My Flat, Cresta

Tuesday, October 4, 2005

Service: * * *
Food: * * *
Ambience: * * * * *
Babe Count: N/A

It's amazing how blogging energy gets sapped when one is busy on multiple projects AND in love with a beautiful woman. Ah well. She's in Cape Town this very second. Having just flown there from Port Elizabeth. She's on the cast of a piece of corporate theatre I've just written. Had the first show last night. The audience reportedly loved it! Yay!!!

(And no... I had nothing to do with her winning the role. She auditioned just like everyone else. And the work is flooding in for her. She's been offered two other roles in quick succession. Wow!)

That design client I pitched for on behalf of POTION, the design company I co-created some while back with Denis and Chanel... We won the pitch. Against nine other design agencies. Yeeehaaaa!

But we didn't know what we were letting ourselves in for. We've been working REALLLLY hard on the job. Major hours. And the client is young and bullish, and doesn't reallllly know how design briefs work. So it's quite exhausting for us to be both doing the work AND educating the client as to how to be a client. But hey. It feels great.

I've been investigating tablet PCs after reading positive things about them on Robert Scoble's blog. The crazy thing about South African computer distributors is that they offer only the most rudimentary factory configuration. Many of the companies I've spoken to say this...

"We don't really sell many tablet PCs here. No demand." Words to that effect.

No frigging wonder, man! Take the Toshiba Tecra M4. The configuration I need, and CAN GET OFF THE WEB if I were living in the United States of A, is: 2 gigaHz processor, 100 gig harddrive, 1 gig of RAM. The one that's becoming available here has a 1.76 gigaHz processor, a 60 gig harddrive, and 512 megs of RAM. What are these fuckers thinking???? Seriously!!!

I need this machine to be my computer. Not a subsidiary computer. Not a backup computer. My MAIN computer. So offer it to me with muscle, and I'll buy it. I'll even pay bucketloads of cash for it. Cos I need it. I'll even buy the damn thing from the States and risk paying vast amounts of money on customs duties. (What I'm NOT keen on doing is buying it from the States and having some stripped down shell arriving and me having no recourse to justice. That's what's stopping me from pressing, "Proceed to checkout". )

There are two local resellers doing their best to get Toshiba and Acer to come to the party. (Acer in South Africa has the TMC 312. But inexplicably, when I phoned head office to ask about the more potent 314, they claimed that I must be making some sort of mistake. They'd never heard of it. And, "It's not on our product roll-out roadmap for the next six months," they told me.

And that's it. No willingness to phone their buddies somewhere else in the world and say, "Hey, we've got a customer whose underpants are frothing with readiness to buy this machine. Please ship us one."

We shall have to see how this one plays out.

(If you're interested, I need a muscly tablet pc cos I want to do some video editing on the thing. Which means it needs quite a lot of power in all sorts of areas. I also want to take my digital drawing up a notch by using Alias Sketchbook Pro. I can't wait!!!)

Okay. SURVIVOR is now on. Time for me to settle back and yearn for S.