My New Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

After more than 16 months of abuses, surfing, shooting photos, tracking, navigating, gaming, headbanging (to my metal music collections), plus a couple of careless drops, I finally let go of my trusty N95 8Gb to get the Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic.

Many will feel that why I would downgrade my phone to a mid-range music phone. Well, I see the only downgrade being the camera, which is only 3.2MP as compared to 5MP on the previous phone. Well, not a very big loss to me since the new phone can take decent shots, and most of the N95 features are still found in this phone.

In fact, I wasn't really want a touchscreen phone initially, given the experience I had with iPhone some time back. However, I had done many visits to sites to read up on the review for this phone, being the first Symbian 5th Edition device in the market. The review on the phone had been mostly positive, esp on the touchscreen. N97 and Omnia HD looked more powerful, but also will come with a heftier price tag. So since I have no intention to burn a hole in my wallet just to get a phone, and my N95 looked so abused, I decided to just go to the streets to casually check out the price, just for the fun of it.

My colleagues and me walked around the estate, asking the shops for the price. At the same time I casually asked for my N95's trade in price. It was until we asked this shop about the phone. The price quoted was not the lowest but also not the highest. But what triggered me to seriously consider buying the phone was when the boss gave me a very attractive trade in price for old phone. After some calculation, I would only need to pay less than 200 to get the new phone. Good deal right?

So after some considerations, I finally decided to trade in the old phone while it still hold some good value.

So I got myself a brand new 5800 Symbian 5th Edition phone export set without burning a hole in my wallet. What's an export set you might ask? It is a non locally warranted set which the phone is brought in from another country, which in my phone's case, from Malaysia. What's wrong with the local set? In 5800 case, the local set will be bundled with a service called Comes with Music, which jack up the price of the phone. This ends up a mid-range phone at high-end price. On top of that, the service provides songs in WMA format with Digital Rights Management, meaning you can only play the music on the device and one PC. So I don't need this service and certainly don't need the local warranty (the local service centre is practically useless), so export set is the logical choice. Anyway the shop provided its own 1 year warranty.

Personal review on this phone will come soon. Stay tuned.

Sneaky Fellows!

Bobby asked me to go Racewerkz yesterday as he is installing the Power Commander 3 for his Fazer plus dyno run for tuning.

When I reached the workshop (after waiting for 3 hours for the weather to improve), Sam, one of the shop's mechanic, asked me for my bike key. I was like, "why you are asking me for my key when I'm only here to accompany my friends?"

When Quizesilver and Bobby insisted me to hand over the key, I began to realise that they are planning something for my bike. To my surprise, they had actually gotten me a K&N air filter as my birthday present. So Sam got it fixed up and I kept the old one in case when I wanna wash the new filter in future.

It was a pleasant surprise for me. And I later found out that it is shared by Quizesilver, Bobby, Alan, Dabitch, Bryant, AngKuGuay, Damien and Sarah. Thanks guys/gals for the timely present (my stock filter is due for replacement anyway haha). Really appreciated :)

Febuary: What a depressing month....

Yup,

As much as I don't want to sound negative-speaking self-degrading bastard, this month had been particularly pretty depressing for me.. starting with thoughts about death which had returned after months of shaking it off.

Guess it's due to the recent discussion on this topic with my colleagues when one of them who had lost her parent in an unexpected situation. That kind of thoughts had been floating around in my head ever since my last major accident. Despite me trying to shake it off constantly, it kept coming back. Guess that age plays a part too, which I will come to that later. I ever spoken to one of my gaming friends, Major Tom, regarding this topic (since he is in his forties and I looked up to him as someone who can give solid advises) and he said that I need to come to terms with the idea of death (not from the religious point of view as he is not a religious person either) in a practical way, I will be able to look past it and begin to enjoy life more. I understood what he had said, but the path to that direction seems to be harder than I imagined, especially when you look at your parents and realised that they had aged so much and you have no idea how much time I can spent with them, when I had known my colleague's father passed away unexpectedly recently. That is really one haunting thought.

Next, V day. It's a day when I used to spend time with someone for the past 3 years, thinking up surprises and stuff. This year, fond and bad memories are the only things I can cling on. The feeling sucked to the core that day that I simply don't have the mood to meet anyone or do anything. Thinking back on the mistakes I made back then worsen things further.

Now, birthday. Yes, my birthday just passed, but somehow it was not a pretty good day either. Having the thought that I already lived thru half (or more) of my mortal lifespan affected my mood more. Guess that is part of the factor that contribute to my thoughts about death, thinking, how am I going to live out the other half (or less) of my life? Will I just die alone or I will have my own family to stay by my deathbed? Maybe that is a symptom of mid-life crisis, I don't know haha. Top that up with me having to go for my reservist exercise briefing plus coming back home to clear my work after that ON MY BIRTHDAY (Whiskey Tango Fox). Exciting huh. Ended up, I just spent the rest of the day alone in my room doing my stuffs. The only good thing that came out of the day is that I managed to complete the draft song arrangement for Tish's singer friend.

So this is pretty much a ranting post, nothing else. If the description of the events suggest a hint of depression, I guess maybe I'm having a mild one at best. Hope it will go away pretty soon. The heart lightening part is that at least I have my family (esp my mum) and some friends who had stood by me during one of my darkest times.

Anyway, thanks to those who had sent their well wishes the previous day and those kukus who had thought my birthday is today haha. I appreciated that.

Another reason to hate iPhone

haha

Gnome Do

While some could have wondered what had happened to me for the last 2 weeks as there's no updates of sorts since the last post about my Thailand trip...

Well, been on a rampage of on-off high fever since the first day of Chinese Lunar New Year and only fully recovered couple of days ago. Yeah, missed out all the good junk food during CNY. Too bad, but at least I'm back in action again. Since the recovery, somehow I lost the drive to post or do anything at all...simply have no mood for everything. Maybe it's the fatigue from fighting the fever or something I don't know, but I do certainly hope that would go away soon.

While that is in the process, I will just drop a short post introducing a cool Linux application I came across on the internet.

It's call Gnome Do.


In a nutshell, it is a search tool which integrates itself in the Gnome environment so it is hidden when you don't need it and can be easily invoke by pressing the SUPER+SPACE (default) keys. From there you just type the wildcard letters that correspond to the application you want to launch and within few letters, the closest match will appear on the left panel of the Do dialog.
Pressing the DOWN key will display a list of closely-matched results where user can select them. The right panel indicates the action that will be taken upon confirmation. To change that you can press TAB key and select the different actions by pressing the DOWN key.

So if you do not wish to execute the command/application at all, just press SUPER+SPACE keys again to close it without executing anything. You can also use it to search for files, using the same method as describe above selecting the "search for local files" command on the right panel.

It also includes numerous plugins, which can extend the functionality of Gnome Do like microblogging, google calendar search, Rhythmbox controls and more. The possibilities are only limited by the creativity of the developer community.

So far, DO seems to run superbly on my Ubuntu machine and no crash is observed. It is speedy and runs low on resource. While it is still in its infancy stage, so use it at your own risk. But should you try this out, please join the community to give your feedback so the application can be further improve with later versions. I see great potential in this application hence recommending this app. The application can be obtain thru the Ubuntu Respository or you can head over the website (URL posted above) to download the files. Enjoy.