Chasing Daydreams

Jeanne is quite talkative and tonight she said “Dah-dhy!” and both Michelle and I heard it! She probably doesn’t really mean me by that but it sure made my night!

Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream, Merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream.

That nursery rhyme is very apt for this movie. Inception means the beginning or creation of something. In the movie, inception is the microcosm of an idea that once planted to a person through a dream and accepted becomes the basis of that person’s thoughts, opinion, other ideas, and even his or her personality.

Cobb(Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor”, someone who retrieves information from a person by going into that person’s consciousness and extracting the information. He is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe) to attempt the heretofore untried inception on a competitor. As in a typical heist movie, he then assembles a crew to do the job and after the usual drama, set about doing it. Of course, since most of these happen in a dream, you definitely can’t expect the usual.

But it is a heist movie in the same vein as The Italian Job and The Thomas Crown Affair. That’s tough company but even if Inception is not one of the best heist movies, it’s certainly one of the more imaginative ones. It has action but it isn’t as edgy as The Matrix, to which it can and will be compared to. It has some twists but it doesn’t attempt to befuddle the user: Whenever things get a little bit complicated, the characters make sure to explain everything (sometimes a little too much). But put together, it’s a well-built, riveting movie.

Rating: 4/5

Finally, 10 years after the first, Starcraft II is out! How big an event is this? BIG! We’re talking about a game that has sold over 11 million copies, still being played all these years, and is Korea’s national sport. They even declared today an official holiday. Of course, there’s a lot of unofficial and personal holidays elsewhere today.

It is doubtful if it can better the original but time will tell (like maybe 10 years) but it looks great, modern, and fun in its own right. There’s no LAN play which was arguably one of the reasons why the original is so popular. That’s a bummer but we can do without that anachronism as shown by World of Warcraft. Maybe it will even force those ISPs to drastically improve their service.

Looks like I’ll be needing a new gaming computer.

If you’ve been dealing with companies long enough, you will notice a notable decline in their customer service. It has become impersonal and less of a service. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the so-called customer service hotline.

First off, it’s not exactly a hotline. A hotline is supposedly a direct and immediate telephone linkup, especially between heads of government, as for use in a crisis. But with most customer service hotlines you get a busy or unavailable signal. Good luck on your crisis.

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Everybody with one of those classic monochrome Nokia phones would know Snake, that game where you control a snake going around the screen consuming apples which in turn makes the snake longer and longer and making it harder and harder to consume more apples. It was quite useful when you’re waiting and bored.

Now if you’re watching YouTube and you have extremely slow Internet connectivity (like when you’re using Sun “Broadband” Wireless) you will be waiting and bored a lot. Worry not, as I discovered just today, the cool dudes at YouTube apparently programmed in Snake in their Flash-based player. Just press any of the arrow keys when the rotating buffering animation comes up on the player screen. Have fun!

On my way from Servitek, I dropped by a Hyundai dealership along the way. I checked out the Genesis Coupe on display and I noticed that it seemed different from the one I saw last Saturday. This got me curious  and, after a few minutes of searching, I learned Hyundai has come out with the 2011 model year Genesis Coupe.

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As we were about to leave for the office, I noticed that my rear left tire was deflated. I looked and saw a screw embedded deep in the tread. You DON’T remove embedded objects from your deflated tire so I just tried inflating the tire with my handy lighter air pump and thankfully the tire seemed to hold air reasonably well enough to let me drive to the office.

But I wasn’t about to let it stay that way for long so I left work early and went to the nearest Goodyear Servitek branch where the service guy cold patched the tire. He even replaced the missing tire inflator valve of one of my tires. As always, great service from Goodyear Servitek.

Finished Kill Zone 2. It was supposed to be my second game after Assassin’s Creed II but back then, I couldn’t find a copy at Data Blitz. I did find one copy at Brochiere but it was selling for P3800 or a similarly unreasonable price. So I didn’t get it. A few months later, I finally found a copy at Data Blitz for P1400 or so. Patience sure is rewarded.

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One of the most popular subtitling technologies is SRT. It is supported by many players soft and hard such as VLC, which I use for playback on the PC, and even by my budget Samsung HT-Z320 home theater. but alas, the PS3 doesn’t.

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If you have an unlocked Huawei E1550, you can use with your Globe SIM to connect to the Internet. Just make sure you have unlimited data or you are on time-based charging. Otherwise, things could get pretty expensive real quick.

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