Upgrading...

Sometimes I wondered whether I am a spendthrift in my deepest soul or anything; I just plunged into buying spree when I feel urged to do so. Luckily it only happened few times, phew~

Back to the story, I ordered two hard drives on eBay, one internal and one external.

Internal hard disk:

Seagate Momentus XT

Seagate Momentus XT, a hybrid drive which claims to combine both the advantages of traditional hard drive (HD) and solid state drive (SSD). HD is cheap and large yet slower than SSD; SSD is much faster thanks to its non-moving mechanism but it suffers from a high price tag. I ordered a 500GB one, hopefully it will satisfy my need (haha!) and its 7200RPM won't affect my battery life much.

External hard disk:

Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB

Western Digital. No frill. I ordered a 1 TB one, serving as Time Machine for my mac and back up data.

Ya these two little drives cost me around SGD $400. A pity that Amazon doesn't accept my order...they are cheaper up there.

I will probably post my first brave venture to open up my 1 year MBP later once I get my packages. :)

My initial impression on Mac OS X Lion (10.7)

Yes, it is a big "Meh" from the lion himself.

Let's see what's on the Apple website on the sneak peak of the newest family feline members. A big fierce lion, going to be unleashed at anytime and eat your face alive, right? Read on and you'll realize this lion is a bit lack of...meat? (No pun intended).

First, the tag line: "The power of Mac OS X. The magic of iPad." Meh. It is just analogous to "The sweetness of sugar, the hardness of diamond" or something. Totally meaningless.

Now we look at the features.

1. Mac App Store. Although it may help the users to find out many awesome applications on the Mac, and help the developers to sell their apps, I am a bit skeptical of the walled garden approach on Mac. Yes, it doesn't limit the installation of the applications to the app store itself, and we still have the freedom and capability to find our sources such as on the developers' websites or torrent sites. However it may kill many interesting ideas of indie developers, and I am scared of Apple: They are not friendly to the developers sometimes. What if App store becomes the exclusive way to install applications on Mac in the future iterations of OS X? It spell doom, many will leave.
2. Launchpad. "The Launchpad gives you instant access to your apps - iPad style". It is a purely eye candy, and serves as a way to lure those iPhone/iPad users to Mac. Dock is there to launch app, an application stack is on dock, Spotlight is there as well. I believe that they serve well to launch the applications you want more faster than looking at a huge grid of icons and trying to find out what you want at the first place. Not to mention there are more third party softwares such as Quicksilver (my fav!), Google Quick Search Box and Alfred etc.
3. Full-Screen Apps. No comment on this. Seems an extra feature than an essential one.
4. Mission Control. It combines Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard, and full-screen apps to give you a bird-eye view on your desktop. Sounds like an upgrade to Exposé, I like it.

Hopefully in the coming WWDC we can see more faces of Lion, and Apple addresses to many existing issues on OS X itself, such as the different windows style of applications (iTunes? iPhoto? Pages?), Finder (I usually use Terminal, Quicksilver and DTerm to manipulate files more frequently lol) and the bundled apps (Mail+iCal+Address Book, iDVD).

I converted to Mac one year ago and so far I love the experience in using it, though I miss the days of using Linux...you know, you are able to do what things you want on your own PC.

Interviewssss

I attended one of the most "rigorous" interviews in my life.

Bloomberg.

That being said, it doesn't mean its interview is worst, lengthy, torturing or something worse. It is just something that I am exposed first time in my life.

As a physics graduate, living in academia, talking nonsense (which may include Physics itself) with fellows, speak to the profs as if they were your old grandpa/granny staying in neighborhood are the norm lifestyle for me. It is disturbing...when you find out that there are worlds outside which require your nimble tongue, quick action and ability to work as a team. Yes, the last item is the most lacking part in my university education in my opinion.

Well back to the topic, I got two interviews this week, one from HSA (Health Science Authority) and one from Bloomberg. The HSA one is mostly "Meh", as I found out it is not as interesting as I have imagined. My naive thought is that: "Medical Device? Physics degree is spotted in the requirement? Wow!"

It is not true.

Back to Bloomberg, I was literally stunned when attending the recruitment event. "2011 Financial Product Sales & Analytics Program", sounds awesome, doesn't it? 21 candidates were there. Wow. Apart from one life science and physics (that's me!) graduates, all of them are business/economics/finance/financial mathematics graduate, among which has people working in Google, Stockholm etc...Big pressure, even bigger when I am in Physics Department.

There are three sessions, the first is the host introduces Bloomberg and the job itself, such as career paths and responsibilities. Standard stuff. The second is self-introduction. I made some mistakes here by not showing my background and multilingual abilities, showing my weakness (not familiar with financial product) etc.

The most notable one is the third part where we are divided into three groups where we are given a scenario to solve as a team. It is a great chance and opportunity for the team leaders to observe how everyone performs and how they tackle the problem. For instance there is leader, adviser, analyst and so and so forth. I think I mentioned one quite important point, saying the cultural background of the particular client. Well at least I spoke. ;)

Conclusion? Quite an eye-opener :)

Revive....

I am trying to revive this blog because I'm too bored.