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Month: June 2011

PC Show 2011

The crowds at the PC Show are such that the media are treated to “previews” an hour before the gates open and the hordes start pushing in.

Thank you people at Grayling who’ve invited us for the second year running. We got our stuff, “redeemed” our freebies, and fled unscathed.

By today, the people manning the booths would’ve also been seasoned enough to deal with the questions and purchases, so that should be a big plus if you’ve decided to head down for a bargain.

There’s one thing I really cannot tahan besides the crowds though – and that’s the massive use (and wastage) of paper from printed fliers. You could end up going home with a stack of paper two feet high if you took every flier on offer, or that was pushed into your face.

The beginnings of Alzheimer’s and the loss of healing

This morning I took my father to his quarterly cardiologist’s check-up, and while waiting our turn, I spoke to him about what I’d been up to at work – about so-and-so that was his client and now mine who called me asking a favour – and he had some difficulty remembering who I was talking about.

No big deal, since it’s been a few years since he’s been in the office.

Then he asked me where my mother was. I missed a beat, then quickly recovered to tell him as flatly as possible, for who’s benefit, I still don’t know, that Mummy passed away in February it’s been almost four months now.

In eyes dulled by the passage of Parkinson’s, you can still see shock, grief, immense sadness, and then resignation.

I do not look forward to telling him again when he forgets again.

Do you have to ask your kids’ permission to use your iPad?

Like many other parents, we sometimes have difficulty prying our son’s grubby hands off the iPad. Ever since the first version was released, Kai has taken to it like a true iOS native.

He now thinks that every screen is a multi-touch screen, and has been seen trying to swipe shopping malls’ electronic directories to change pages.

I was thinking of how to summarise what we use our iPad(s) for, now that the iPad2 comes with a camera (and I was treated to some of the many amazing things it could do) – but really, it all comes down to what Kai does with it:

1. Angry Birds
2. Talking Gina
3. Talking Tom
4. iDP FREE
5. Cat Piano Jr
6. iBooks
7. YouTube
8. Videos
9. KidsSongs

When we got our car last year, we thought about decking it out with the latest in Audio-Visual entertainment, you know, like an in-headrest DVD player with tv tuner – the works, basically. And we were astonished at the price.

So last year, when iPad1 was released, we said to ourselves, “buying two 3G iPads and holsters for the headrest is cheaper than buying an in-car DVD player!”, and went out and did just that.

Kai has never looked back since (cos as long as we put the iPad in the headrest holder, he’s looking forward), and enjoys long car rides watching his favourite Disney movies, Sesame Street YouTube playlists, his favourite music videos on an iTunes playlist, or simply practice his numbers one to twenty something and letters A-Z on one of many many apps that we’ve downloaded for him.

In the other passenger seat, we’ve also put up an iPad holder so that Naomi can do her own stuff looking up maps to give me directions to where we’re going, or to check Twitter to see if anyone’s warning about some mall flooding. Nothing beats a backseat driver with real-time information and forecasts.

Now with the iPad2, Kai’s in-car entertainment can be interrupted by FaceTime calls while we’re on the move.

I don’t know how he feels about that.