Another Tuesday - It's Pirate time!

Pirates of the Caribbean: The World's End is a very long movie indeed, spanning nearly 3 hours from start to credit and you know what?...it feels that way too! Lucky we went to an earlier session, otherwise, I think I would have fallen asleep midway into the movie :) There you go, in a nutshell, this is how I think about the movie unfortunately.

It's way too long for the story and to make thing worse, it involves far too many characters which I think fail to connect with their audience. Forget about Captain Jack Sparrow, Captain Barbossa is back thanks to Calypso, the goddess of sea trapped in human form by her lover, Davy Jones. It's Barbossa who leads the show this time round I think and thank god he does well to keep me interested at time.

Oh, just throw loyalty out of the window in this movie. In fact, betrayal is the most apt theme for this installment; betrayal of trust, betrayal of love, betrayal of friendship, betrayal of promises and there are plenty of it.

Saying that, I think this third installment is much better than the inferior second film, which until now I still can't fully comprehend...or is it just me? The movie excels visually and the epic ship battle is nothing short of spectacular but a tad too drawn out. Love the flying cannon monkey though :)

Overall, I give it 2.5 out of 5.

Another lazy afternoon gone by :)

Today was a truely lazy Sunday...woke up late, breakfast in the bed and computer game for couple of hours, then went down to city for an afternoon stroll. Actually it was Jin's idea because she wanted to have a look at some autumn sales in Myer and Cue :) For me...as usual, lugged around my camera gear whenever possible just to catch something unexpected may be :)

After browsing through quite a few "fashion outlets", my stomach started to grumble. We had a great lunch at the Sassellas Tavern above the city arcade. We love the pub/restaurant setting and most of all, they serve food in gigantic proportion. Of course, going to a pub with having a booze or two will be a shame!

I bought a ND4 filter alone the way in the hope that it may help "slow down" some action in reasonably bright daylight. Earlier experiments can be found here. I think I might need a darker ND8 to handle some brighter situations.

Myths vs Facts: Part II

OK...Windows Vista isn't that new anymore, but from what I can see not many people have actually switch to the "the newest and the greatest" yet.

I am not going to write another review about Bill's lastest creation since there are countless reviews posted everywhere already. What I am here to do is to share my view whether "the lastest" is indeed always "the greatest"? In most cases, I guess newer should be better. In the case of Vista, it's a little of a mixed bag I guess. I have been using 64bits Windows Vista Home Premium for a little more than 4 months now and from what I experience, it's indeed a very stable operating system. I have yet to experience a crash or a blue screen apart from a few times where I have overclocked my cpu a tad too much :) Even if a game is totally crashed, I would still be able to recover from Windows task manager and return to Windows. So that is a big plus from crash-prone XP. Oh, did I mention?... Vista is by far the best looking Windows period!

Sadly, that's about the only 2 advantages of Vista I could gather from my experience. The biggest let down of Vista is that fact that you need a fairly decent computer to run it. As Microsoft has put it, to run Vista at its full potential with all the bells and whistles turned on, you need a computer with a WEI (Windows Experience Index) of equal to 5 or more. Now, Vista rated my E6400 @ default 2.13Ghz with WEI of 5 and at the time of purchase, E6400 was one of the fastest midrange chips out there! Good luck to those who are still running Pentium/Celeron. In addition, everything is running much slowly under Vista than with my good old XP :( Oh..one more thing, don't waste $400+ on new retail Windows Vista, just head to eBay and get yourself a geniune OEM version for less than half the price!

Back from South West

It's a short 3 days trip down to Margaret River - Augusta region but it's nontheless refreshing one. We have been to Margaret River numerous times in the past but this time appeared to be the most relaxing one for some reasons. I always love Margaret River, not because it's full of wineries :) but because of the friendly locals, sheer tranquility and amazing coastline. Although a few visits to wineries won't harm hehe!

I have taken many beautiful shots with my camera this time, despite of terrible weather for photography - hardly any sun, very windy and drizzling unpredictably. May be that's why I finally collected some dust in my brand new lens! Guess this is kinda "emotionally" worse than dust on camera sensor because you can't physically clean/blow the dust away because the elements are completely sealed. Good thing about it is that they never show up on the photos I took.

I have posted more shots at Flickr.com.

Ok...coffee time...can't wait to try some "kintamani" blend which we bought from Yahava Koffee Works :) Hey Wayne - can't wait for your expresso machine!

Myths vs Facts: Part 1

Myths vs Facts: CPU
What is CPU and how fast should it be? This is not a computing class and I am certainly not an expert in computers. But I have seen so many of us get confused with the term CPU. Yes…I said us as people around my age and older. Those younger generation lucky bastards get to use computer even before they reach pre-school! For me, my first experience with 486DX2 66 was at my college library when I first came to Perth. Those computers were running at a “speedy” 66Mhz! Most of the people have a misconception that CPU is the “box”…yea…the “box” that attaches to your monitor. As a matter of fact, CPU actually stands for Central Processing Unit, a complete computation engine that is fabricated on a single silicon chip and it actually resides in the “box”. It’s the brain of your computer and usually is given a speed in MHz, which comes the second misconception.

