Category: ranting

Now I can get married!

I have to have my birth certificate to get married in Singapore—Passport apparently is not good enough—I’ve been told that this is so they know what sex you where when you were born. But being as I’m in Singapore and my birth certificate was in the US it took me about 6 months to get my hands on it. In the mean time I used my hands to pull my hair out trying to figure our where it was. I thought I knew where it was but when I had my mom look she could not find it! She finally came across it last week in a pile of her stuff—not in mine! Good timing!

Being less than 200 kilometers from the equator Singapore has two season: the dry season and the rainy (less dry) season. In the two years I’ve been here I haven’t noticed a lot of difference between the two—the monsoons don’t reach Singapore, and neither do the typhoons. I have noticed that there is a thrid season that happens every year around this time. The hazy season [bbc.co.uk]

So Apple is going to revolutionize home media (again?) with there upcoming iTV (stand by for rename—that one is owned already.) Basically the iTV is a box to allow you to stream your digital content from your computer to your home entertainment system. But Apple is taking baby steps. I think they need to get up and run.

There are few things that I would like to see Apple do:

1. Think big!
   Apple recently added a 24 inch iMac to the line up but I would like to see them go bigger. How about a 30 inch or even 36?
2. I hord data
   Now that we have a bigger screen on our iMac we have a lot of extra room down below the screen where the guts of the system are. Lets use it! Memory is cheap. Give me more, say 1 or 1.5 terabytes. Yea that’s good. We’ll need it.
3. It’s all about the Connectivity
   While we’re at it lets add a few things to the back of that iMac:
   • 2 HDMI inputs
   • Component video
   • Optical audio
   • Stereo phonos audio
   • Coaxial input
4. Even better I’d put them on the stand of the iMac rather than the back of the screen as the wire hanging down bother me. (Oh yea, put a firewire 800 port or two on the iMac too!)
5. iPause
   Time to add some functionality to Frontrow. Great program but we need to add a TV function so we can use that Coaxial imput to watch TV. And while we’re at it lets add a good DVR function too.
6. Control
   To pull it all together we need to update that dinky little Apple remote we use to control Frontrow. We have a TV and DVR in the system now so we need a full scale TV/DVR remote. Maybe it can still magnetically mount to the side of the system maybe not. Who cares, you’re going to lose it between the sofa cushions anyway.

Now we have a great system. Who needs a TV? If Apple packages the thing with a wireless keyboard and a wireless mighty mouse it’s the first real all-in-wonder digital home entertainment center.

But is the world ready to use a computer as their main entertainment hub in the living room? I don’t know, but I am. I want one. Take note Steve.

Five years on and what have we learned?
Nothing.

Five years on and is anyone any safer?
No.

Five years on and has anything changed?
Everything.
Nothing.

After close to four years since my last move I have changed jobs. Why? I decided it was time to move on, enough said.

My new job is still in Singapore –thats good since I am going to be married here in a few months– and it’s still in the same industry. It’s going to be a real challenge as it’s a move up the responsibility ladder but at least it’s a new challenge. It should be fun too. Anyway. I don’t like to talk too much about work on this site so I’ll leave it at that.