{"id":6199,"date":"2009-11-22T06:11:07","date_gmt":"2009-11-21T22:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=6199"},"modified":"2020-01-03T10:30:45","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T02:30:45","slug":"year-in-review-%e2%80%93-2009-%e2%80%93-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/11\/22\/year-in-review-%e2%80%93-2009-%e2%80%93-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Year in Review \u2013 2009 \u2013 Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s come to that time in the year again<\/a> where I get to look back at some of the most major decisions this year and and with the benefit of a mite bit of hindsight look at how they went. This is gonna be a long post, so it\u2019s gonna be posted in parts.<\/p>\n

Switching to the iPhone<\/a> (Win\u2026 maybe)<\/strong>.<\/span> Now that the novelty of the iPhone has worn well-off 7 months after picking it up, I\u2019ve still got mixed feelings of what pundits call the Messiah Phone but thankfully it\u2019s still mostly on the positive side of things. Sure it\u2019s got a great UI and a huge online store which is choked full of both free and paid applications. I used its mobile Mail program a lot, and that it can sync with Microsoft Exchange for work email is a god send. On the down side though, the phone\u2019s still too clunky and prone to mysterious crashes.<\/p>\n

Buying a portable HD camcorder<\/a> (Mixed)<\/span><\/strong>. The Panasonic HDC-SD20 camcorder I picked up in March this year was on account of Hannah coming along, and also for my San Francisco trip. I think of all the camcorders I\u2019ve owned, I\u2019ve shot more video on this Panasonic unit than all the others combined \u2013 especially of Hannah. That\u2019s testament to how useful the tool is. That it takes video in the MPEG4-AVC\/H.264 codec saves a lot in by way of storage space, but at the (huge) expense of editing work. Either I fork out money for Adobe Premiere Elements, or I convert the .MTS file to a more editor-friendly codec like .AVI and work from there using free tools.<\/p>\n

More seriously though is that the camcorder is awful in lowlight\u2026 and a month after I purchased the unit, all the other competing camcorder manufacturers came up with their own line of budget HD camcorders, many with even better specs. Ouch.:(<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Buying the huge lemon, whoops iEcologi<\/a> (Lost)<\/strong><\/span>. Ling did a lot of homework on this one, and while she was well-aware of its less-than-desirable characteristics (especially weight and effort-to-floor cleanliness ratio) she was still absolutely sold on the utility of this product. We forked out a huge wad of cash for this baby, and since February, the number of times she\u2019s used it can be counted on two hands\u2026 maybe. It\u2019s painfully heavy, requires a lot of post-use maintenance, and requires way too much effort to get a clean floor that we could achieve by hand-mopping, Japanese style, in 1\/5 of the time spent.<\/p>\n

The one thing we can\u2019t do using the latter is sanitation which we don\u2019t need to yet, but Ling says as soon as Hannah starts crawling, she\u2019s going to dust off the cob webs off the iEcologi and use it more often. We\u2019ll see.<\/p>\n

The MSI Wind<\/a> (Win)<\/span><\/strong>. This one\u2019s easy \u2013 considering that this little netbook has accompanied me to San Francisco, spent several nights at Thomson Medical Center, and has been thrown into and taken out of backpacks countless times… and has yet to miss a beat. Ok, so the limited screen resolution of 1024×600 means I have to keep scrolling vertically when I read stuff off the web, but it\u2019s hard to complain for the low price I paid for it compared to the immense amount of photo productivity I\u2019ve got out of it. Why pay a lot of money for portable photo storage when there\u2019re netbooks.<\/p>\n

Apple MacBook Pro<\/a> (In Progress)<\/span><\/strong>. The new wave of CULV processor-equipped and Nvidia ION-powered with 11.6 inch LCD screen netbooks hitting the shops were really tempting, and was initially my choice for replacement of my NEC Versa E6310. I eventually decided to go with the Apple MacBook Pro though, and even Ling was surprised at my change of heart. At this moment of writing, I’ve only had the unit for a couple of weeks so my evaluation on whether it was a good or bad decision is still in-process.<\/p>\n

More in the next post.:)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s come to that time in the year again where I get to look back at some of the most major decisions this year and and with the benefit of a mite bit of hindsight look at how they went.<\/p>\n

Read More Year in Review \u2013 2009 \u2013 Part 1<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[670],"class_list":["post-6199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-toys-technology","tag-year-in-review","wpcat-16-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}