Weather in Charlottesville is on the lower side, with dismal white skies and bleak winds. Winter is upon us, and so is the huge annual shopping season for this place. Nepal usually has it during August/September during Dashain/Tihar. Last year was my first Thanks giving and Black Friday event here, and it was fun.
I saw consumerism at its peak with religiously following flock standing outside the temple shrine of big retail giants. I joined and became one of them, standing in frigid winter for more than an hour before a volley of men and women fought for precious deals. For my shopping, I waited online, up late at night, waiting for that small window of opportunity – and got myself a decent portable computer machine (11 inch, Dell laptop). Thanks Giving however was not fun. Partly because we had no nearby friends and families that celebrated this customs. Hopefully this year becomes different. We did get a turkey, but we didn’t know how to cook it well. I was limited to glass or two of good wine with cooked yet unflavored turkey meat.
This year has been relatively better, and up till this moment, we have not decided on anything particular for Black Friday or the Cyber Monday. Instead of a whole Turkey, we have decided to delineate into making turkey mo:mo. Something we enjoy better.
Waiting for Android Lollipop to be available for the mass devices. My personal feeling, that this may finally be a good looking interface for Android. Looking forward to “Material Design”. Never liked Android before, but things may change in future.
I am a Windows Phone person, however I do think that WP needs a boost in its App Market as well as a system that works more fluid now. I do not need games in my handheld devices, and so my Applications are limited to certain “productivity” range. I love Windows Phone implementation of People/Contacts and its in-sync with Social Networks like Linked-In and Twitter (obviously Facebook is there). Default mail application has still not been updated; and default Music application is still crawling behind Windows Phone 7 Music Application. Social Network and Chat apps like Skype, FB Messenger and Viber still takes a lot of time to load in even 1 GB RAM machines and periodically freezes up. This, in-spite of me manually closing all other back ground applications. Apart from the above few problems, WP is a solid platform. I love it. Outlook.com has been a huge help for my daily routine – mails, contacts and calendar. One Note is my personal library, big importance. There is a rapid development cycle gong on, and hopefully I will see more fluidity in coming days, but for now, Android and iOS just work. This makes me want more.
Somewhere in between it was e-commerce that caught my attention. Next article, I want to explore about how big retail giants could shape a new legal boundaries. Well more of tip toeing this time.
momobites 