Movie Review: Miami Vice

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My Rating: 1Star

This afternoon I went to see the movie “Miami Vice” at JP Cinema, Causeway Bay.

One simple word “BAD”.

I must say this is one of the worst if not the worst movie I’ve seen this past 3 years.

I appears to me that they tried really hard to reproduce the 80’s TV series “Miami Vice“, which they should never had done. They should have try to produce a movie simply called “Miami Vice” about vice cops in Miami with the typical modern police story flare. At least that would have been much better than what was done.

Although in Hong Kong’s perspective, this is a foreign movie, but never thought that I would feel that way in the theater watching it. Through out the movie, there were many scenes I had not idea what the character were saying. I had to glance at the Chinese subtitles to try to figure out what I had missed. This is from a guy who does not really read Chinese.

For some reason most of the characters in the movie were mumbling their lines.

It was not long ago that I gave a movie 5 penguins, but it had been quite some time since I given any movie 1 penguin. That’s because in this case I do not have a rating that is lower.

Rating Legend:
5Stars Not to be missed
4Stars Wait for the DVD
3Stars Buy from iTunes Store
2Stars Rent it if you can
1Stars Waste your time elsewhere

Zune gets Social

Microsoft’s new Zune player is suppose to have community features. Not very unlike what I had described in my Blog, “The Next iPod“, on July 23, 2005.

Here is what I imagine the future can be if Apple implements what I suggested above.

  1. Your friend who wants to know what you’re listening to on your iPod or wants to share the music you have on your iPod. Will simply turn on the wireless connection s/he has on his own iPod, then using the built in “Bonjour” feature like that in iTunes, your friend will be able to locate your iPod and see the set of playlists you publish for others to view. S/he will be able either listen to the song you’re listening to or just choose among the songs you have published in the form of Playlists.
  2. With built in Bluetooth enabled on your iPod, your friend whom you want to share your headphone with, will just have to pair his/her bluetooth headset to your iPod and s/he will be able to listen to the song or audio track you’re listening to.

Where I layed out a very similar social community feature that Apple should add to their MP3 player. Is Microsoft reading my Blog?

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The IE7 Myth – is Microsoft shifting blame?

The article written by Steven Wittens infuriated me so much that I decided to Blog about the subject also.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not angry with what Steven had wrote. To the contrary, I totally agree with Steve in terms of Microsoft placing blame on the developers.

Sending out emails like these to developers/companies are just trying to support their own agenda of forcing everyone to switch out of IE 6 or earlier.

M$ is hoping that that switch, due to habit, will be IE 7, but as Steven had said these “CSS hacks” should not affect IE 7 if it was fixed correctly and fully compliant to the CSS standards.

Therefore, the fact that these pages are not displaying correctly in IE means that M$ may have corrected the CSS compliance issue, but they have missed out on the rest of the W3C standards for a browser.

So, my suggestion and wish is for all developers to do nothing to explicitly support IE 7, but rather continue to code to the W3C standards. So that more sites will break for the end-user, unless they are using one of the fully Standards compliant browser.

I personally think that M$ had been spoiled for too long. What I mean is that they had been the dominate player by default; end-users do not bother or care to install any other browser except the one that came with the computer they purchased or what was already installed with their OS. As a result of this unjustified dominance, M$ had slacked off and not correct issues/bugs that they should had fixed much quicker.

Therefore, if majority of the end-users cannot use majority of the Standards compliant web sites on the Internet, and these web sites clearly states the list of Standards compliant browsers that will work properly. M$ will be forced to finally stick to the Standards rather than forcing their own onto developers.

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Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest

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My Rating: 4Stars

This afternoon I went to see the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” at Ocean Cinema, Tsim Sha Tsui.

What can I say, Johnny Depp is at his usual best.

For some reason ever since Johnny Depp stared in the first Priates of the Caribbean movie he seems to have carried his Captain Jack Sparrow character into his real live. Or may be it is just him playing the role to promte the movie. During his interview on David Letterman, when Letterman ask when he will take the gold teeth caps out, Depp just said, “why take them out when there’s a third movie”. Yes, for those who do not know, there is another sequel coming, “Pirates of the Caribbean 3“. It was three years between the first two in the sequel, this next one is tentatively going to be released on May 25, 2007.

Anyway, this sequel has the same priates chants, characters and sword fights that everyone expect from a priate movie. Although at times there are too many of the usual expected stuff, which made the movie a bit slow.

I always judge the interestingness of a movie by how often I notice my surroundings during the movie. Although it was not often, I was not able to totally immerge myself. Even so I do enjoy the movie and the performance of Depp. The special effects and makeup are amazing too.

Rating Legend:
5Stars Not to be missed
4Stars Wait for the DVD
3Stars Buy from iTunes Store
2Stars Rent it if you can
1Star Waste your time elsewhere

My Comments on Steve Jobs’ Keynote at WWDC’06

Apple

Just finished reading the Live coverage of Steve Jobs’ keynote at the Apple 2006 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC’06) in San Francisco.

There are so many new features in the new Mac OS X (code name “Leopard”), it will be even more exciting to be using a Mac starting in 2007.

Two of the features I definitely will use are “Time Machine” and “Spaces”. For the former, I had been trying to find a backup software that does incremental backups on my Macintel. I had been using Carbon Copy Cloner, but its incremental backup (synchronization) feature is broken on Macintels. Now with “Time Machine” built into the up coming Mac OS X, there will not be any more excuse for people to not have a back up of their Macs.

As for the latter, “Spaces”, I also currently use an application, VirtueDesktops, that does similar thing. But Apple’s Spaces is much more featured and some of which I will definitely be able to take advantage of, that is not currently available in VirtueDesktops.

So check out the various sites with coverage of the keynote and start salivating for the next Mac OS X this coming Spring.

Unusual Behaviour

This afternoon I was sitting at a McDonald’s restaurant in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, having my Big Mac™. All of a sudden a young kid, about 6 years old, came to my table, without saying anything, he just took a french fried and begin eating it. To say the least I was very surprise.

I am even more surprise that it was a local Chinese boy who did this. As my readers may know, I had always had the impression that local Hong Kong people are shy and not talkative. The action of this young boy is totally out of character for the typical Hong Kong children.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this sort of openness is a good thing. Although, I thihnk the boy may not have simply took the french fried and started eating it. May be he should have asked.

On the other hand, I don’t think young children, for that matter adult, should be eating things given by strangers.

What this incident actually points out may be the lack of education and teachings Hong Kong parents have on their children now a days.

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Public Humiliation

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A great image captured by Leo Laporte and posted on his Blog.

The moral of the story is, you do not want to get a woman upset. Notice the “PS” at the bottom of the billboard.