It's been a while

It's been a while since I last wrote anything on my blogs...in Chinese or English...and before you know it, Multiply decided to shut down all of its social network services like blogs and moved into on-line markets.  One of its functions is to export blog to Blogger...so here I am.

Lots have happened.

Diablo III came out after all those years waiting and disappointed many.  Torchlight II seemed to be the one that continues on the Diablo II tradition, as its developer team was working on Diablo II.  However I think I am going to play StarCraft II a little bit longer...

I broke my camera Pentax K-7's LCD screen on the back of the body, it now only shows half of the screen.  Other parts of the camera still work fine, autofocus, viewfinder etc etc...of course with half-black LCD screen I can't do live-view focusing hence no video recording with that camera.  Though I have not been taking as many photographs as before, I have been looking for new cameras.

Pentax K-5 II and K-5 IIs were announced.  It was tempting to buy Pentax K-5 as its price will come down.  I am become more weary of the fact that it is heavier than those mirror-less lens-interchangeable camera like Olympus PEN, Sony NEX, Nikon 1, Canon EOS-M and Pentax K-01/Q...so I'm thinking of changing my system.  Not selling any of my old gear but rather buy into a completely new system, and this time get a decent various focal length lens...the kit lens came with K100D were Sigma lens, not bad but not as good as Pentax's even it's just for kits...

I was looking at Olympus OM-D EM-5 with 12-50MM lens.  Handled that in JB HiFi store and it's not bad.  Ergonomically I think I like Pentax K-7 a lot more, but OM-D is indeed smaller and lighter.  Then Olympus announced E-PL5 in Photokina.  With even smaller body and most likely a cheaper price than EM-5 I'm tempted.  However this is not on sale in Australia yet so I want to find out what it's like before I buy...and another thing came into my mind.  Focus speed.

Although I liked my Pentax K-7, auto-focus speed is not it's strong point (and ISO 800+ performance, thanks to Samsung CMOS...).  Coupled with fixed focal length lens such as FA50, DA35Macro, DA15 isn't much help.  Coupled with other lens such as FA 28-70 f4, Sigma 17-70 f2.8-4 (first version) isn't any better.  Having used friend's Nikon D90 and D300s before, I know camera's autofocus ability is definitely very helpful in catching kids in action.  Enters Nikon J1/V1...having read good reviews on how amazingly fast its autofocus speed under daylight is (good to catch kids in action!) and getting good comments from friend who's is an old Nikon user (from old film time to latest D300s) and an owner of J1, I am very tempted to get Nikon J1 (since it's also going to be the cheapest on Australian market).  Quite interestingly Australian market price of OM-D is cheaper than Taiwanese market price (both proper distributor stock not grey imports).  To this day I'm still undecided...who knows maybe Olympus will announce E-P5...

Then there are my keyboard and mouse and ear-mic problem.

Ever since I started to play Starcraft II a lot more seriously I found my old wireless keyboard and mouse with under 800dpi setting (most likely 400dpi) to be quite unsatisfactory.  Never knew wireless keyboard and mouse could be that unreliable, easily missing many keystrokes and clicks (and normally I don't type that much that's probably why I didn't find out...).  So a good friend gave me his old Logitech gaming keyboard and Razor gaming mouse.  Too bad I spilled water over the keyboard and killed it...so now I'm back on old wireless keyboard with sometimes missing/non-responsive keystrokes...in the meantime the side rubber thing on the Razor mouse also fell off and now it can get a bit uncomfortable to hold for longer hours.

Ear-mic's problem was that it's not wireless and once I rose up from the chair too quickly and damaged it...so now only one ear has sound...

So a search was done and I think I will get TtESports' Meka G1 keyboard with Steelseries' Kinzu V2 gaming mouse.  Taiwan's PCHome has a set on sale of the mice with Siberia V1 with very good price so I will probably get that.

So what else is happening in life?  Well my son's growing and growing...apart from that not much I suppose.

Such is life.

And I speak to the void.