Rant 743 / It Can't Be Stereo If You Only Have One Earphone

This is how they grill their chicken in BK apparently.








So the brochures of the IT Show have been uploaded but I am unsatisfied with the amount of useful I find in them. Of the 3 things that I want - hooked earphones, speakers and 1TB portable HDD - not enough of each was listed.

Altec Lansing  BXR 1221 goes for $39 and comes with a wireless mouse. Looks like a decent deal since I really don't mind a wireless mouse. One can never have too many spare mice.

Another is the Edifier M1250 which goes for S10. Looks pretty close to what I have in mind. Or I could go for the R18USB for $19. Or the R600USB for $29. I don't know! It's so hard to decide when I'm trying to be cheap without a fixed budget!

To make things worse, there's also Creative with speakers at the same prices, like the SBS A40 at $9, SBS A60 at $15 and SBS A220 at $29.

As for the HDD, there is the Fujitsu, Astone and Ovation combined brochure which features a USB3.0 external HDD, and the 1TB one is priced at $110. I don't believe that is a good deal for what I want. I don't actually give a damn about the transfer speed so even if it's stuck at USB2.0 I really wouldn't mind. Furthermore, fan-less? More useless feature I don't give a damn about that contributes to the price.

Or maybe I just don't know enough and that's a normal feature in most big external HDDs.

The same brochure also features a 2TB one but I think that's some serious overkill. I don't have that much stuff to store, and even buying this additional 1TB external HDD is way too much for me. The only reason I'm buying it is because I've learnt long ago that having just enough right now is never enough after a year or two. Always good to be prepared.

Western Digital external hard disks are offered by Eternal Asia, Achieva, Newstead on the 6th floor. Newstead also has a booth at the Concourse. I'll probably get a My Book Essential for $100, which is what I have apparently. I was wrong about one thing: the Caviar business is only for WD internal HDDs.

As for earphones, one is offered by TDK, model EC250 priced at $45.

Obviously these are not what I'm definitely buying. By the last day on which I'm going, they are expected to do some price slashing during the evening. That means I'm going to have to do some price comparisons then.

Then there's the traffic. It will be crowded by people like me, and since it's a Sunday, going home is going to be hard. I fully expect to see a 1-hour-long queue, or at least a 30-min one. If so, I'll probably take the bus, unless I picked a large speaker set.

I know I can find some really cheap stuff at Sim Lim Square too but since I'm looking for so many things I might as well just go to the IT Show and take a look. Maybe I can find a bargain deal that combines 2 of them. Besides, I don't think I've ever been to one before. PC Show yes, Sitex and IT Show and Comex no.








Zeus got so easy after I learnt 2 ways to properly design my housing zones. There are 2 - one with elite housing and one without. For maps with limited space, I have no choice but to adjust, but always using a similar method - a loop with one all the utilities on one side because the infirmary reduces appeal, and using parks and decorative columns to fill up the remaining low appeal tiles.

It's only at the 3rd and 4th Adventures that things get a little challenging in spite of this. At one point I was given a map with no basic necessity available, so to build a decent city, everything needs to be imported. That made the game a lot more interesting.

...

Anyway now I'm at the stage where Hattusili(?) attacks Greece. Athens Through the Ages is the name of the Adventure. It's pretty hard as it is as far as I can tell, but I accidentally made it worse when I attacked Sardis instead of Hattusas in the previous round and made all my allies hate me. So my allies are getting into hissy fits on me while getting attacked by the Hittites, and I can't save them because my army is too small compare to the enemy's.

Then to top it all off, a dragon appears in my main food production zone. That caught me completely off-guard and destroyed my main granaries while disabling my food supply by killing all the people working there. I totally didn't expect that so I'd been playing at max speed and suddenly, boom! All my food's gone and everyone's leaving for their greener pastures.

It was not a fatal blow but I got annoyed anyway. I had more than enough cash on hand (180k) to rebuild everything and wait for the hero to arrive, all the while paying off the Hittite invaders every time they try to attack me, but the destruction of my food source, food stores (14 months worth) and part of my peasants' residential zone was a huge blow.

Not so easy after all.

EDIT: It appears I was pretty confused when I typed this. The current map I'm in involves Eretis and Sparta attacking me and I have to conquer their cities to win the game. Nothing to do with Hattusa. That was the previous stage.