Here I am, on my way to Sim Lim Square, and I just can’t help but to reflect on what brings about this journey and the events leading up to it. It all boils down to one of those things that had been there throughout my formative years, Trade-shows, and to be more specific, Comex.
Ever since I was first shown a home built Apple II by my uncle, it wooden housing, cassette tape drive and all, I have always been fascinated by computers. So much so that it is one of my greatest obsession and career. While others will be happy to just own a computer and use it, I probably can’t be happy until I get around dismembering it and figures out how to tweak and coax an additional ounce of performance out of it all because, I could.
For the longest time since getting the family notebook with little thanks to Starhub, I have wanted to tweak it and make it work even better, this is all because that even with a respectful 512mb of ram and all its purported 64bit processing powers its still running slower than a turtle with 2 shells. The cause of it, Ram not enough as it has to share its 512MB between applications and graphics. For the uninitiated, while ram sharing is serious infringement to casual computing, it is considered cardinal sin for any performance computing if that’s your cup of tea and a definite death sentence with eternal purgatory after which if you are a serious gamer (No, I don’t mean a mean game of bejeweled). As such, what better reason is there to lug myself out of my cozy Saturday morning bed, kiss my sleepy wife before heading out across the entire island just so I can jostle my way with thousands of people in the sea of computer, gadgets, offers and other peripherals? No, I don’t think so.
Comex is now in its 14 incarnation and with every passing years, I weep for its lost and unfortunate soulless existence.
Comex, as with PC shows and other computer events in Singapore owes its existence to a bunch of computer companies to showcase their latest offering and a bunch of computer enthusiast and practitioners of the arcane art of computing for them to pay homage and make offerings with their wallet so that they own the latest piece of computing must have which they coveted for so long, also allows them to grope and gawk at those shinny blink blinks which they could have only drool at on the pages of magazines. In fact, I always suspected that without all these tradeshows, geeks might not even step into places like World Trade center then, Suntec City for some time, and Expo for now. In fact, you can even consider it a form of conspiracy with the owners of these places to attract the geeks to spend.
However, as time that flows, change ensures, and computing evolved from the arcane to the mass market and eventually to the mundane and while I still believe that it is mandatory for people who wants to use a computer to be trained, pass a test and gets a license before they are allowed to even touch a keyboard and mouse, I have to say that the mass-market ownerships of computers allows me to stay gainfully employed and to also allow me to even contemplate to start a business on computing.
Soon, the computer fiestas became that of a printer bonanza, seems like in every show, there will be a great many mindless minions tat deemed that their printer is too slow, too colorless, too big or just plain too last year that they need to buy a new one. As times changed, the minions of printers gave way to the minions of Notebook, the minions of LCDs and today, the minions of MP3 Players. Yes, how time has changed and you will now go into a tradeshow with choke full of credit card pushers, MP3 dealers and cartridge replacements. Seems like computer is now nothing more than an afterthought instead of the main attraction in a computer trade show.
Well, as long as there are still good deals to be have in a computer trade show, I shall still be the sucker that is being drawn to it like a moth to fire. I did get a pretty good deal for another 512MB for my notebook but unfortunately it did not fit, and I was just told at the shop that they are not able to help me today as their technicians will not be in until Friday. Well, anyway, I just got the namecard and the logo for my new business ready (That will be another entry). And I will now dutifully rush home to meet the people that is suppose to fix the main gate of the house, just hope that they can get it fix.
No comments:
Post a Comment