Booking a Flight

•March 18, 2009 • Leave a Comment

Well of course this is one of the most important steps in traveling abroad! So if this is one of the most important steps in budgeting and scheduling for your trip overseas, I think people should spend more time in researching pricing. I’ve been on trips before where the group I was going with decided to purchase the ticket a month or so before we took off. The longer you wait to book your flight the higher premium you will end up paying.

I’m going to give a brief description of my trip and the extreme difference I saved on booking my flight. Like the title of the blog says I am traveling to Hong Kong. The duration of the trip is going to be the entire month of July. I have been planning and praying over this trip for several months. Last year for my plan ticket to Hong Kong I paid a little over $1700. I believe our group bought the tickets about a month and a half from our set date.

This year I bought my tickets maybe about two weeks ago now and I ended up paying a total of $1000. That is quite a difference in price. I almost paid for my ticket at half the price. Now keep in mind we are under a “recession” but I found the same principles to hold true before we came under this unfortunate economic downturn.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Orbitz is not the only online travel provider. There are plenty of other sources such as http://hotwire.com http://travelocity.com http://studentuniverse.com and I’m sure there are plenty of other ones. While I was searching for my ticket I searched a span of months that might be cheaper to travel in. After trying May, June and July, July turned out to be the cheapest month to travel to Hong Kong over the summer. I’m not sure if this is a yearly thing or just pertains to this year. Anyways over a period of two weeks I check daily the pricing of airplane tickets. You would not even believe me if I told you about how drastically they change each day.

So my suggestion is pay close attention to flight tickets and do a lot of research on the pricing. This is the first step in optimizing your trip budget so your piggy bank won’t be aching after you return from the trip. 😛

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Goodbye Conscience?

•March 9, 2009 • 1 Comment

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Samsung T10

•February 13, 2009 • 3 Comments

Ok so I know everyone has a bloody iPod. Well ya! Including me but I also have my Samsung T10 MP3 Player. I will say it’s no iPod but I feel as though this is a very exceptional MP3 Player. Allow me to elaborate on my reasons.

Oh by the way. If you are planning on buying this MP3 Player you better hurry because I believe they are trying to fade it out. This could be a good thing or bad thing considering your look on things. Since they are trying to fade it out you can find it on Amazon for $80.

So some of the reasons why I really love my T10. First off it has a bluetooth module inside this device which means I can use my stereo bluetooth headset with it. This also means that I can pair it with other devices such as my phone and transfer files between my two devices. This is pretty handy to keep both of your devices synced or if you want to give a friend a song to listen to.

Another reason I like it is it shows up on my computer as an MTP device. This pretty much means that I don’t need to use the lousy software that came with the MP3 player. The Samsung software is absolutely terrible and I recommend not using it. Windows Media Player does a fine job of syncing both the audio and video to the T10.

Another thing that I like about transfering files to the T10 is that I can go into My Computer and see the T10 as a USB Removable Storage Device. Meaning I can organize the T10 myself in any fashion and manually delete files or add files to it.

The T10 also comes with an FM Radio. This is another feature that the iPods do not believe in. It all comes down to what Steve Jobs thinks is best for us all and he does not think we need a radio. The T10’s radio signal is very nice and it works from all around the world. It has a setting that will allow you to fine tune it for various other nations. It worked great when I was in Hong Kong and mainland China. I was able to listen to local talk radio 🙂

One of the last features I would like to share is the fact it supports multi-lingual songs. If you notice some MP3 Players or Mobile Phones do not have the fonts or Unicode in order to display foreign languages. For example my N95 only displays English, Spanish, or Portuguese metadata in the songs. To be more specific most Mobiles or MP3 Players can only display ASCII type languages, at least if you bought them in the U.S.A or any Western nation. Any Eastern languages only display as boxes. So like the iPod you can have foreign language songs and you are not required to translate them into English.

