Round Up – So Bored I Blogged

What A Saturday Morning
What A Saturday Morning

Working in the office on another Saturday morning when most my work is completed. Sleepy as hell, eyes hanging out and needing more rest but nope here am I ready to fulfill another 9 hours of company time. No one needs greater motivation than such to write a little junk on a sleepy morn.

Football – The Arsenal DM Mystery, Chamakh to Replace Ade? & Owen to United

Melo isn’t signing for us. Inler, Cana, etc looks like a pipe dream. Nothing going on except for Chamakh whom I’ve never heard before. Supposedly Adebayor’s replacement and I hope that Togo chap goes. Basically his heart isn’t here anymore, his form has dipped and he wasn’t a really good striker anyways. Lacking a solid first touch and sharp finishing, what Ade had was plenty and plenty of tireless hard work operating ahead of RVP alone upfront. Think about it, he’s a bit of a Heskey like player, important but he could be better. No idea how good Chamakh is though in comparison with Ade. Actually, I really miss Bergkamp, Petit & Wright.

Owen signed for United! Think its good for him. I’ve always liked players like him. Quiet, leads a decent life even with the riches he has on hand. Good professional but whether his injuries plague him again is another thing. He was with Liverpool when he was young and used his pace to burn up defenders. Now at 29, he’s slower and is back in the English League (read: physical). We’ll see how he does. It’ll be good for his England aspirations partnering with Rooney who can operate behind him or being a pacey striker to front man Berbatov. Might be an excellent deal for United in the end since he is on free transfer.

Geekish – Time for a Laptop

This is the time of the year that every uni going chap wants to get a laptop. I’m going to hold out until:

1. September IT Show sales.
2. NUS offers.
3. I know the exact requirements of my faculty.
4. Confirmation of the sponsorship so I can work out my budget.

It’s hard for a geek like me to choose a laptop. Idiots like me love power and performance. Everything must be top of the line but with a laptop, portability and battery life comes to mind so one has to balance this. I can’t go for a C2D 2.53ghz with SLI GFX and expect my laptop to be featherlight and still last a long time on battrey power. I’d still need a fast processor (can’t skim on that), good RAM and a doable GFX. I’m not very familiar with the GFX lineups for notebooks but here’s a good link to check.

I’m not going to game much on a laptop but would like my laptop to be ready in case there are adhoc gaming sessions that kinda thing. I don’t play high res games anyways, TF2 isn’t that demanding.

So basically depending on price, I’d like a:

Processor: Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz or 2.53Ghz
RAM: 4GB DDR2/3 RAM (This is dirt cheap anyways)
Hard Drive: 320GB minimum
Screen Size: 13.3″ to 14.1″
GFX: Non onboard. Preferably ATI Radeon HD4570 / nVidia GeForce 9600M GS and above.
OS: Windows 7 32-bit. (I’m going to run W7 64bit on my desktop so I need a little variety)
Build Quality: No skimming on this. Has to be tough and solid.
Budget: $1,600 (Pretty tight)

News – H1N1 will become a common flu.

H1N1 was given a SARS level welcome mat and everyone went bananas about it. After following the news and talking to a few doctor friends for a bit, there’s nothing much we can do to shut the strain out. First it is not life threatening when treated on time. The 100+ people who died early in the outbreak did not know it was a new strain and it was common flu. Thus untreated >> dead. Second, recovery rate is excellent in H1N1 and there’s nothing to be too panicky about. Same rules apply, good hygenie, enough sleep (oh man), proper food (oh boy), and see a doc the moment you have symptoms. You won’t die, you need not panic. Just live your life the way it should be. Most countries are going from containment to mitigation and in 3 months to come, H1N1 would be so widely spread no one will be keeping figures (just imagine how keeping numbers of people with common flu will be like) and it will, in the end, become a common flu. Vaccine’s on the way if you’re interested.