Back from another night of rehearsal. It will be another 7 days worth of rehearsing at night! At least I feel that I'm coping well with my current routine of waking up early enough to feel fresh and do my warm ups and routines on the instrument. Rehearsal was fun indeed especially with most of the orchestra present. As usual, the lineup of performances include solos by very young kids who you probably couldn't imagine holding full-size instruments and playing them with technical abilities so high for their age. It really impresses me. I hope these kids will grow to be mature musicians and people who will successfully promote and advance the art.

It has been over a year that I've owned my first Apple product, my MacBook Air and since then I've acquired more products with the iPhone 4S and the 3rd generation iPad. Perhaps it's time I write a small review of my devices. My MacBook Air was bought at a time when my Acer laptop was simply not comfortable to use anymore hardware-wise. It's battery could no longer last more than an hour before it reached its 3rd full year of use, a laptop cooler has to be placed below when I'm watching videos, not talking about games yet. In fact, it couldn't run games better than my old desktop I used as a young boy. So I looked up what other laptops that could be a good replacement for the Acer. I chanced upon the MacBook Air. At that time, my impression of the MacBook Air wasn't really positive. Word had gone around at its launch that the ports are not accessible enough, the performance is not good, it overheats, etc., so the first impression wasn't so good. But after reading reviews, which is something I have not done then because I didn't know they exist, I realise it's a very good computer indeed and the starting price for the 13 inch was below $2000 (which was the budget my dad set when I was shopping for my first laptop; the Acer costed $1200). So then I heard from my classmate that Apple will be releasing an update to the current MacBook Air to feature the latest processors, and quite importantly, a backlit keyboard on the Air. So true enough, they released the update and I got my dad to get me one. When I got it, it was a delight. A laptop this thin, light, fast, and stable and still under $2000. It cost $1638 after the student discount. Till this day, I believe it was one of the best purchases in my life. It probably has, but I do not remember the computer crashing on me. There of course have been hiccups here and there but none that affected me as much as the Acer. I don't need to keep it over a cooler and the battery lasts 7 hours even today. So now, I'm a musician, I don't game a lot (in fact, there are no games on my computer now), I don't often do processor intensive tasks very often; I use the computer to generate essays, music notation on Sibelius 7, presentations and also to check my mail, be a hub for my media (it lives on my external hard drive due to lack of space, I'll get to this later), surf the web and also organise my life and work with calendar, reminders and a note app. So my typical usage is not heavy. Every one of these tasks just operates smoothly on the computer, there hardly is any system lag and I should be right in attributing that to the SSD. That's really great and I really appreciate the speed at which my computer can get things done. However, when I was in the market for it, my storage demands were not high at that time; I used less than 128GB on my Acer not counting the games. So I thought I could live with 128GB that comes on the base model of the Air. Turns out that as I become more serious in collecting music and operas especially, my iTunes library just got really big. Now this would not have been an issue if Sibelius weren't on my computer. Unfortunately, I find it a very useful app to have and it doesn't make sense to have it on an external hard drive so I migrated all my music and videos to the hard drive. Now, that's all fine until you have to sync your iDevices with iTunes and if you forget to plug in your hard drive, it creates a new iTunes folder in your computer and sets the iTunes destination folder there. You would then have to change the settings and wait for the computer to consolidate the library in the hard drive again. My library is probably still tolerable (it's close to 50GB) but if you have anything larger, the time taken will be so long! It's an inconvenience. So, moral of the story is, if you foresee yourself needing more space in the future for whatever reason, please choose a higher storage option. For my next laptop, I'm definitely getting more storage. Other than that, I really have nothing to complain about the computer. I hook it up to a 21.5 inch external display for more screen so that I can be more efficient when I work because sometimes I really need two or more windows open. The trackpad in my opinion is much better than any other laptop I've put my hands on. It is so good that I have never considered buying a mouse. The keyboard is good to use and the backlight (which I'm using now), is really handy in the dark. I also use the SD card slot often as I transfer recordings from my recorders often. Overall, as a computer, it has served me very well for the past year. I do not feel it is getting slower, the battery life is still very good (I don't bring my charger with me usually; only if I know I'm going to do processor-intensive work for a long time), built-in software is really useful and most sync with iCloud and the design and build is really good. All in a very justifiable price tag. I am really happy with my computer and carrying it with me almost everywhere I go because it is so light! I hope the hardware lasts and by the time I feel it starts the downhill, Apple would have made a very good computer with an even more attractive price tag. I'll provide reviews of my other devices soon!

Alright, really sleepy now, so goodnight world!