Well of course with all technological devices there are some cons. One that I already mentioned was the terrible software that they ship with it. But the work around is using Windows Media Player or manually transferring files via the Windows Explorer.

Since this is a MTP device there are some tricks you need to know in order to get it to work on Linux machines or Mac machines, but thanks to Google that was a very easy fix. Rhythmbox on Linux and XNJB for Macs. These are the specific software that utilise the Windows technology in order to speak to the T10. *Don’t worry I’ve tried both software and they work great.*

The most disappointing thing about the T10 is it’s battery life. Samsung claims 16 hours but it is more like 6-8 hours. The other negatives all had a work around except this battery issue. So this is probably the only major negative I have against the device. Well check out the T10 and I still love mine. 😛

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Crazy Romanian Game-show Host

•January 21, 2009 • Leave a Comment

Hey everyone! I was getting ready for my Psychology class today and as I was getting ready I was listening to Bob and Sheri in the morning (national Radio show in the U.S and Canada)! Anyways they always try to have some amusing international news. Well I’m not sure their source of this information, but thanks to youtube I found the particular episode! I might suggest to Sheri via email for her to quote her resources. I’d like to post the link to this article. 🙂

A popular game show host named “Adela Lupse” in Romania displayed a temper tantrum on a live broadcast. It seems that her game show was not receiving any callers one evening and she went overboard. After not receiving any phone calls throughout most of her show she takes her phone and smashes it into the ground. As this is happening she is yelling in Romanian ‘God only knows what she was saying lol’. By the tone of voice she was using I do not believe it was a pleasant dialogue. Anyways Miss Lupse lost her job shortly after the show and cost the television studio a large fine. Another consequence to this woman’s bizarre behavior is the Romanian government has now changed the rating to this particular game show to an ‘X’ and has requested they change the airing time to after 10pm. This is to prevent minors watching violent acts on television. lol Anyways I find it extremely funny and here is the Youtube link. Enjoy 😛

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Gadgets Collide

•January 10, 2009 • 3 Comments

 

I saw this on Youtube and I just had to do a post about it. It’s amazing what this guy did with all of these gadgets. It’s probably one of the most expensive instruments I’ve seen also! lol Anyways I hope you enjoy! 🙂

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Physic Deck

•January 3, 2009 • 2 Comments

Ok so my friend Steph has gotten me back into playing the Pokemon trading card game. lol! Yes it sounds lame but it’s actually pretty fun and I really like the fellowship and the challenge. It’s actually more popular than I figured. Here in Fayetteville at BAM (Books A Million) on Saturdays there is a tournament that goes on and usually about 30+ people show up. Anyways I thought it would be an interesting post if I posted my deck online. To see kind of an idea of how to build a deck, now I also would like to thank Stephanie for assisting me with building this deck. She really helped me a lot in thinking up strategies. So ok I hope this helps you all!

Energy Cards-
10- Physic Energy Cards, 4- Multi. Energy Cards, 1- Warp Energy, 1- Cyclone Energy, and 1- Call Energy.

Stadium Cards-
3- Crystal Beach and 1- Moonlight Stadium

Supporter Cards-
1- Mom’s Kindness, 2- Celio’s Network, 1- Marley’s Request, 2- Copycat, 4- Roseanne’s Research, 1- Scott, 2- Steven’s Advice

Trainer Cards-
3- Poke Healer, 1- Dusk Ball- 1 Premier Ball

Pokemon Cards-
1- Uxie, 1- Misdreavus, 2- Bronzor, 2- Bronzong, 2-Duskull, 2-Dusclops, 2-Dusknoir, 1 Lv X Dusknoir, 3- Gastly, 3-Haunter, 2 Gengar.

