Pzizz

Sylvia from ping.sg twittered about Pzizz.com. I dunno how new this site is, can't be bothered to check now that I've closed the window. But in short Pzizz offers you customizable audio to relax and energize you with their Energizer module, or bring you peaceful sleep with their Sleep module. Pzizz combines New Age-y music, the usual soothing stuff, and a relaxing voice to accompany you to sleep. And these change with every play, ensuring that you'll never get tired, nor will your body be too accustomed to the musical sequence for Pzizz to lose its effectiveness. Sequence durations and audio levels are customizable to suit your preference. In other words, it fills in the energy limits of humans. I don't think you'd last 20min accompanying and soothing your child or loved one to sleep. You'll wake up screaming crying and drooling at 7am the next morning with three stacks of work undone and half an hour to get your arse to the office.



As a trial, Pzizz offers download of their software, individually or as a bundle, as well as a 15min sample track of each module. I played the sleep sample track. And after 30 seconds I was so frightened of knocking out right in front of my computer that I turned the track off. I'll load it into my MP3 and try it out later. I do need some uninterrupted sleep badly, if that's what this software touts.

Check it out and lemme know! :)

You Dropped Your Pad

Yesterday I was honored to be invited to Daphne's 21st birthday party. We were at The Mussel Guys at Vivo City, and we had a really great time with well, not funkilicious, but at least good seafood (if you consider fish and chips seafood, that's what I ate). The fish was soft, and at times that became a fault because you couldn't dip your chunk of fish into tartar sauce without leaving it behind as you lift your fork up. The tartar and fries, however, were good. As we finally left for the... oh what's that place called... Rooftop Gardens? for a few final pictures, John motioned to the welcoming waitress outside the restaurant. The filter sponge of her earpiece had fallen off as she removed it, and she hadn't noticed it. Ben and I noticed him stopping, and we turned to see what happened. As John explained, Ben comprehended and filled in with, "Ohhhh the pad issit?"

"Yeah yeah."
"And you told her that she dropped her pad."
"......"
"Um..."
"No let's... don't go there."
"I'm not going there!"

So all the girls saw at first were three guys screaming and laughing and bent over and walking like drunkards. I could barely explain it to them over my laughing fit. Oh gosh, it was so funny.

"Excuse me ma'am, you dropped your pad." Nice.

Should I Join the Petition to repeal 377A?

A friend of mine invited me to a Facebook group, or rather the Facebook group for Repeal377A.com, to petition the Singapore government to consider repealing the (in)famous Section 377A, presently criminalizing gay sex even between consenting partners. As I was about to click the Join button, a powerful force on the inside of me swelled and set off alarm bells. My subconscious was hesitant. I had a dilemma on hand.

As a person with, at the very least, an average intellect, I'm neither ashamed nor afraid to say that I recognise the need for Singapore's society, especially the older generations, to be more open-minded. Things are changing rapidly, very rapidly, and if you don't agree with it, you'll just be left in the dust. If you don't agree with it as a nation, you'll be left in the dust as an entire nation, dragging younger generations like us who wish to see Singapore becoming a more intellectually modern place. That said, 377A is, to me, a rather rare stepping stone to voice our concern in this area. The contents are certainly controversial, but how many chances like this do liberals get to voice their stand on an open society?

On the other side, I am Christian, and I firmly believe that fornication between two men is not natural and is not God-ordained (whether it gives pleasure is another thing. But it's not right).

Just today, my junior sent me the link to Keep377A.com, the "nemi-site" of Repeal377A.com.

Once before I commented during the last Singapore General Elections that while we all weren't exactly overjoyed with the PAP, there wasn't enough strength and faith in the opposition to vote for them. So I said I would have nullified my vote. To which my cousin gently corrected me, saying that since I've been giving the choice, I should exercise it to the best of my ability, and not waste it when others don't even have the chance to make their opinion counted.

Today, I feel that I have been given a chance to vote. For or against liberty, and for or against the inevitable spread of homosexuality should this section be approved. And after all I've just wrote, I've come to a conclusion. That's right, thanks to blogging, I've made up my mind. And it is this.

No matter how rare opportunities will come by, we are a rapidly evolving society. You can try to resist it, but soon it will overwhelm you. I believe, and in fact hope for more chances like this to show my support for liberalism in this society, without having to deal with thorny issues such as the spread of homosexualism. For now, faith and rational morals will take the throne. I will put my name down in Keep377A.com.

What is your stand today?

One of those weird dreams

So I was woozy in front of my computer right? As always my sleep cycle wasn't complete before I woke up, and I'm dozing off to make up for it. I just never learn. Images of an excited email from my podcast's head honcho Daniel shrieking that we have another PR email flashed around my mind. I tried to open it and the only thing I can remember now was a 5-letter email conversation (thank you so much Gmail) and someone from the PR firm starting off with Dear Renhao.

A couple of minutes later I woke out of Twilight Zone, and I'm in that part of waking up when you recover from sleep? Like when batteries get over-charged and they're trying to deal with it? Yeah, and I'm doing the cover-one-eye-and-frown thingy and thinking What was that all about?

