Jun. 30, 2008
This has been a good month for movies. I saw the following in cinemas:
Kung Fu Panda - complete AWESOMENESS. I drank the Kool-Aid all the way on this one.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - classic Indy goodness.
Incredible Hulk - Edward Norton is cast brilliantly here, a choice on the same level as Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man. And they addressed the issue of Hulk’s stretchy pants!
Wanted - The story is decent, although the Loom of Fate weirded me out a bit. But let’s face it, you’re really here for the kickass gun battles, and the movie pretty much delivers. Remember back when bullet time from the Matrix was a big deal? The gun battles here are like a generation up from that. I love the gunfight through the factory, and the train battle was pretty much insane. The ending was meh, but at least it wasn’t some generic “good guy wins and gets the girl” (er, spoiler much?)
Since I now have a laptop, I’ve also been able to watch more movies on DVD as well:
21 - it’s undeniably a geek movie. If you want to watch it, you need a geek with you to explain how card counting in Blackjack works. It’s pretty good, and also doesn’t have any predictable “hero wins it all” ending. Based on a true story, but I think the win rate may be highly exaggerated.
The Kingdom - we actually just needed something to watch. Something with guns and explosions. This movie did the job. Jamie Fox and Jennifer Gardner are FBI agents who went into Saudi Arabia to hunt down a terrorist. The nice thing is that they don’t portray the Arabian police as incompetent and are instead useful allies, i.e. the Americans don’t hog all the work.
I’ve also managed to watch a few random crap movies as background noise (Monster in Law, Norbit - god, HBO seems to be showing this stupid movie all the time!)
Upcoming movies I’m looking forward to: Dark Knight, obv. Although Hancock seems interesting as well.
Posted by Roy in Pop Culture | No Comments
Jun. 29, 2008
The gist of it is: it wasn’t as annoying as I had been led to expect.
Frankly, I think it’s better than XP, but I might be blinded by the fact that it’s very pretty. Visually it’s a step up from XP the same way XP was a step up from ‘95. The XP box at work seems so bland to me now.
The file manager (Explorer) is very nice, I like the functionality of being able to navigate the address bar by mouse click (though I never used this back in Ubuntu) and the ability to sort files even in thumbnail view. The desktop gadgets are neat but probably not really that useful, though I still keep them around.
IE7 so far has been tolerable, except that I found out just now that it has Javascript errors when I’m using the Wordpress RTE for posting. Also, the Ctrl+K shortcut for the search box is missing, but I still insitinctively use it all the time. I think I’m going to switch to Firefox right after posting. :p
All the permission prompts that I had heard people complain about didn’t really bother me. They only come up when you need to do administrative-related tasks, and coming from Ubuntu I’m a bit used to it.
I haven’t removed most of the preinstalled Acer crap yet, but I’ve removed the 90-day trial of Norton Antivirus and replaced it with Avast antivirus.
Oh, Windows Update is prompting me for a restart! It’s also my first time working with an OS that has Windows Update enabled, and some people have told me how annoying the restart prompts are especially while playing games. Luckily, I can afford to restart right now.
All in all, Vista seems okay, and I believe it’s a good upgrade to XP, which has been getting boring to me. I was originally planning on dual-booting this laptop with Linux, but I think I’ll stick with Vista for a while.
Posted by Roy in Geeky, Tech | 1 Comment
Jun. 22, 2008
Just a bit of an indulgence.
There was a warehouse sale at the office building from Tuesday to Friday. Like every single time I would make a big purchase I waffled undecisively between buying and not buying a laptop for the first four days, only to succumb at the very last minute when a model with an insane price became available.
On 7:30pm of the last day of the sale, I picked up an Acer Aspire 4920 unit with the following specs:
===================================================================
Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Processor Technology, Intel ® Core™2 Duo Processor T7100 (1.8GHz, 2Mb L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)
Mobile Intel® PM965 Express Chipset, Built-in Intel® Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N
Genuine Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Home Premium
1GB DDR2 533MHz Memory/ 160GB SATA HDD (Extended Power)
14.1″ WXGA TFT CrystalBrite LCD (8ms response time)
Built-in New Acer CrystalEye WebCam supporting Acer PrimalLite Technology
Built-in Dolby® Digital Surround Sound (DLNA Certified)
Built-in Bluetooth 2.0+ EDR Technology
Built-in 5in1 Card Reader
Built-in Super Multi Double Layer Drive
Built-in 10/100/1000 Gigabit LAN/56k Modem
ATI Mobility™ Radeon® X2500 with up to 1GB of HyperMemory™ Technology (256MB dedicated Memory, 768MB Shared Memory)
New Acer Arcade Deluxe Multimedia Software
Acer GridVista Technology
Acer Empowering Technology with Free
Microsoft® Office Home and Student 2007 (Trial Version for 60 days)
===================================================================
I felt guilty about the impulse buy for a few hours; I didn’t really need a laptop of course, and I could upgrade one of the home desktops into a top of the line gaming machine for the same price. Still, I’ve always wanted a laptop and if I went by that logic I’d never have one!
So yeah I’m using it now, I also bought and setup a wifi router at home as well, so now I get to blog while watching a DVD of 21. I’m also back to using a Windows OS at home, since the laptop comes with Windows Vista Home Premium. I think I’m going to try using Vista and IE for a while and see how long before I decide to wipe and install into an XP/Ubuntu dual boot. At least I get to experience the thrill of being a Windows shill for a while. 
Posted by Roy in Hardware | No Comments
Jun. 17, 2008
Because I’m a sucker for trying out alternative software, I installed and tried out the latest release of the Opera web browser, Opera 9.5, for a bit more than a week. Opera is neat and all, but I don’t see any features that are so awesome that they can’t be done in Firefox (with some extensions maybe).
My favorite feature is I guess the Speed Dial page; where opening a new tab displays a customizable table of common websites you visit. Opera also provides a function to zoom in or out of any web page (don’t know if Firefox has a similar extension). Supposedly Opera is also the fastest in terms of browser rendering; I didn’t perform any benchmarks, but I didn’t notice any significant difference either.
There are quite a few cons though. In particular:
- The standard Wordpress rich text editor doesn’t work correctly; I had to use the plain text editor when posting using Opera.
- Some Google properties such as Google Docs and Google Notebook don’t work correctly
- Flash content that renders before the rest of the page does not correctly move into the proper position once rendering is complete
The Wordpress and Google support are deal-breakers for me, without those problems I would have considered keeping Opera as my primary browser for a while. As it is, I’m switching back to Firefox 3.0.
Posted by Roy in Tech | No Comments
Jun. 16, 2008
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The first 2000 strips of Diesel Sweeties have been released as cc-licensed ebooks.
Posted by Roy in Links | No Comments
Jun. 9, 2008
Google started a treasure hunt about a month ago, releasing four questions (one per week) that covered a range of computational topics. I actually joined the treasure hunt late, the 2nd question was already released by the time I got wind of it. The site says there are prizes to be won for the people who are able to provide complete answers first; I’m not sure what my odds of winning anything are since (a) I joined late and (b) I can only do the questions during the weekends, typically a few days after they are released.
Still, for what it’s worth, I was able to answer all four questions correctly on the first try. For any programming parts, I wrote up Python scripts to help me through. The problems were pretty good, and also randomly-generated so that you can’t just copy the answer from another participant.
Hoping I win something.