Argo

Argo?

Now that I've seen both Argo and Life of Pi, I still don't understand why it received such following, critics or crowed.

I forgot the OSCARS is American.

Now I also have a new perspective on "based on a true story", which to Ben Affleck means "basically, it's a fiction".  Maybe there's something CIA did that Wikipedia missed, it's pretty clear that the CIA didn't do much.  I assume it's okay to bend the fact in a drama, Ben Affleck's acclaimed "integrity" is under serious doubt by never set the facts straight.  Oh, I forgot, it will affect ratings, i.e. money. 

iPad Mini update

A week of use so far and it's doing pretty well.  It light and the battery lasts over a few days of moderate use.

Seems to be a very good decision. Although rumor said that the mini-2 would come out with a retina display, that will be the earliest October.  I also didn't see too much of a difference between retina display and regular on the Macbook Pro in the Apple Store.

iPad mini

After a long hiatus, now I'm back.  After all, I've been on leave since Dec. 2011 and will go back to office after September 2013.  I have been writing during the leave but turned to Live Journal for a private dairy. 

While walking in the mall on a Saturday morning, tried the new iPad mini for the first time in the Apple Store, and decided to buy one.  Based on my iPad 2 experiences, aka buy the most expensive model on the 1st day of sale, I chose the cheapest 16GB WiFi version for $329 plus tax.  Then while restoring it with the iPad backup in iTunes, I found out that 16GB is not enough.  It actually hung both iTunes and the new iPad. Despite these problems fresh out of the box, I was really convinced that it's worth to get comparing to others. 

There are three factors led to this decision: First, the iPad Mini is slightly larger than the rest of the 7" mini-pads.  It is surprisingly a comfortable size to read news and watching Youtube videos. I never thought that 0.9" (7.9" vs 7") made such a huge difference.  Secondly, it's also super light.  The iPad is not really a device that I can hold for hours to read. Last but certainly not the least, even when it hung, I was able to see how easy it is to transfer almost all settings on the iPad.  Not like the Android on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which I had to manually change quite a few things when switching users.

So, I bite the bullet to go back to the Apple store to exchange for a 32GB version for $100 more.  It's not the most expensive 16GB storage I've ever paid for, but it's getting there. 

After 2hr of restoring and updating, the 32GB device works flawlessly and I don't really need to change anything except to enter most of the passwords, which is probably a good time.