Wherein I am a Narcissist

I went to the IT Fair on Sunday with Gary and Nathan. Being in a financial crisis at the moment, I wasn't expecting to buy anything, but the for company's sake I went anyway. Gary wanted to look at Creative stuff, and Nathan was checking out LCD monitor prices. I regretted the decision as soon as I got off the bus to Suntec. The place was crawling with people. Singaporeans crave free entertainment (as you can tell by the number of people who will throng the streets to ogle at an accident but no one is willing to fork out ten bucks to watch a play) and an IT fair was as good as free entertainment got.

Babies, children barely old enough to walk, pregnant mothers, elderly people, aunties with seven children - all were present at the fair, regardless of the fact that none of them knew what half the items at the fair were for. I personally despise having to have things explained to me by a salesperson(I find it demeaning that a salesperson might know more than me) and I hate seeing it happen to others as well(projection of expectations). So you can imagine my ire at the fair where dozens of computer-illiteraterati stopped to have the concept of megapixel explained to them whilst blocking the way of the hapless idiots like me who had wandered in a moment of folly and were just trying desperately to find a way out. And the children, oh the children! Gary complained that there was NO REASON AT ALL, not a single iota of a reason why you should bring a one, two, or even eight year old to the fair. They don't understand a thing! Little kids should be at home playing with Nintendo or doing programming, not let loose into streets with real live people! The stroller-bounds ones are the worst, taking up enough space for three people to stand in but housing an inhabitant to whom the fair means nothing but a reason to cry.

I became one of those awful people who step on others' feet on purpose and say sarcastically "I'm soooo sorry." in that tone of voice which informs you that remorse is the last thing on their minds. Yes, it came down to that.

On the bright side, I think it would have taken Buddha to remain calm in that situation. But he would have gotten kicked a lot, sitting on the floor to meditate. I would have kicked him several times.

We saw a creative deal for a webcam going for something like 80 bucks for a double set, so me and Gary thought we'd get one. The queue for Creative told us otherwise. So we trudged on along the line of tiny stalls looking for other webcam deals, when we saw this Logitech one going for something like 50 apiece. When I make a decision to spend money I hate to recant, so I just decided to go for it together with Gary. We ended up getting charged only for one at the cashier, though, so it turned out to be only half the price - 29 dollars for a Logitech webcam.

And that is the story of how I got a webcam. And I'm not ashamed to say I've been using it! The drivers work just dandy, but the included software has to be one of the worst I've encountered. Because I have support for East-Asian languages installed or some unicode thing, it installed in Chinese - old fan2 ti3 Chinese - which was impossible to read. In some cases I could make the sounds of the words, but they didn't make any sense to me. For now I'll have to stick with Window's built-in webcam functions.

Taking pictures of yourself is fun.

Next time I go for a high-end Creative. Won't be long till I have purchasing power!