Month: December 2011
When my siblings and I were kids, we usually have pine for our Christmas tree. Yes, real pine. Not the plastic stuff so common these days. Sometime, James and I would even accompany our dad harvest the tree. It was tiring but in retrospect, that in itself was a great experience. Once set-up inside our house, the scent was absolutely Christmas-ey and it livens and truly completes the Christmas experience. On our first year as a married couple, we got one, a Douglas Fir, because Michelle said she never had a Christmas with one. And besides, it just seemed fitting for the honeymoon period. This year, with Jeanne very curious, inquisitive, and full of wonder, we decided to get another one. Her excitement as we were setting up the tree was an absolute joy to see. Makes it totally worth it.
I needed an Android phone to test the Android version of PSMonitor. I wanted a low-end phone, a least common denominator, so I checked out the Samsung Galaxy Ace. While it has better than usual low-end specs (800MHz processor, 3.5″ 320×480 display), it didn’t have a front camera and is not expected to have Ice Cream Sandwich. So scrap that.
This led me to search some more and eventually to the LG Optimus Black which is a bit higher-end (1GHz processor, 4″ 480×800 display). Expectedly, it was quite expensive. But that changed when LG lowered the price and, even better, announced that Ice Cream Sandwich will be available for it. After a few more days of considering, I finally went ahead and got it.
My first impression is that it’s a well-designed, minimalist, and low-key phone. Almost everything is black. Even the LG logos are in subdued shades of gray. Once you hold it, you see it’s also very slim and very light. Probably the one thing that really screams “Look at me!” is the Nova display. It is just BRIGHT! Unfortunately, it has a yellowish tint when viewed from the front which is a bummer.
The user-experience is typical Android, a whole lot of power and flexibility. Frankly, it’s way more than what you actually need to get real work done. It’s not drastically more complicated or worse than iOS, we know they each got their particular quirks. It’s just different.
However, it does feel like it needs a bit more polish (but that’s supposed to change with Ice Cream Sandwich). Also, it’s a little bit laggy due to the low-end specs as well as all those virtual machinery and hardware abstraction layers. The price of multi-hardware support. But it’s nothing that you can’t get used to.
Performance with the built-in Frozen Yogurt is good although I expect it would improve once the promised updates comes out. Gingerbread after all is an enhancement, optimization, and bug-fix version. Performance with Ice Cream Sandwich would probably suffer. I’m hoping it would still be passable though. At least still enough for its primary purpose as my Android test phone.
About a week after submission, PSMonitor has been approved for sale at THE App Store. Yay!
PSMonitor lets you monitor the Philippine stock market activity real-time and on the go (requires a WiFi or data connection).
- Real-time updates from the stock exchange
- Simple and intuitive interface
- Flick up and down the list of stocks
- View stock symbols, prices, and price changes at a glance
- View details such as symbol, name, last price, previous close, change for the day, %change, trade volume, and trade value.
By purchasing PSMonitor you get all of the above plus:
- Refresh button for refreshing data on demand
- All Stocks tab for viewing actively traded stocks by symbol
- My Stocks tab for storing your portfolio or watch list of stocks
- Add stocks along with quantity and buy price to My Stocks
- Edit stock quantity and buy price
- Delete stock from My Stocks
- View your stocks’ position value, and profit/loss for the day at a glance
- View additional details such as your position, position value, profit/loss for the day, profit/loss to date, and buy price.
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Michelle and I tried surfing again after three long years. The operative word, at least for me, is tried. Almost as soon as we got to Crystal Beach, I excitedly rented a board, strapped it on, walked into the water. The fact that the waves were higher than I’ve ever seen them in Crystal Beach didnt’ faze me. I climbed onto the surfboard, paddled to the surfing line, scanned for waves, paddled, and caught a wave, then… nothing. I couldn’t pop up!!! I tried again and again but my arms just wouldn’t work! My upper body strength, the little there was, have completely evaporated :( Definitely need to do them push-ups again. Michelle fared way better later that afternoon: She was able to pop-up and actually ride some waves.