Fear of test and trip across Canada with Sam Lau ?

I woke up this morning after having some crazy dreams. Some are so crystal clear that they still stuck in my head. One of them was a dream which Sam Lau and I were trying to go to "the west side of Canada" (don't understand why I was so keen about the direction is that dream.) we started off at the east side, and we took turn driving a car. When it was my turn, I was driving in the desert like area, and the road was ultra bumpy. At one point the car was trapped in some ugly looking Mud, and kept yelling Sam Lau, "get out of the car and push". We somehow reached to the super crowded train station (the what?) and we found out that all ticket were sold.

I asked, "what should we do" but saw that Sam already got back to the car. In fact this time is somebody else' s car, which belonged to an old friend at church (forgot exactly who he or she is). And then the rest of the dream became hazy.

But the dream turned into my preparing to take a standardized test. My friend Hansel Sin seems very well prepared and walked out of the class which was set aside for people to prepare for the test. I was on the other hand very frustrated, and at one point struggling about whether I should bring a laptop computer with me.

And then "the camera" (my view point in the dream)cut to the time when I am already in the dream, struggling to answer all the questions. I found that I kind of knew a lot of the answer, but I was just too slow to answer most of them by comparing with the others. And when the end of the test approached, I didn't have one fifth of the questions answered. In fact I even mistakenly answered a lot of the question directly on the question paper instead of on the answer sheet. When someone came by to collect my answer sheet, I simply stapled (come to think of it, where in the world did I find the stapler on my desk anyway) the answer sheet with the stack of question paper, and then hand it over.

At the end I asked who will mark the papers and I wanted to talk to that person. I was about to tell that person how frustrated I was, and my plan of quitting school because of that. At that moment, I woke up from the dream.

This Is the Nth time I woke up from the nightmare of taking standardized test.

How to pay Amazon.com purchase by combining debit card(s) and credit card as payment method

I got 2 $10 debit card as rebate from 2 different rebate inquiry.  One card was from buying a Hitachi harddisk, and one card from buying Patriot SD card.  The thing that I don't like these debt cards is that it's hard to combine payment with another credit card when shopping online.  Since I was about to buy something from amazon.com anyway, so I used the following process to allow me to roll these $20 credit combine with my credit card to complete the purchase, which basically use gift card as the temp "buffer".

- Use Hitachi Visa debt card to buy $10 Amazon gift card.
- Apply the gift card credit to my Amazon account.
- Use Patriot Visa debt card to buy $10 Amazon gift card.
- Apply the gift card credit to my Amazon account.
- Purchase at Amazon.com.  Amazon allows me to combine gift card credit with my credit card.

Mission accomplished.  And I am going to throw away these 2 debit cards 2 months later once I make sure that there's no leftover credit.

Super fast hair cutting

I was amazed by how fast my hair stylist cut my hair.  I think she probably spent less than 30 minutes on my hair, and it was done pretty OK.

Another Android nightmare

Continuing the tradition of "what can fail eventually fails", the microSD card of my HTC Desire failed this morning.  It was actually died in the middle of some Amazon AppStore App installation.  What a WTF experience.  And now everything is messed up, so I think I have no choice but reinstall everything all over again.  Honestly I don't know whom to blame: Amazon App Store, that shitty KingMax Class 2 8Gb MicroSD card or HTC.

Anyway I need to first write down all the apps that I need to reinstall first before I reset the machine.  This is also a good time to swap in a better Kingston Class 4 8Gb MicroSD card.  The bottomline is this whole process is like a damn joke, happening in this morning when my sixth sense told me to wake up earlier in order to deal with "some crap".  There it goes.

So this is why I am not getting XBox 360

It all started this morning when I saw the deal available from amazon.com, which sells XBox 360 Sim 4Gb for US$199 with US$50 Amazon credit rebate.  I brought most of my stuff my Amazon.com anyway, so this basically says that XBox 360 is selling at US$149.  As a person who always obsess on trying new gaming gadget, this sounds like a pretty nice deal. 

So the question is: should i buy it?

After a near 2 hours research (I consider that quick, consider that most of my purchase decision takes months and sometimes years of research), I told myself, "no, you are not getting it".  Here's why:

• "Creating game for XBox 360" is a stupid excuse: Believe it or not, but this is usually my biggest excuse of getting XBox 360, particularly after I brought PS3 last year.  Gaming is no longer the biggest reason since most of the XBox 360 available titles are on PS3 too.  But I kept telling myself: you can write games for XBox 360 using C# and Visual Studio 2010.  Isn't that awesome.  Well, first of all, in order to run code on XBox360, I have to join the dev program and pay US$99 everyday.  Am I willing to do that?  But more importantly, if I have time, I would much rather spending time developing for iPad, and I already paid US$99 each year to join the iPhone Developer Program.  How many games have I developed?  ZERO!  **ucking ZERO games created?  Why?  Because there are tons of other shit in my life that are in higher propriety.  So, if I couldn't even find time to develop for iPad, something that I am so passionate to do, how to hell will I find time to do that on XBox 360?
  
• No time to play (more) games : I just have to keep reminding myself again and again and again: Daniel Kwan, you do not, I repeat, you do not have a lot of time to play video games unless that quit your damn day job.  So stop fooling yourself.  You already have your PS3 with 3 great games that you have to fight with yourself in order to find time to play it, and then there are tens (probably around 100 now) of demos on PS3 waiting for you to try it out.  And on the top of that, you have iPad, Andriod, PSP plus tons of emulator games, NDS, Wii ...   So how in the world can you find time to play even TRY OUT games?
  
• Not gonna play Kinect games at home : one of the great excuse for getting XBox 360 is to play something exclusive to XBox 360: Kinect.  Too bad the fun and hype on it is pretty much gonna by now, and I am not going to be a sad loner playing Kinect games at home by myself.
  
• Not useful unless I get the 250Gb HD, and suddenly the price is not cheap anymore: The reason why I enjoy my PS3 even though I only have 3 games is because (A) it's an awesome media player (B) I can try out tons of demo.  Technically I can do the same to XBox Live.  However, with 4Gb harddisk, there's no way I can enjoy XBox Live.  So that means I have to buy the 250Gb harddisk.  Suddenly that's another US$90,  Plus I need to pay U$60 annually to subscript XBox Live.  And Finally I have to find PEOPLE to play with me on XBox Live.  The more I think about it, the more I found those not making sense to me.
  
• No exclusive XBox 360 titles that I enjoy playing: I checked some wiki list, and yeah, there's no exclusive XBox 360 title that I have play.  I don't play FPS, and just that should be enough for me to skip XBox 360.
  
• XBox 360 Slim is still not hackable yet: Nope, I am not thinking about pirating (otherwise I won't buy PS3), but no hacking means no alternative media center feature and such.  Not a major reason, but another bullet point that I care.
  
• XBox 360's hardware problem track record: fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on you.  RROD change to red dot in the middle of the ring.
  
  

Hopefully, next time when I am hyped thinking about getting XBox 360, I will have this article to remind me why not.