Grace and Mercy

Lately I've been experiencing a lot of awesomeness this past week. Here's an update:

- Housing inquiries have been pouring in, even from people that sound very sketch on emails. Also, very special thanks for Joses and Jorge for helping out with showing the house. Pray that things will go smoothly, and for others who still haven't found sublets.

- I'm making up my failed TPM by taking a speech & presentations course down at UofT for about 6 weeks during my work term. To my surprise, my academic advisor (Prof Harder) was actually understanding of my situation.

- Just got all my marks back. Ended up with a low 70, two low 60s, and two low 50s, making an average of 59.6....totally God's work here. They will have to review my previous marks to decide whether or not I pass the term since it's under the absolute pass line of 59.8.

- Found out that one of my friends in class finally found a job...surprisingly at AMD as well! Guess I'll be seeing 3 people from my class at work now. Still, prayer for those who are looking for jobs.



This week has been semi-productive. Hung out with some people I haven't seen for a while. I managed to get bingo'd at BBT on Tuesday night somehow....all the other guys decided to go home early. It was quite an awkward experience. It went something like this...names changed for obvious reasons:

Girl 1: "Did you hear about what happened about Andy and Sara?"
Girl 2: "No, what happened?"
Girl 1: "Apparently, Sara flew all the way back to visit Andy, and he dumped her on the spot"
Girl 3: "You mean my ex? Oh...my...gawwwsh!!"
Girl 2: "Are you serious? How could he?"

I sat there thinking to myself...yeah, I'm a guy...totally can't relate to this. (Jon Lin, I need advice.)

Oh, and I managed to put the first collision on my mom's semi-new van. I put a palm-sized dent on the rear right because I backed out of the garage and hit my dad's side mirror. Thankfully, (a) I wasn't the first to hit my dad's car, and (b) only paint was scraped off the mirror. But yeah. As a son of a driving instructor, I'm quite a terrible driver.

End of term reflections

So 3A has drawn to a close. Things to praise God for!

1) Done exams! Maybe not the best exams written, but God did help me through them. Whether or not I pass them is another story, which I'll explain later.

2) I got a job early at AMD/ATI as my first and only interview this term. Given the economic situation, this is truly a blessing.


Prayers for others:

1) Tim Ng still needs to find a sublet, along with a bunch of others including Alex Yu.

2) Pray for people looking for jobs. Very very tough to find jobs now. There are even some people in my class who are still unemployed.


So I have three things that I need prayer for:

1) Marks. I thought I'd be able to put a ton of more effort this term and be able to achieve at least a 75 average, but I fell short again. Seems like this happens every term...I only end up working super hard as exams approach. Really up to God on this one.

2) Another school related thing: my TPM. It's a presentation that I had to do back in 2A that I failed, and I completely forgot about redoing it or taking the make-up course for it. Apparently I can't go on to 3B if I don't clear it. I'll be talking to the coordinator tomorrow. Up to God on this one as well.

3) Housing. Still haven't found a sublet for next term. I have about a week to find someone.


Extra stuff:

During the exam time, my relationship with God has dwindled. My big study bible has been sitting on the floor for quite some time now, and I know it's wrong to just call on God only when I'm in tight situations. Despite this, I know that God allowed these things to happen to me. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm ready to face what God has in store for me for the upcoming months, whether or not it will be to my liking. Whatever it is, I know I will benefit from it. He truly gives and takes away.

netbooking?

So I decided to buy an ASUS EEE 1000HE netbook to see if it was really all that useful. Okay, maybe it was just an excuse to try out a new electronic gadget, since I seem to have a natural affinity to them. Yesterday, I was about to boast about resisting the urge to buy things I don't need, but Keith managed to easily convince me otherwise.

And so, Staples shipped it to my door today. For once, I could actually say "that was easy". When I took it out of the box, it looked pretty sleek. The top lid was so nice and glossy (although with a gritty-looking texture, so fingerprints aren't as noticeable). It looked like a really nice oversized DS or something. However, it was a bit on the thick side when compared to my 15" Macbook Pro (around 1.4 inches vs 1 inch), although it's about two pounds lighter (3 lbs vs 5 lbs).



