Thursday, May 22, 2008

EEE Laptop Skin



I've had my ASUS eee "Luthien" (galaxy black 701 4G model with webcam) since February 9 this year. The very first accessory I purchased for it was a P400 screen protector from Silie Nation's Eilis Tan, one of the original merchants in the Eeeph.com Buy and Sell section. I also want other items from her catalogue -- such as the eee 6600 mAh battery (to order) and leather PDAir case (regularly available).

Along the way I bought a 160g WD Passport (ABM Systems, Virra Mall) and a reasonably priced slim external DVD writer (Glenn Santos aka "Shinrai" of Eeeph.com and Tipidpc.com). In the ensuing mania I bought an inexpensive black nylon canvas bag (originally a portable dvd player carrier) from fellow eeePHer Corine to carry my peripherals, as well as a Tokidoki-print Le Sac-alike messenger bag from Divisoria to act as my computer bag.

Still, once out of the bag, my Luthien looked like everybody else's galaxy black eee. It was only a matter of time before I got myself a laptop "Proudskin" from Manix Genabe to help me give Luthien some identity. At the Eeeph.com Meet & Greet 2 raffle I actually won an anime print, which Ning wanted, so I agreed to swap for her Japanese rising sun print. It still didn't feel quite right for my personality, so when Mark asked for it, I just gave it to him. Reg bought the Hokusai wave print skin I wanted, so I figured I'd look around for something similar.

One day I saw my copy of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha and remembered the Zhang Ziyi movie poster. I rushed online to find the biggest file size wallpaper of it, and at the 4th Meet & Greet I asked Chie to help me remove the cinema information fonts on one side (yes, he had Adobe Photoshop CS2 in his eee's 8g SDHC), and to resize the file to eee requirements. I immediately deposited the payment, emailed proof of deposit, and received my Proudskin a day and a half later. The laptop skin is photo-quality printing on a vinyl sticker, quite easy to install. I did notice a while later that the ASUS logo was under the bridge of Zhang Ziyi's nose, making her look like Owen Wilson's sister, but when the Proudskin looks this good, who cares?