So when building a deck you need 60 cards. It is best to either stick with one type of pokemon or two at max. In my first deck I chose to deal with all Physic type Pokemon. Also in building your deck it is at your best interest to try and level out the three main types of cards. 20 energy, 20 pokemon, and 20 supportor/trainer/stadium cards. I placed a lot of supporter cards in my deck that will help me find Basic pokemon because my deck it sort of limited in that sense. I don’t expect anyone to copy my deck card for card but to get some ideas or even suggest cards to be added or taken out! Thanks a bunch everyone and I hope you’ve enjoyed this entry! God bless : )

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K-Pop Connection

•November 19, 2008 • 4 Comments

hey everyone! I was browsing one of my favorite websites called KBS World News the other day and found this really interesting audio stream they do. It’s called “K-Pop Connection”. The hosts are Chris and Sarah and they seem to be entertaining. I love K-Pop and just Korean music in general so if you have a chance check out this stream. They discuss the news that affects this interesting spectrum of Korean culture as well as play some requested K-Pop. The show only lasts for an half hour but it is broadcasted several times throughout the day. The one that I try to listen to is at 9:30am EST. Even though the content is great there is a draw back to listening to their show. I recently installed Ubuntu (a distro on Linux) on the only PC that I own. Well this audio stream contains DRM and is only playable on Windows. So I had to take an old XP Pro disk and install Windows in a Virtual environment. I think this is an extreme downside because the web is not bias against what kind of computer you own or where you are located. I think they should either offer an MP3 download of the show or stream their content in a format that is accessible by any computer. I mean the point of placing it on the web is for people to access it right? But anyways I really enjoy the show and I hope that you all will also! Check out Sarah’s blog at http://kpopsarah.blogspot.com/ and then you can actually listen to the show at http://world.kbs.co.kr/english/entertainment/enter_bbs_list.htm. Sarah doesn’t update her blog daily but you can check it out weekly. Anyways as Chris and Sarah say “Anyoung”!

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Nanos!

•October 11, 2008 • 1 Comment

I currently have a 16 gigabyte iPod Touch, a Samsung T10 and a Nokia N95 phone. All of these platforms play back MP3s and I love them all! The only problem is with my Samsung T10. The screen is not as durable as the iPod or my N95. Anyways so I really don’t need anymore MP3 players but I’ve been looking at the new Nanos that Apple released. I really want to get one! Particularly the Green one or the light Black one! I don’t even NEED ONE! lol I really like my T10 because it works with Windows Media Player 11 and I kind of prefer WMP over iTunes! SHOCK! lol maybe its just because i want to change from using iTunes because I’ve been using it since the second year of it’s release. Even though the new iTunes 8 interface is some pretty nice eye candy! The final statement I would like to make is that if my Nokia N95 could display Japanese, Korean, and Chinese fonts then that would be my MP3 player. But since it can’t I normally carry around my T10 because of the size and it does display CJK fonts.

These nanos are availible in a variety of colors! 9 to be exact. They also have an accelarometer inside them that can rotate the screen depending on how you hold your iPod Nano. Plus all of the iPods except the Shuffles support CJK fonts. The only thing I wish they would change about the iPod is the ability to use them with whatever media hub I want. Whether it be Danpod, Windows Media Player, Napster, or iTunes. I like the ability to stretch out and gain some leg room! Well now that the price is extremely reasonable I hope this article might convince some of you all to buy one! If you’ve played with one or own one drop a post! I am interested in the overall design and how the screen looks.

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United States of Socialism? :(

•October 7, 2008 • Leave a Comment

this is just the first post of what is going to be an on going topic for this week. I hate to say this about my wonderful nation, but I’m afraid it’s slowly becoming a nation not for the people… Well here’s the video, hope you enjoy

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Forgotten Video Clip!

•September 14, 2008 • 1 Comment

well I actually had forgotten I had a video clip of the bay in downtown Hong Kong with all the buildings changing their lights. It’s a beautiful scene, except my Flip Camcorder didn’t do a great job at processing the video. It’s a little pixelated. But I hope you enjoy it anyways! Next year I’m going to bring my HDC-SD1 HD camcorder! 🙂 Later

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