I probably said this quite a lot of time now but not recently. I used to be Point of Sales support or technician. It ranged from the small cash registers that print out just numbers to restaurant POS where it linked several PC-based cash registers. At one point, I thought that was my career path as I loved it so much. Well, being able to travel around and meeting new and different people from all walks of life. I did have some tough days though when customers were not pleased or didn’t have the money to pay after I fixed their problems. I have to say that I didn’t really did a good job every time. Sometimes, I was just trying to get by as I would like to quickly move to my next destination. Even the next job after that involved POS system too. However, I got to work some programming language which expanded my knowledge. My, IT is huge and I am glad that I love it even until now.

POS still plays a part in me. Every now and then, I still feel very close to it whenever I see an advertisement about receipt printers like the new Epson TM-T88V or even when I go to restaurants or having a dinner, I like to look at their cash registers. Most cash registers, be it the normal ones with dozen of buttons or the PC-based front end, they are all linked to a PC-based back end. As you may have already known, a PC can basically do anything but it still depends on the front end equipment to have the ability to perform the tasks required. Like for example, when I was still working as the POS support, most receipt printers were so basic that they couldn’t print out the company logo and the printing sound was unbearable at times. There were receipt printers that do fancy stuffs but they were just too expensive for some customers.

I do believe that now would be a different story. Hmm…. that was a job that I started out about 8 years ago! And I am not sure if I like to think what if I were still with that job now!

Ever since Mee and I came back from my sister’s place after Christmas and New Year, I must say that I haven’t wore my iPod Nano as watch yet. That’s partly because I had bought a Citizen Eco Drive watch which runs on light energy. It doesn’t require any charging or battery. Well, iPod Nano is cool as a watch but I don’t think it is suitable while travelling. I already have my Macbook Air, iPad and phones to charge and I wouldn’t want to worry about another piece of gadget while travelling.

I have to say, if I had bought this Citizen Eco Drive watch before browsing for iPod Nanos, I might have bought iPod Touch instead. While searching for watches that don’t require batteries, I found that most of them were either ugly or too expensive. It’s the Citizen Eco Drive that’s affordable and looks good that caught my attention. It’s quite a new model and no wonder I didn’t see it. Anyway, I still need an iPod just so I can listen to music while at the gym. I had a Sony MP3 player previously and it had broken like a year ago.

In addition, I recently found out why I can’t wear MP3 player for too long. The in-ear type of ear phone is what causing discomfort to my left ear. The Sony MP3 player that I used had an in-ear noise cancelling ear phone. The ear phone that I use while watching movies in the middle of the night is a JVC in-ear ear phone. Since I bought the iPod Nano which doesn’t come with in-ear ear phone, I could feel the difference immediately. It may not sound as good as but I would rather it be good to my ears.

It’s the first week of work and time seems to go very fast. It’s already Friday tomorrow and I hope that I will be able to rest more than usual this weekend. Well, you might be thinking that I should have rested a lot during the Christmas and New Year holiday but in fact, it’s busier than before. In the past, I would only be busy for the first couple of days after Christmas, that was to accompany Mee to sales in London. After that, we stayed at home most of the time or even when we were at our sister’s place, we would not go out very often. We shopped less this year, a lot less. However, we were at our sister’s place for a week and we basically went out every day; shopped a bit, window shopping and ate a lot.

When we arrived home, we saw a letter from our landlord. Our rent increased by more than £60 per month. That’s really a lot considering our pay rise is a lot less than that. By the way, I don’t even expect in getting a pay rise this year. I know that the landlord never increases our rent since we moved in. However, we would really appreciate if he increases the rent gradually rather than the £60 immediately. We had a discussion and hopefully, he will change his mind.

The weather has turned cold since coming back from my sister’s place. Oddly but not, it is still bright and sunny in the afternoon.

Mee and I also started our first gym class yesterday. It was body attack. The class was full of people. Every evening classes that I look now are almost fully booked, even for next week as members are allowed to book 7 days in advance. The spinning class that I usually go to on Thursday is now fully booked. The body attack class for next week has only 4 spaces left. I havent’ booked it yet as we might change our mind and go to body pump which is the next class. I guess, we will only be doing Pilates for today.

I have been using my HTC Desire for quite a while now. The only complain that I have, is the internal memory space. I have talked about it over and over again but I believe that I have more understanding now than before. Honestly, it is a good looking phone; solid and the screen size is about right. It doesn’t have a dual core processor but 1GHz Snapdragon processor performs quite sufficiently. The multitouch screen problem is also annoying but I am fine with it. The internal memory space is still my main concern.

Well, HTC Desire has only about 120MB internal memory space available for apps and games. When I first got the phone, everything had to be installed in the internal memory space. The 4GB microsd card is only for storage purpose. Soon, the App2SD was developed and apps and games can be moved to external storage. However, there will still be some bits of data installed in the internal memory space. I then rooted my HTC Desire and apply the S-OFF to pump up the internal memory space to 200MB. To date, I have about 130 apps and games. It sounds a lot but it’s not. I wish for more.

Why would anyone design a phone with so limited internal memory space available for user to install apps and games? I have read the specifications of a few newer HTC phones and while they have about 4 – 8GB of internal memory, only 1GB is available for the user. Is it a problem with HTC or Google’s Android?

In addition, the speed of the phone is also very much dependent on where the apps and games are installed. As most of my apps and games are installed using App2SD, my HTC Desire performs sluggishly at times. I had tried moving some frequently run apps to the phone in the past. While it improved the performance, the internal storage space soon became full.

My next phone may probably be an Android phone; and it might be HTC too. However, I will be making sure that I will not be troubled by the lack of internal memory space and the phone will be free of multitouch screen problem. The latter should already be solved since a lot of users had pointed it out but I am still very wary about the former.

We watched this movie the other day at my sister’s place. I watched it once already but it was still nice to watch it again. I believe that my sister and Mee thought the same too because they both watched it from start to finish. In that movie, there were a lot of lab furnaces in the lab where the lead actor was working with the chimpanzee. I didn’t think lab furnaces were relevant in that movie especially the type of medicine, which was used to test on the chimpanzees, was for treating Alzheimer. Maybe it is beyond my knowledge but it’s just a movie and maybe I shouldn’t treat it that seriously.

I have to say, I watched a few older versions of planet of the apes but they always start with apes dominating the world and human beings as slaves. They never sort of explaining the beginning of the apes and I believe that is why I am attracted to this movie. I do hope that there will be more sequels of this movie since it’s one of my favourite movies this year.

On another note, it’s the last day of the year 2011, Happy New Year!

A few months later, I will have my car checked and MOT-ed. I am quite nervous when it comes to having my car checked because I had my car’s catalytic converter changed twice in two years. I asked the mechanic if there were other problems in the car that’s causing the catalytic converter to fail but he couldn’t seem to give me any satisfactory answer. Hence, I made use of the free exhaust check and had my car’s catalytic converter checked twice this year. Hopefully, it will be problem free this year though I am sensing the I might need to change some of the thrust bearings. The gear changes doesn’t seem to be smooth nowadays.