I had spent the past weekend doing nothing at all; except playing Fifa 2012 on my iPad and watching TV. As usual for Mee, she cooked and watched her own online TV programs. I just felt weak and my head seemed to be a few kilograms heavier. Anyway, I feel much better now having rested so much.

Playing Fifa 2012 can be quite challenging at times. And frustrating too. When it’s too easy, we wish that it could be harder. But when it’s too hard, we curse the computer (AI). Most of the times, the AI is just ridiculous and it’s better off playing against top teams than playing against teams at the bottom of the table. On some games, the AI goalkeeper is ridiculously good that it could block any shoot from any angle. On the other hand, your goalkeeper can be just rubbish. I have come to the fact that I just play it through no matter how ridiculously good the AI. I will have my revenge the next match. I can’t win all the matches anyway and that’s the same with real life football.

The settings still need some tweaking but I suppose Fifa13 will be very entertaining. Fifa11 is absolutely rubbish. It’s the same like Fifa for PC. It just gets better each year and I still don’t understand why people are complaining. Fifa just works for me.

By the way, I tested playing Fifa12 using iPhone as controller. It worked pretty good but the space is somehow limited. I kept going out of range and a mini-Fling gamepad will be ideal. However, my Fling has broken twice now and I don’t think I will invest in another one until a better one is available in the market.

I watched a thriller, Prom Night, a few days ago. I watched it before but it was a few years back. Well, I am quite a movie fan and I don’t mind watching a movie twice or more unless I could still remember the storyline. It’s not particularly a great movie but it reminded me of the prom that I attended when I was a college student. In fact, I was one of the committee who organized the prom night and I was in charge of the ticketing. I don’t really remember much of it except that it was the night that I approached Mee as my girlfriend. I also had friends who dressed ridiculously. When some of the photos were developed, some of them looked horrible in the photos compared to the real person on scene. Bear in mind that it was 10 years ago and digital cameras are not yet popular and very expensive. Hence, we could only take the photos first and hope for the best later.

Looking at 2012 prom dresses now, they are so much different. Honestly, there were so much things to do to prepare for the prom. If I wasn’t the committee member, I wouldn’t have attended the prom. That prom was organized during my third year in college. For the past two years, I only watched people getting excited about it and it’s not really cheap considering that I was still relying on my parents. However, having attended the prom, I believe that anyone should attends it at least once when given the chance.

Guess what? I received an email from thehut.com yesterday. It said;

We are really sorry but due to a high demand we have unfortunately sold out and are unable to fulfil your order.

It’s really frustrating and that was the second time that I tried to buy something from the site. I have bought things online so many times and most reputable sites are very good at stock checking especially electronic sites. In addition, it offers PayPal payment but the payment never went through. It kept saying that the payment cannot be processed. It’s a rubbish site and I believe that buying from them requires patience, time and most importantly luck! I would rather look elsewhere even if they cost a little bit more.

Android

My relationship with my HTC Desire is all love or hatred at times. Some interesting Android apps are what keeping my love for it while the hardware limitation is what I hate about it. I wish that the internal memory could have been a lot bigger than 200MB. In fact, it was only 140MB before I rooted it. This internal memory space is where Android installs the apps. In the specification sheet, it states 576MB of there are only 140MB available. The worst part is that older versions of Android do not allow user to install apps on external memory card. Though new Android allows the use of external memory card for apps installation, it still installs bits and pieces onto the internal memory. Eventually, Android will still use up the internal memory in my case.

Having said all that, I must admit that I have done a pretty good job in maximizing it’s potential. To date, I have just over 200 apps installed.

One advantage of Android over iOS is the ability to add widgets on the front screen. However, I kind of like the idea of iOS which is all icons and no widgets. In my case, what’s the point of having dozen of widgets but slowing down my HTC Desire? From now on, I will be configuring my HTC Desire with icons and leaving only the task manager, weather and todo widgets in the homescreen.

If you search on the internet about managing apps, lots of people or even expert will say that you do not need to have task killer app. Android is capable enough in managing memory efficiently. I beg to differ. On many occasions, I have to use task killer app in order to speed up my HTC Desire. It’s true that after a while, it will become slow again but that’s just prove that Android is not good at memory management. Okay, some say that Android app will close itself after the process completes. I know the logic but when will it finish? Most apps seem like taking a second to run but forever to close.

When I reboot my HTC Desire, there will be about 200MB of free memory. After a while, it will drop to 60MB depending on the tasks that I do. Using the task killer app, I could bring it back up to 200MB. However, the longer I use my phone, the less free memory I get. Some apps just run in the background all the time after using it just once. They would not go off unless a reboot. I cannot say that it’s all Android’s fault. It could be all down to the programmers who might not have thought about programming the apps thoroughly. Anyway, I do not know how to create an Android app, I cannot really comment.

I still love my HTC Desire and I do not see any reason why I should change it at the moment. Dual core or not, it does not seem to matter too much for me. It’s running apps happily and I do not suppose Android apps have too much problems like when iOS4 moves to iOS5.

No doubt Christmas is fast approaching. Every year, the celebrations seem to get earlier and earlier. Just weeks ago, Christmas trees have already been put up in the town centre. Dozen of retail stores have started decorating and having sales. Very soon, my colleagues will be talking about our yearly Christmas presents where each of us will buy a small gift and put into together into a sack. On our final working day before our Christmas break, we will each draw one out and that will be our Christmas present. I wonder what will be their selection of Christmas gifts for babies as one of my colleagues has got a baby girl and another baby coming soon. My other colleagues might get something for that colleague since it’s Christmas.

Hmm… I don’t think that I ever bought anything for myself during Christmas. Well, I mean something expensive. All I ever got during previous Christmases was clothing. As I mentioned in my previous post, I might get myself an iPod Nano watch. It’s nothing new, it’s just an iPod Nano plus a watch strap. I have done some research for the past few days and most smart watches are either expensive or ugly. I think iPod Nano watch might just do it well for me. To my surprise, Sony Ericsson had developed a series of bluetooth watches a few years ago. However, no one knows why they decided to discontinue it.

A couple of days ago, I received an email from Virgin Media, my television, broadband and telephone service provider informing me that I am entitled to receive free £6 worth of telephone add-ons. It includes cheaper international calls, cheaper mobile calls and 250 minutes worth of 0845 and 0870 calls. Well, the only add-on that I am interested about is the 250 minutes as calling 0845 numbers can be quite expensive when you have to listen to some music and advertisements before you can actually get hold of someone. Other than that, I don’t make mobile phone calls very often and I use Skype for international calls which works out cheaper. Skype even allows audio conference calls where you can chat with several people at once. I never tried that before and I just thought it would be difficult to hear each other, wouldn’t it? The real big question that I have in mind is whether or not I will be charged in the future once I opted in. Though it’s a little bit late to consider it as I have signed up for it already but I believe that I can still cancel it should I find the terms and conditions a bit dodgy later on.