Myths vs Facts: MHz
MHz is actually “speed limit” that is imposed on a CPU. It’s the maximum speed that the processor can run without generating any errors. However, many modern CPUs can be run above their rated speed with some simple tweaking, and this process is called “overclocking”. Many people think that the higher the MHz, the faster and hence, better their computers are. Well, that was indeed true in most of the case until few years ago when AMD (Intel’s rival) starting to produce CPUs that run slower in MHz than most Intel counterparts but capable of much faster program execution. You will find the same situation occurs within Intel when they introduce the Core2duo family which replaces the good old Pentium 4 dual core (my current budget cheapo overclocked Core2duo E6400 running at 3.0MHz will run rings around any Pentium 4 and most AMD 2x chips out there). A big drop in MHz but a big jump in performance! So is faster MHz actually reflects in faster real time performance? Well, it’s only true if you are comparing the chips, which are produced using the same architecture and process.
Photo on the right shows the mess inside my "box" :)

Myths vs Facts: More RAM or memory = better performance?
RAM (Random Access Memory), also better known as computer memory, is considered “random access” because you can access any memory cell directly if you know the row and column that intersect at that cell. (1 cell = 1 capacitor + 1 transistor) and RAM consists of millions of them! My simple definition of RAM is “workspace” for your computer. If your computer has inadequate RAM, then your computer will be forced to make more frequent file transfer from your RAM to your hard drive cache in order to free up more RAM space, resulting in extremely slow and unresponsive system. Hence, more RAM = faster executions and productions. However, this is only true until certain RAM size is reached, and then increase in RAM will result in little or no real time performance gain but a big dent in your wallet! All but the basic Windows Vista has a minimum requirement of 1GB of RAM in order to run things smoothly. But my advice is, get at least 2GB of RAM if you are planning to run the Vista. I still can’t believe all those people out there are still trying to sell new computers with 512MB RAM for Windows Vista…and worse still, with completely obsolete CPU technology!

Spiderman 3

Well...guess what it's Tuesday movie time again. This time we went to watch Spiderman 3 with our friend Dao at Reading Cinema. My expectation was pretty high before I watched the movie because of the previous 2 installments which were reasonably good, as well as the proclaimed astronomical budget. The story was a little loose and a bit scattered but I think the director managed to pull them together pretty well. It's a job well done considering there are quite a few supporting charaters involved. Tobey Maguire (Peter) acted reasonably well in this movie, especially when he discovered his "dark side". Venom, which was the last villain in the movie mutated by the same alien black slime that changed Peter was a little bit disappointing in his ugly outfit and poor design...something unexpected from a movie of such a big budget. Overall, it was rather entertaining and visually amazing. Rating, a near 4 stars movie let down by the badly designed last minute Venom, highly recommended if you are spidy fan, personally I think it's on par with the previous installments.

What I cooked for lunch today

Some people are more adventurous in cooking and some are not. Jin is the unadventurous type, everytime she cooks usually must be by the book...no mixing of multiple ingredients...no multiple sauces...no mixing pork with beef for instance...I know I know, doesn't sound very good mixing different meats together...well...you never try you never know. What I have here are two dishes I cooked for our lunch today, don't worry, not much "mixing" involved...just simple and I think nice :)

If you are interested, here is the recipe for the fish..the amount is just estimates, I just add in what I feel like and most of the time my dishes turn up ok. Oh yea... I like the number "2" :)

Fish fillet in sweet black sauce
what you need:
2 good fresh fish fillet (I used cobbler)
2 tsp ginger sliced in thin strips
2 cloves of garlic finely chopped
2 small hot chilli finely chopped
2 tsp corn flour
2 tbsp soy sauce in same amount of water
2 tbsp sugar
chilli powder
pinch of rock salt
some spring onion and sesame seeds as garnish

Thinly coat the fish fillets with mixture of corn flour, chilli and salt to taste. Remember we are not making fish in batter or fish and chip, so do not use too much flour. Heat enough oil to cover the base of a large pan and fry the fish until lightly brown on both sides and remove to plate.
In wok, fry the ginger, garlic and chilli in 1 tbsp of oil until brown. Make sure the wok is hot, add in sugar, then mix in soy sauce and water. Put the fish back into wok for 1 minutes then remove and garnish with whatever you want :)

New TV unit

I would like to do a before and after shots but I was too excited with the arrival of our final piece of furniture for our lounge room, I totally forgot about it. As Karen and Bill would have recalled, that LG tv must have weighed a ton! With great effort, we managed to shift the tv down and up onto the new unit without smashing a single toe!

The no nonsense unit is clean and simple and it's just the way me and Jin like it :) We have been shopping around for a long time and most of the low line units we came across were either too tall or too "complicated" in design = ugly :) My next mission is to get a flat panel monitor for our "entertainment" PC.