Well, it's 2005 and usually we got a lot of new goals that we wish to attain. Fortunately for me, those new goals came right to my step.

Job Scope Change
There are some work scope shift adjustments. I'll be working on a slightly changed basis supporting a few different customers. Fuminari will be the senior of the PDA & Projector Support accompanied by many fresh faces. I'm gonna miss that guy but I believe with the different work definition, we can finally do outside activities together! No no, nothing GAY! What I meant was like lunch, those photoshoot activities and heck, we can even take the same day for our annual leaves!

Just go by means that we're not constrained by our responsibility anymore. For those who didn't follow much on our stories, Fuminari and me are the only person in our company that support PDA & Projectors and because of that, when he does take an annual leave, I would have to work because there can never be two of us taking leave at the same time! Sepang Race Queens, here we come!

New Computer
In fact, a few days ago, I was so busy that I was unable to post a few blogs because of a new computer I received. According to our Process Engineer (he's the guy that shuffles the backend and upgrading our standard computer equipment), my processor was the lowest amongst my team member (being only a Pentium III 550 Mhz or so). Been testing this baby for the last 3 days and was quite impressed with its speed. Featuring a Pentium 4 2.66 Ghz and 512 MB worth of memory, my whole workload seem to be lifted and it felt like I'm flying instead of crawling when updating our customer records.

However, Ms. Ong / Mrs. Khoo told me that I'll be getting a new notebook as well, so I might go easy on the computer. Asked him why can't I keep the notebook I have now? It's a workstation notebook with Quadro 4 Go graphics card and a Pentium 4 M processor! It relatively gives me a really good performance and I have no wish to use other new sissified notebooks. But, rules and rules and I'm forced to accept the new notebooks in the future instead of keeping the desktop. *sigh*

Camera Galore
Finally sold my stock option after being kept in the company for God knows how long. Sold it for cash and decided it is time to get me a good digital camera. It's been too long that I lament about the Panasonic FZ20 (I love the zoom feature) but since I've got some extra cash, I was thinking why not go for the extra mile? Then suddenly the Digital SLR¹ camera thought came into my mind. What's the best camera there is within my budget?

Fuminari suggested instead of staying on a prosumer point-and-shoot and faced with a lot of stock shortage problem², he initially advised me to get a Canon 300D (also known as Digital Rebel in the States or Digital Kiss in Japan) because it's only a few RM³ hundred extra from the Panasonic FZ20. After checking the camera details from the shop, we found that the relatively cheap priced DSLR⁴ actually comes with a shortcoming: it doesn't come with a battery pack! With the whole package, it comes with extra RM 450, which roughly matched the price on the street! And if I add another few hundred, I might actually get a Nikon D70!

¹ SLR = Single-Lense Reflex: Basically, the lense gets the image & reflects that exact image to you through a mirror to the picture capture circuit. Standard point and shoot digital cameras uses video signal to make an adjustment. In short, DSLR is much like your old cameras, and preview is not reflected on the LCD, but instead through the viewfinder. This causes the photographer to get no prior adjustment except for his hand coordination skills and knowledge to take a good picture. However, since it's mostly manual work, a DSLR has a high quality picture capture instead of the standard digital cameras.

² At this time and date of writing, Panasonic FZ20 has a notorious stock shortage problem in Malaysia. Sure the product was great but all the stocks have to pass through Hong Kong, and because it's a hot-cake, we have only few units left to be sold in Malaysia.

³ RM = Ringgit Malaysia, which is the currency of our monetary in Malaysia. Exchange rate goes roughly about USD 1 to RM 3.8.

⁴ DSLR = Digital SLR. Duh!