In yet another delay of my Gaming PC Project, I’ve decided to take up photography about 3 months ago. I went the Nikon route and I have no regrets so far. I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more than I originally expected so here I have an itemized breakdown of expenses for my new expensive hobby.

This is the first time I’m going to calculate how much I’ve spent so far, and I’m going to let it sink in so I can set aside some quiet time and reflect on how splurging is bad. Bad Carlo, baaad.

Well, shit.

The fruits of my labor can be found on my Flickr account.

Several of us here at the office have decided to have our own business cards printed. Psalm has some digital printer contacts, so I suppose he’ll be handling them. In the meantime, I have yet to decide how I want the paper (glossy, matte, or maybe a mix of both).

You can preview it on deviantArt.

Curious about what I actually do at work? You might wanna check out my account at tumblr. You’d be surprised how much in common employment has with unemployment.

Timothy Olyphant has been confirmed as the actor to play Agent 47 from the Hitman series of video games. I’m not exactly sure if he’s fit for the part. As you can see from my crude 10-minute photoshop above, he doesn’t have the dark, brooding professional assassin image quite right. The movie should be interesting with Luc Besson on board. Cross your fingers and hope that this game-to-film adaptation doesn’t get butchered like the ones that came before it.

Hey, at least it isn’t Vin Diesel.

Gone is Insectivore, my old Celeron 300MHz SD 196MB. This PC I’m using now, Muymra, is a three year old AthlonXP 1800+ DDR 512MB whose knees have weakened and is likely on it’s last throes before it finally dies of old age. It’s actually running at 1.2GHz just so it doesn’t keep freezing up. This phased out Nvidia FX5600 128MB acts up every once in a while to bombard me with ugly square artifacts, usually at crucial moments while playing a game. Before it pisses me off enough to break it, I’m going to peacefully retire it out of pity and start planning for my next baby.

My P30,000 budget is fairly reasonable for a gaming PC considering I plan to transfer devices over from my current PC such as extra hard disks, my 19″ CRT, and my DVD-RW.

This list will be changed according to my most current list of parts to be purchased:

Next set of problems, coming up with the money by this summer and thinking of a new name.

Update: I’m halfway there, another month or so of holding off any impulse buying and I’ll have the money to buy this thing. Maybe add another month if I want to gift myself with a sweet Wacom Intuos.

I got myself a P100 henna tattoo at the mall. Yeah, the guy kinda botched it. It looked much better on the stencil and it wasn’t one whole shape. Note to self: get something less complicated so the morons get it right next time.

After my shift yesterday, I met up with a guy who was selling these Sennheiser CX300-B canalphones. It was a weird feeling, I had never spent over P1,000 for earphones before. But taking into account that I had already spent P14,000 for my MP3 player and P2,500 for a leather pouch, it would just be plain stupid to not go the extra mile for an item that will let me fully enjoy the device.

So he handed me the earphones still in its packaging and urged me to try them on. He suggested I try the small size silicon rubber eartips first. It was a very uncomfortable feeling having a foreign object stuck into your ear canal. It didn’t feel right at all. I pressed play on my player and I got this horrible tinny sound, there was no bass at all. Utterly disappointed, I paid him P2,300 anyway and took them home to give it another shot. I wasn’t keen on looking like an idiot in public.

At home, I pulled out the small size eartips and attached the medium ones. I read somewhere that people, usually westerners, have a comfortable fit with the mediums. Maybe I have large ear canals, I thought.

I gently pushed them into my ears. It felt like there was a vacuum inside, after all there are rubber sleeves stuck in my ear blocking out the rest of the world. Must be what a butt plug feels like. I could barely hear the vehicles right outside the window, that’s probably a good thing. Probably. I mean, that’s the point right? I adjusted it some more and once I had a good seal, I picked a random song and played it.

Oh wow.

The tinny sound was gone, the bass was strong, everything was clear and it sounded like the band was playing from inside my head. It was earsex, I swear. Once you get past the discomfort of having rubber sleeves plugging up your ear, it’s all sonic paradise. Mind you I’m no audiophile, but this is the first time I’ve heard music sounding this clear and this good.

I shuffled around through other songs, through different genres, and each song I played sounded entirely new simply because I’ve never heard them like this before. Even the testicle-shriveling power metal wails are divine with this thing. I popped in a 24 DVD, looked for an action scene and enjoyed all the rumbling explosions and gunfire. I could’ve sworn my head was vibrating.

I’m 95% satisfied. The other 5% went to the weirdness of being able to hear my own footsteps, breathing, and talking via low inner ear vibrations while I have them on. Overall though, these canalphones are worth every peso I paid. Besides, it will take only like a day and a half to earn it all back, so it’s all good. If I ever lose these or if they ever break, I wouldn’t hesitate to pay another 2k to replace them.

I’m not even going to proofread this post, I wanna get back to using them.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Even my sister and her boyfriend, both iPod Video users, are impressed. They will readily admit that the Zen is the better device. Why? Because I was watching DivX episodes of Lost and 24 I copied directly off my machine. They have to convert theirs first. Plus, the screen is superb; the colors are better, the screen is brighter and the themes are a lot less antiquated than the tired, old iPod version of Aqua. Aside from a few useful extra features that the iPod doesn’t have, I can transfer files to it using Windows Media Player 10 or Windows Explorer. Another thing, though I haven’t tried it yet, is that it’s supposed to work under Linux. Later, I will try transferring media using Banshee under GNOME to see if it’s true. MTP is sweet.

There are some drawbacks though. The package I bought doesn’t come with a power adapter, it’s a separate purchase. Also, the A/V out cables are proprietary and I need to buy them if I ever want to play my videos on a TV. The accessories are less widespread than the iPod’s so I have to go to particular shops that sell Zen-specific accessories. Another tiny detail, the first unit I got broke within 12 hours and I had to run back to the shop the next day to get a replacement unit. I guess it’s a good thing that Zens tend to break while still under warranty.

My next purchase will be a non-white set of headphones or earphones. I’m personally blaming the iPod for making people wearing white earphones such a juicy target for muggers and thieves.

I’m finally getting the hang of using Inkscape. The interface isn’t the most intuitive around but you can’t argue with free. I retraced the skull thing from The Triumvirate in SVG format and imported them into Photoshop.

Yeah, so I kinda cheated because only the skull is from Inkscape (although the rest are composed of Photoshop’s fully-scalable shape layers), but I’m taking baby steps with it. I still work so much faster with Photoshop and I don’t have a lot of free time, so that’s the temptation right there.

- Crux on deviantArt.

Next thing on my to do list is learning how to make half-decent fractal flames.

After three days of working in-between work and life, I’ve can finally say that my new splash is ready. Just in time for Friday the 13th too. View it here: muymra.com.

I also made a wallpaper version of it for download.

-The Triumvirate (deviantart)