Then I saw my Gmail Notifier was blue.

Then I opened it up and saw a press release email from Olympus announcing the E-3 DSLR, successor to the 7-year-old E-1 (thanks to the Engadget community).

Ok so it wasn't an excited letter from Daniel. But it's still a press release! How the tech did Olympus get my/our email? I dunno, but I find it kinda presumptous to add media to the press list without first notifying them innit? Cos this was directly from Olympus, not even from a PR middleman (middleperson).

The mystery lives on...

Fu-i-ku-to-ri

Wuha.

Ahahaha.

MUUUUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA! VIC-TOR-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Tsukasa-chan's through to the next round of Saimoe '07!

Tsukasa BANZAI~! BANZAI~!

Tsukasa's victory however, also means that San-chan from Seto no Hanayome has been booted from the competition. And I'm not gleeful to see her go because she's one fine gal, with alot of chivalry to boot. But nevertheless I'm more happy for Tsukasa.

WAII! WAII!

You know you're too obsessed when you rejoice over your favorite cartoon girl getting through a competition.

Free webhosting and domain. Why not?

Ok, well, since I thought of blogging about something or the other anyway, I decided to join unclesha's free webhosting and domain contest.

I deserve to win the 1 year free blog hosting and web domain sponsored by ‘We Host You’ because I've been wanting for the longest time to have my own site. I love Blogger because it's just so straightforward, and it offers more horizontal room than I would ask for. But, and this is not Blogger's fault in any way, I don't get vertical freedom.

What the hell you talking about? Well especially with a sort of user interface for layout editing, Blogger's brought the ability to customize your blogs to the masses like never before, when previously to do so you had to learn HTML. I know, because I did. But anyways, layout editing. That's what I mean by horizontal space. Short of having the theoretical ability to make your blog into an interactive site with CGI fairies and THX-certified surround sound, Blogger's got it all laid out for you. But what if you wanted to create a survey page? Or a special page for a special something, say a page dedicated to the situation in Burma now, showing your support for the monks. Or a mash of your Web 2.0 stuff - Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc.etc. Or a page that doesn't have the usual characteristics of a blog page. Now it's not Blogger's fault they don't offer something like this to you, because they are a blogging site after all, hello?

Having your own site offers that flexibility and more. I've got so many ideas waiting to be launched, that are either not feasible on Blogger or a chore to do. I'd rather just wait than work my ass out to make something half-past-six on Blogger when I can do it so easily on my own site.

So yeah. I deserve to win. Really.

Discman VS MP3 Player

There was a week's gap between the time I returned the review ZEN unit and yesterday when I collected my very own unit. To fill in the void of a portable music player, I burnt a few CDs and went back in time to use my Discman.

It was a disgusting experience.

What an irony that CDs which were supposed to be far more superior than painfully compressed digital audio files sounded like a mere shadow of the latter. But in all fairness, these weren't original CDs but burnt CDs converted from MP3 files. I always wonder what they do... expand it back to its original space? Well wouldn't that just make things worse?

Guess I answered my own question.

And these past two days I've had the Aurvana X-Fi headphones with me to play around with. For those of you still not in the know about X-Fi technology, X-Fi aims to accomplish two goals of audio resurrection and relative spatial reproduction. In English, to attempt to replace what has been lost through compression, and to reconstruct an accurate stereo stage for a more wholesome listening experience.

And even the X-Fi could only do so much with the crappy CDs. The sound quality was average at best. And the volume, oh my goodness. At MAXIMUM volume, the CD player was outputting to the headphones at my normal listening volume (65%). I thought well, maybe the headphones required power to run properly.

Then I got my ZEN today! Excitedly I dashed back and loaded songs in and played.

I only had to crank up to 75% volume to have a fantastic (nevertheless ear-spoiling) listening experience. But the ZEN I've always felt, I thought, had a higher output power.

And then as I'm typing now, I'm listening to my brother's spoilt iPod Shuffle (dunno how he can throw here and there until the USB internal data cable snapped. No hope). Still has battery though, so I'm taking the chance to try it out. Very surprisingly, I estimate that I've turned the volume to about 80% or at most 85%. And it's already blasting into my ears.

Well that's that then. CD players, you disappoint me. Be thee casted into techological oblivion forever, and may ye not just burneth there, but melteth there.

How many of you got that joke now?

Reviewin' the Creative Aurvana X-Fi Noise-Cancelling Headphones

Ok so I attended the launch event right?


Well my audiophile friends, the review unit is here. And guess what.



I'm ROCKIN' OUT ON IT BIG TIME! \m/ It's a freaking aurgasm powered on my computer (too soft on portable devices - standard problem for otherwise rocking headphones). I'm listening to classic guitar tunes (not classical, classic) like Hotel California, Cemetery Gates, Sultans of Swing, Master of Puppets, Sweet Child O' Mine, and I'm thinking to myself "I can die happy."

Well ok I do have one regret. It's not that snug that I can do some serious headbanging. If I do that, give another minute and I'll start banging my head for headbanging $500 onto the floor. In pieces.

Many pieces.

Watch out for NTT and my extensive review of it on Tech65 soon.