Tag Archives: stuff

Stuff from Amazon and other random purchases

Me, yesterday:

Amazon not shipping things to Australia is the bane of my existence. Or cool stuff not being available in Australia, one of the two.

Every time I get a link to yet another cool thing from Amazon they won’t ship to Australia, I put it in a special collection of bookmarks and forget about it for a little while. And every now and again (i.e. a few times a year), I pick and choose a few things that I actually want and do a shipment via OPAS, my package forwarder of choice. Sign up using my referral link, and you’ll get free registration (usually $25) and I’ll get a credit every time you ship something with them.

Shameless self-promotion aside, this last shipment of stuff from Amazon was pretty impressive.

stuff from amazonIn no particular order:

  • Cyalume 10″ SnapLights in green and white — apparently these are the best chemical lights money can buy. I just had to have some. (I have a bit of an obsession with glow sticks. Weird, I know.)

  • Fenix PD35 — pretty decent torch for the money. Takes either two CR123A batteries or one 18650 battery. Seriously bright, too, and the strobe is impressive, to say the least.

  • Gerber E.A.B. Pocket Knife (and the Lite version) — I saw these on Uncrate a little while ago and thought they’d be cool. I had intended to use them as an every day carry kind of thing, but decided that was just asking for trouble. They’re really nice, though. After purchasing I wasn’t sure if they would make it through customs, but here they are.

  • Lenox Gold titanium-edged utility blades — two packs of five. Titanium edged razor blades! Crazy. To go with the pocket knives.

  • iTP EOS A3 flashlight — 96 lumen output from one AAA battery, in a minimal design not much longer than a standard house key. It replaced the ageing Star Wars lightsaber laser that previously adorned my keyring. Waterproof, too.

  • ThruNight Ti2 flashlight — pretty much the same thing as the iTP EOS A3, except with a slightly newer version of the CREE LED inside (CREE XP-G2 versus XP-G). Also waterproof, etc.

Not pictured:

And finally, the pièce de résistance:

Acer C720 Chromebook box

  • One Acer C720 Chromebook (specs via Anandtech). Ever since this was announced earlier in October I’ve wanted one. Didn’t really want to wait for it to become available locally (who knows how long that will take), so I imported one from Amazon. It’s honestly pretty great for a $250 laptop — I’ll have a full review up in the next month or so.

All in all, all of the above was around $160 to ship to my door — expensive, yes, but it arrived in around 6 business days. The bad news is, I’m already planning my next Amazon shipment (something I should have bought along with the C720 but failed to think about ahead of time). One item might not be so bad, shipping wise.

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Your testimony, please.

Alternate title: testify, oldbag! (If you don’t get that, you clearly haven’t played enough Pheonix Wright. [link opens iTunes])

Okay, I’ll admit it: there are times when I think there would be nothing worse than going to church on a Sunday. There, I said it. Sometimes it’s because I played too much Bad Company 2 the night before and didn’t get to sleep until 1am and sometimes it’s because I’ve had a terribad week (in terms of sleep, anyway, averaging 5-6 hours per night).

My own laziness aside, it’s not until I actually drag myself out of bed, get ready, and sit down at church that I realise I’m glad to be there.

As I type this on my very-soon-to-be-replaced iPhone 3G, my mind flicks back to last Sunday…

If you’re a regular church-goer you’ll know that a testimony (sometimes also called a witness) is where some member of the congregation tells the other members how they came to be a Christian.

This one particular guy from the congregation stands up, somehow manages to mumble into the microphone “I really don’t want to be up here”, and then gets on with his testimony.

Well, if you could call it a testimony.

Now, I’ve said a friendly “hello” to this guy once or twice, but for all I know he’s just another churchgoer like me. I never see him come with a partner/wife though, but that’s not uncommon.

Anyway, he gets on with his testimony, and because he’s usually a pretty quiet guy he reads it out from a piece of paper. Which is fine, it’s normal to have notes or something. But I digress. Maybe it’s the fact he’s reading his testimony, maybe it’s just his actual testimony is amazing, but what he describes is actually pretty out there – not outside the bounds of reality by any means, but enough to make you stop and wonder.

Maybe it’s the fact that most testimonies I’ve heard are relatively the same (having Christian parents, going to a Christian school, etc, etc), but his story just makes me think. I won’t attempt to recall all of it here, but you hear stories of people coming from fractured families, having abusive parents, entering destructive cycles and so on, but it’s not until you actually hear it from a person that you know that it really hits home.

Not that he did come from a fractured family or had abusive parents, mind you – nay, his problem mainly stemmed from a lack of self-confidence and the discovery of alcohol – but it made me stop and think that yeah, that shit is real.

Maybe I’ve lived a fairly sheltered life. Maybe it’s because I’m lucky to have the parents that I do, and the lifestyle that I have.

I’m not really trying to say anything here, apart from the fact that I’m glad I went to church that day. 🙂