As a size comparison, I've stacked up a few other things. From the bottom, there's my Macbook Pro, Keith's NEC MobilePro 780, and my Nintendo DS.



As I opened up the lid......to my horror, I was greeted with.....a FRENCH KEYBOARD!! The moment I saw this, I wanted to return it. That's how much I dislike non-US keyboards. I need both shift keys to be long, I need the enter key to be long, and the "\" key to be right above the enter key.



From my few hours of use, I've already made many typos from this keyboard. Aside from that, they keys look something similar to the Macbook keyboards, although the build quality definitely feels a lot cheaper. Keys are slightly smaller, which I do notice a bit with my big hands.

I think the mouse touchpad is what I liked the most. It features something similar to Apple's MultiTouch, where you could use multiple fingers to do different gestures for, let's say, scrolling, right clicking, zooming, rotating, etc. Most of it is pretty customizable, so I made it behave as close to a Macbook's trackpad as possible. Sure, it doesn't have the same feel to it and can be a bit finicky at times, but it works.

In Windows XP, I was limited to a small 1024x600 screen resolution. This was my biggest turnoff for any netbook, as I tend to enjoy super high resolutions so I can fit a bunch of windows on a screen. When I'm severely limited in screen space, it feels very crowded and sometimes frustrating when windows are too big for the screen (ex: Windows Live Messenger, unresizable configuration menus). I wish they at least included an option in Windows to change the overall sizes of things like fonts, windows, taskbars, etc. Oh well.

Video playback was pretty impressive. I installed the Combined Community Codec Pack to watch some soft-subbed anime clips. Anything in SD would work flawlessly (like the first episode of K-On!), but started lagging once I threw a 720p Zeta Gundam opening clip. However, trying out CoreAVC allowed smooth 720p playback (presumably had better decompression algorithms). Super impressed.

Hooking up my trusty Dell 2407wfp LCD monitor, I tried video playback through that. Strangely, I couldn't set the resolution too high, or else it would result in a distorted image. When I got to a working resolution, I tried the 720p clip again with CoreAVC. To my disappointment, the video and audio went out of sync again. Meh, oh well. Wasn't expecting too much out of the integrated graphics.

I'm quite impressed that Asus created a separate backup partition on the hard drive, so you could restore your C: to factory settings easily. Most manufacturers leave you with a single install of Windows XP, and you're on your own if you need to re-install it.

Battery life is freaking ridiculous. I haven't had all that much time to test it out thoroughly, but Asus claims a 9.5-hour battery life. I'd presume with the wireless adapter on and a bunch of applications open, it would work out to about 7 hours or so. Nevertheless, I wouldn't have to worry about battery life like I did for my Macbook Pro running on an old 1.5hr battery.

Lastly, the price. I paid about $410+tax for this, which works out to be about $463. At that price, I could have gotten maybe a decent CoreDuo based laptop. Maybe not with the same features, but you get the idea--a netbook, made designed purely for the convenience of having the Internet "at your fingertips" wherever you go, is relatively expensive. I'd say it's more of a luxury thing.

Now, for the big decision: do I really need this? Definitely not. Is it nice to have? Yes. However, I already have an existing laptop, and having this would merely be just for convenience of being able to bring a small, lightweight computer around whenever I may need to use one. Problem is, I haven't had the need to do that. Sure, it could be a good laptop to bring to SLC to study, but again...I'd rather just bring my other laptop. It has more screen space, better hardware and operating system, etc.

I started to think a bit further, past the "good deal" and "practicallity/usefulness" train of thought. Why do I indulge myself in worldly things so much? After I received the netbook and used it for a bit, there was still this dissatisfaction...sort of a craving for more. It's like the law of diminishing returns. It's probably safe to say that I've been idolizing material wealth over these years. It's one of these things that I'm constantly struggling with. I could have used all that time that I spent surfing RedFlagDeals and read the Bible more, or even my baptismal books that I planned to finish by the end of the year.

Well, on that note, I think it's time to say goodbye to this nice little laptop. I'll be returning it to Staples tomorrow after the Maple Syrup Festival.