Aaah, the joys of driving.
Or attempting to, that is.
Today saw the first of my many upcoming driving lessons. And boy did it go well. I'm sure I impressed the instructor, with my smooth handling and innate ability to go off-road at the slightest sight of a kerb. Obviously he was impressed with my rather sporty handling of the vehicle too, with me violently hard on the accelerator at any given instant. I swear Honda's engineers who did the NSX also had a hand in the stone age Civic too. Feathering the throttle, I desperately tried to keep the revs at 1500rpm but oh no, the pedal would have none of it. Owing to the crackpot engineers' meddlesome meddling, presumably - or it could just be my lead foot - the revs jumped all the way up to 4000rpm. I swear if I had lifted up my left foot from the clutch at that moment, we would have had wheelspin.
As expected, I also tried vainly to not stall the engine and set a new world record for an L-plate driver to have not an engine stalled. But no it wasn't to be. Rounding a corner, I deftly turned the wheel back to center and promptly tried to engage second gear. A slip, a far-too-fast unclutching and before I knew it the whole damn car was dead. This happened a grand total of 5 times. So much for world domination.
Minor problems aside, I think I performed rather satisfactorily on the whole. A light note was when the instructor asked me whether I had driven before, and wasn't too convinced when I told him I had never touched a car before (bow to NFS and Top Gear!), just that I was deeply passionate about them. Exciting, really. I shall be looking forward to my upcoming lessons.
Before driving, I went down to Geek Terminal at 8am to witness the launch of a new Creative player. Apparently it was 10am and we, Tech65, had to wait patiently till 10 where we then told it was an invitation-only event and that kiddies weren't invited. Damn you, Creative. Nevertheless after the event Farinelli went up to ask and apparently we could have just told them we were from a tech website and they would have let us in. Well, we all got what we wanted in the end: a video interview, and free Creative earbuds! Yay!
We spent the time before 10am looking up websites and what we thought was a product leak actually wasn't. The Creative Zen mp3/mp4 player was already launched at 530am the previous day, and it was all over the news already.
The Creative Zen - yes, simply Zen - is a really good looker of a player, a smaller, flash-based kiddie brother of the larger Zen Vision: M/W. The 2.5 inch screen is fantastically brilliant with 16.7 million colours and has solidly-built, intuitive buttons on its right side. It's slim (about 6, 7mm?) and boasts an FM radio, mp3, AAC, WMA with DRM, WMA and some other formats I forgot. Video playback and photo viewing round off the device's cool features and do show off its screen exceptionally well. Battery life is 25 hours (audio) and 5 hours (video), very respectable indeed. I can't remember much of its tech specs so I'll direct you here - Tech65 - for the whole writeup and a video interview.
Very, very exciting indeed.
Or attempting to, that is.
Today saw the first of my many upcoming driving lessons. And boy did it go well. I'm sure I impressed the instructor, with my smooth handling and innate ability to go off-road at the slightest sight of a kerb. Obviously he was impressed with my rather sporty handling of the vehicle too, with me violently hard on the accelerator at any given instant. I swear Honda's engineers who did the NSX also had a hand in the stone age Civic too. Feathering the throttle, I desperately tried to keep the revs at 1500rpm but oh no, the pedal would have none of it. Owing to the crackpot engineers' meddlesome meddling, presumably - or it could just be my lead foot - the revs jumped all the way up to 4000rpm. I swear if I had lifted up my left foot from the clutch at that moment, we would have had wheelspin.
As expected, I also tried vainly to not stall the engine and set a new world record for an L-plate driver to have not an engine stalled. But no it wasn't to be. Rounding a corner, I deftly turned the wheel back to center and promptly tried to engage second gear. A slip, a far-too-fast unclutching and before I knew it the whole damn car was dead. This happened a grand total of 5 times. So much for world domination.
Minor problems aside, I think I performed rather satisfactorily on the whole. A light note was when the instructor asked me whether I had driven before, and wasn't too convinced when I told him I had never touched a car before (bow to NFS and Top Gear!), just that I was deeply passionate about them. Exciting, really. I shall be looking forward to my upcoming lessons.
Before driving, I went down to Geek Terminal at 8am to witness the launch of a new Creative player. Apparently it was 10am and we, Tech65, had to wait patiently till 10 where we then told it was an invitation-only event and that kiddies weren't invited. Damn you, Creative. Nevertheless after the event Farinelli went up to ask and apparently we could have just told them we were from a tech website and they would have let us in. Well, we all got what we wanted in the end: a video interview, and free Creative earbuds! Yay!
We spent the time before 10am looking up websites and what we thought was a product leak actually wasn't. The Creative Zen mp3/mp4 player was already launched at 530am the previous day, and it was all over the news already.
The Creative Zen - yes, simply Zen - is a really good looker of a player, a smaller, flash-based kiddie brother of the larger Zen Vision: M/W. The 2.5 inch screen is fantastically brilliant with 16.7 million colours and has solidly-built, intuitive buttons on its right side. It's slim (about 6, 7mm?) and boasts an FM radio, mp3, AAC, WMA with DRM, WMA and some other formats I forgot. Video playback and photo viewing round off the device's cool features and do show off its screen exceptionally well. Battery life is 25 hours (audio) and 5 hours (video), very respectable indeed. I can't remember much of its tech specs so I'll direct you here - Tech65 - for the whole writeup and a video interview.
Very, very exciting indeed.
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