I don’t know if I have mentioned this on here yet but starting September 12th I will be leaving the US for 3 months again. This time we will be gone from September 12, 2010 to January 1, 2011. For the first month or so we will be backpacking through Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, maybe Malaysia), then two weeks in China split between Beijing and Shanghai. I can’t wait to go to the world expo! I am pretty excited about this trip and have recently started making preparations. I think three weeks ago we bought our tickets so now that dates are set in stone. But this stone only costs $100 dollars to modify so that’s cool. And I have started buying stuff!

Electronics!

Since I will be moving around a lot I have decided that my X61 tablet is just too big. Soon (next week) I will be selling it and I have already ordered my replacement laptop. It should be arriving this Friday. I had a really hard time deciding which one to buy. In the end I decided on the Asus Eee PC 1005HA. Yes I know it is last years model but I decided on it anyways.

At first I was looking at this year’s Eee PC netbooks and trying to decide between the 1001P and the 1005PE. The only things I cared about that separated the two were the 1005PE had 3 hours extra battery life,  bluetooth, and wireless N. The battery life on the 1001P is rated at 11 hours and, you guessed it, the 1005PE comes in rated at 14. I was struggling for a few days wondering how important these extra goodies were for my purposes. I then decided that none of these could justify my paying the extra 80 bucks for the 1005PE. But then when I was about to buy the 1001p I saw that Tigerdirect was having a sale on the 1005HA from last year! At the time I ordered it the sale price was $269.99. But as I write this the sale price has been increased to $279.99. Looking at the specs I noticed that other than the 10.5 hours of battery life and the N280 processor it was the same as the 1005PE, with a price tag that was 20 dollars less than the cheapest 1001p I could find! so I jumped on the deal!

Now keep in mind I do not care about things like hard drive size, 64 bit processing, or the performance differences. The N450 processor in the 1001P and 1005PE has 64 bit capabilities and the N280 does not. So anyways from my point of view the 1005HA was 100 dollars cheaper than the 1005PE AND I got all the extra little goodies I wanted like wireless N and Bluetooth, plus extra HD space which I don’t care about, while only getting dinged for 30 minutes of battery life from the 1001p which I was about to buy. I think 279.99 is an extremely good deal for the 1005HA and 269.99 was even better!

But anyways that’s enough about my netbook purchase.

I also decided that carrying around a full sized 1 terabyte hard drive and the extra power brick that it would require was quite stupid so I bought a western digital 1 terabyte 2.5″ width external drive that is usb powered. This cost me 139.99 I was thinking about getting one from Fry’s for 119.99 but then I would have had to drive all the way to Renton and pay 9% tax (I have no idea what the WA cities tax rates are) or something so I just ordered the drive from Tigerdirect as well.

Clothing

I am a cheap ass, especially when it comes to clothing, so I will not be buying the 250 dollar rain jacket and the 90 dollar lightweight breathable pants.

Anyways, since it is kind of early I have only ordered two things so far. A backpack and a lightweight rain jacket. Since we will be going during the rainy season and I am still pissed about the pouring rain that soaked right through my backpack when I was in Taipei I went down a sort of unorthodox route for my backpack. I ordered a medium Seattle Sports H2O Gear Waterproof Backpack. It looks more like it should be used for water rafting but it is cheap and waterproof so I am gonna try it. I’ll post back here if for some reason it is impossible to use. who knows how long this link will work but here is the link to the backpack where I ordered it. I also ordered the White Sierra Trabagon Rain Jacket from the same place. The reason why I ordered the jacket so early is because I think the lightweight jacket will be nice to wear around Seattle since it is summer but every once in a while it rains.

Edit (7/27/2010): I received the rain jacket and it is perfect. The backpack however is not perfect haha. Being a noob I thought this would work, but I did not know that these types of backpacks have no zipper. On top of the no zipper it was HUGE in my min 25inchs tall with a 14 inch diameter did not seem that big but it is quite huge. So the backpack is getting returned and I have ordered the Deuter Futura Zero 40 Pack this was last years version so it is a closeout. It’s only 40 liters compared to the 63 liter monstrosity that I am about to return. I also ordered some vibram fivefinger flows (backordered), 20 feet of rope (just in case), and some other stuff. But these new purchases will be part of another entry when I get them all. Oh and also it seems that after July 4th the summer weather in Seattle is just like Los Angeles haha so the rainjacket is useless, but still nice to have it already.

Future

Soon I will have to order, pants, a towel, some sandals. Hopefully while I am in Hong Kong the Asus Eee PC EP121 will come out and I can buy it before everyone in the US!

Anyways I have a midterm in 3.5 hours that I am not prepared for. Managerial Accounting is no fun!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Gadgets, Tech, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.