James Mok’s Soliloquy

Once again, Apple, like everyone else in the electronic market, has given us something that’s not and making us wait for something that is.

How many new adapters are you planning on making anyway?  Haven’t we all got enough for our computer related components?  Micro/Mini/USBs, 1394a/b, eSATA, D-SUB/DVIwhatever/HDMI/Apple Display/Apple miniDisplay…  Don’t we have IEEE standardizing ports anymore?  If it’s just another glorified iPhone/iPod, WTF is wrong with their existing USB cable?  And what’s with that MicroSIM, who uses them anyw… oh, never mind.

1024 x …res…, my 7 year old Fuji 10″ subnotebook had 1280x res.

So yeh, now Apple fanatics will have to bring 3 Apple gadgets out? NetBook, iPad, iPhone coz none of them really does anything the other 2 do at all?

My prediction is, just like the nonphone iPhone 1G, by the 3.5 generation we’d get the proper iPad.  Hopefully by then, there would be one without the long side margins making it more like the iPhone aspect ratio in 16×10 ( I hate 16×9 for work ) format, 1280x res, multitasking, Flash support, USB/Firewire/eSata, DVI so it may not need to have yet another computer with it, front cam.  No I don’t like lugging a sleek machine along with 30 adapter cables around, not even across the isle to the desk next to mine.

Either that or just put 4GB RAM, 3G phone support with proper SIM slot, and a GPS in the new Macbook Air and make the keyboard detachable.  Then we’ll have a real computer so we wouldn’t need to bring 50 gadgets out at once.

Now the Nokia Booklet… nah, 1GB RAM with WindO$ 7!  Who are they kidding?

In an ATV kit show, they interviewed an English pronunciation teacher asking him to demonstrate how he teaches English pronunciation.  The teacher had two examples, the word “CAT” and CATERPILLAR”.  He explained how English words can be broken down into several bits to assist with the pronunciation of the entire word.  Like the word “CAT”, if we break it down to their individual alphabets – “C”, “A”, and “T”, and learn how to pronounce the the alphabets, like “C” has a “ke” sound (he didn’t explain how to pronounce words that end with “CE” or “CI”) “A” has a “ah” sound, “T” has a “Te” sound, by simply pronouncing their individual sound together quickly, one would get the “correct” pronunciation as “ket (spoken by him without written on the board)”!     @_@’

By the same token, the teacher continued, the word “CATAPILLAR” can be first broken down into “CA” “TA” “PIL” “LAR”….. blablablabla…. and “LAR” is pronounced as “lur (spoken by him without written on the board)”, then we know the correct pronunciation is “keterpilur”!

With teachers like these, we may as well go watch movies instead of going to classes.

Perhaps I should take over and double their fees.

iPhoto is so damn slow it is surprising anyone likes it at all.

I was having issues with the stupid Facebook photo uploader and decided to fire up iPhoto again for the first time in 3 years after 2 major OS updates and don’t know how many iPhoto version it had been, in hopes of the Facebook iPhoto uploader would be better.   I had opt out of copying files to the iPhoto Library thinking it would just index all my photos without duplicating them.  iPhoto took it’s sweet time showing me all my photos in it’s importing screen and while I didn’t pay attention as to whether I have over 10s of thousands or 100s of thousands photo count on my HDD, I let it running overnight last night and went to bed.

Just before going to bed, I found and installed a Firefox add-on called Fire Uploader and was able to finish uploading a few photos to my Facebook album and I could get a good night sleep.

This morning while I was checking to see how iPhoto went, all I found was the iMac had frozen with the screen offed.  I couldn’t wake the iMac up so I had to reboot it.  It then took iPhoto over 2 minutes to load and showed that all it had in its Library was just over 200 lousy photos which I had deleted long time ago and it asked me if I want to finish importing the last remaining 6000 photos in my HDD!   What it really wanted to do was to finish importing the remaining “recovered” photos.   NONE of my legit photos had been imported at all!

All this time that I had iPhoto up and running, I thought Facebook as so slow last night that there must be some problem with their servers again.  This morning before shutting down iPhoto, Facebook was at that same slow speed.  I had since removed the iPhoto Library and shutdowned iPhoto and found that Facebook was running normal after that!  Coincidence?

Picasa on the other hand is like a rabbit on steroids indexing photos in hyperspeed without duplicating any photos that’s already on the HDD or in the Trash bin.

Not sure why Facebook chooses to support crappy app and crappy phone; or it’s just Facebook itself that’s being crappy.