more than 3 domains by the time I discovered them, I went and sign up with them since 2006. The uptime was good and still good, but there were pro and con about them as well.

Pro:
Uptime guarantee: Uptime is fine for me, I’m not the kind that demand 100% or 99.999% uptime, as long as most of the time it’s up there I’m fine.

Support: Support will be reply within 24 hours, well, at least there is reply.

Server uptime: It’s very well uptime, although they changed a few server for the past few years, recent year they didn’t change though.

Con:
Uptime guarantee: I don’t like they cheating on new costumer about their uptime. It’s not 99.999% but they insist to put 99.999% even though there are siteuptime tracking, when site is down, they pull down the siteuptime tracking as well, clever don’t they?

Support: 24 hours is too long I recall. 12 hours will be much more better. What worst was when they’re down, they will quit their MSN so none of their costumers can do anything with them (Support was on-site too). Oh, there is always no explanation on why it’s down, they want to let those who didn’t notice keep in the bottle.

Server uptime: It’s fine now, cause I didn’t even reach 10% of my account yet But I used to hate it when they keep changing server that cause 24 hours downtime

I’ve tried to email them several time about giving me an explanation when there is downtime, but they never improve it, I wonder if it’s me who bought with a lower price that they don’t even want to care about me or it’s their culture to make themselves looks good in serving new customers? If it was my problem I would really need to take all my Outer Banks saving to get a better deal with them in order to make them notice me!

2GB doesn’t really guarantee my Macbook speed though, just few hours ago, I keep seeing the spinning cursor and I was fed up and pulled out my magnetic adapter plug (I’m fucking evil when computer is not cooporate with me). Even MacWorld tips on tuning applications to speed up my Mac doesn’t works too, this also applied to Wired’s Howto.

I wonder how many more equestrian clothing do I have to get for my Mac to run smooth and can operate 24/7? I know it’s a bit over to turn it on 24/7, not only it hurts my Mac, it hurt the environment too, but hey, it so happen that sometimes I really need to open it for 24/7 in order to finish my work… Erm… Download

Doesn’t matter what kind of operating system you’re with, you have the chance to make panorama photos in a few clicks by Hugin. One of the best application I found online for doing panorama photo, this of course is also way better than Canon’s application

Hugin has a very simple interface and it’s so friendly used compare with Canon (Ok, I admit I used to go with Canon application if not Adobe Photoshop). I went on and tried myself adding 2 photos I took way back…

These photos took me a few minutes to adjust and combined in Adobe Photoshop, as I dumped Canon panorama application previously. Because it’s the most easiest panorama photos I took, so I wanted to test how Hugin works.

Hugin has this point to point panorama, it helps to combine the points I made so they can link to each other for better panorama photo appearance. A few clicks later…

Yeap, just in a blink and I got myself a good panorama photo. Of course it’s not that easy to understand how the whole system work. That’s why tutorials are ready made on Hugin site to make sure you can follow up first, well, all you need to learn is Stitching two photos together and eventually you’ll get the idea how to do the rest Now even if you wanted to panorama your office space Connecticut, it’s not a problem anymore No extra skill but reading skill.