Chasing Daydreams

This is essentially just a follow-up to my review of Infernal Affairs as I don’t intend on going through it again here. The two other movies in the series follow the same formula as the first: a police drama with a lot of twists and turns and great acting. I don’t know if all three movies were planned beforehand, but it sure looked like it. Though each can actually stand and are great on their own, the experience would be even better if you watch all of them and in sequence. It would also be less confusing that way.

Infernal Affairs 2, is a prequel to the first movie. It follows the stories of the lead characters Yan (Tony Leung) and Ming (Andy Lau) as they rose up the ranks of Sam’s organization and the police, respectively. This is while they grapple with identity issues that plague moles. As a backdrop to this is a complex and sometimes bloody struggle between and within the police and a powerful crime organization.

Infernal Affairs 3, is a sequel to the first movie. The original cast returns and picks up where the first movie left off. It follows the story of Ming as he tracks down all of Sam’s moles while grappling with his worsening identity crisis all the way to the climactic ending. As the events unfold, there are constant flashbacks to put the current event into perspective. Needless to say, this can sometimes be disconcerting and this is the most confusing of the three. Here’s where you will appreciate watching the first movie.

Rating: 4/5

I was finally able to watch Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. After failed attempts to watch it during the CineManga preview and the actual CineManga festival, I finally succeeded over the looong weekend. The movie is about robots going berserk and killing people. Batou, the main character, has to find out who is behind all these killings. This seems to be a rather common theme in robot movies. The movie actually reminded me of Blade Runner and I, Robot (which I would guess is based more on Blade Runner than on Asimov’s work). But why does it always go like that? Why not about people killing robots? Is it because robots are non-living? But what if robots also think and feel? Or if humans can be replicated into robots? Wouldn’t that blur the fine line? These questions are pose to you during the movie as it delves into the uncanny valley and other robotics issues. It’s a bit heavy. More so than Ghost in the Shell and it would help if you have seen the first movie and have an idea of robotics, cyberpunk, and other common anime themes. In the end, there really were no answers. But I suppose those are questions we don’t need to answer at least until several more decades. Thankfully.

Rating: 4/5

No, this is not about that lame horror movie starring the misguided daughter of an ex-president :P I was just watching a feature on feng-shui on the National Geographic. I find it amazing how feng-shui is so popular. In Hong Kong they build buildings based on it. In fact, there’s a building with a hole on it to allow the dragons of the mountain behind the building to drink at the bay in front of the building. So, thoughtful of them :D And at the HSBC, they have a good luck escalator and a bad luck escalator . The good luck escalator is for employees while the bad luck escalator is for clients. The result is that the bank gets higher revenues. Very comforting thought if you’re a client, huh? :P

In another case of feng-shui strangeness, my finance professor related to use how a financial institution in Hong Kong contracted the services of feng-shui masters to predict the stock market for a certain year. The actual outcome turned out eerily like the predicted outcome. So alike that they contracted the services of the feng-shui masters to do the same for the following year. Although my professor didn’t say what the result for the following year was, he said that they expected that the actual outcome would also follow the predicted outcome. Make you wonder, though, if all those feng-shui believing traders traded, consciously or unconsciously, based on the prediction. A case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then, doesn’t superstition work that way?

Went scuba diving with Ren’s group yesterday at Aquaventure Reef Club in Anilao, Batangas. On the first two dives, the visibility was good and there were lots of fishes but the dives were pretty much uninteresting. On the third dive, things got a bit more interesting. As I opened the tank valve when I did my pre-dive check, I heard a loud hissing sound. Investigating it, I saw two or three pinprick-sized holes on the high pressure hose. Ren tried sealing with glue it but the seal won’t hold.

I was thinking of not joining them on the dive but Ren and the others told me it’s nothing to worry about. Since the leak doesn’t seem to be too great and I was assured that there’s no chance of a catastrophic hose rupture, I relented and decided to proceed with the dive. Besides, since the last dive will be shallow, there’s the option of an emergency ascent. Of course, even from a shallow dive still, it still carries the risk of bends. Funny because we were talking about whether we would choose drowning or the bends during lunch. Fortunately, nothing bad happened during the dive. I did stick close to Ren ready to grab his backup regulator if necessary. Call it a precautionary measure ;)

Back at the surface after the dive, I checked the hose again and discovered that it was no longer leaking air. My theory is that the starting tank pressure which was higher than normal– the pressure gauge read 225 bar instead of the usual 200 bar– went above the hose’s age-degraded specification and so leaked. But when the air got used up, the hose was able to handle the lower pressure. I’m not sure if it would have been able to handle the normal 200 bar but considering healthy hoses should be able to handle 300 bar, it definitely needs to be replaced before the next dive.

My Nokia 6100 is now definitely dead. The repair guy said the board has been cracked. No surviving that I guess. It was pretty saddening. The Nokia 6100 is really neat no-frills phone in a small package. Worse is I wasn’t ready to buy a new phone yet. So I put off buying a new phone for several days. Thankfully, Jem lent me his old but still functional Nokia 3530 and I used that for for the meantime while I scoured around for good deals.

The best deal I found was Globe’s zero interest installment promos for existing subscribers where you can pay for your phone via credit card for up to 18 months. Supposedly this is at no interest. Of course the base price are a bit higher than your typical side-street mobile phone vendor. But installment payment sure is hard to beat especially if you have little cash on hand.

I’ve decided beforehand that I will be getting a Sony Ericsson. My first choice was the K750i. I’ve been lusting over this phone for some time. It has good features including a serious 2 megapixel camera. Unfortunately, it’s so good that it’s out of stock in most if not all Globe Centers. Besides, it was rather expensive. My next choice was a K300i. It is a lot less expensive but is a bit too shabbily built for my liking. So I settled for the middle-ground which is the K700i.

For a phone, this basically has everything you would expect: tri-band, hands-free operation, voice commands, SMS, MMS, etc. For connectivity, there’s IR, Bluetooth, GPRS, and USB cable. The only phone feature missing is a speakerphone mode which is rather a bummer but not so much as to earn it negative points. UPDATE: It actually has a speakerphone though it’s a little bit unintuitive to activate.

On the extras side, the influence of Sony is very evident as this is essentially an entertainment phone. It has a media player that can play MP3, MP4, 3GP, and WAV files. It also a radio that uses the headset as an antenna. Both the media player and the radio can be minimized and run on the background.There’s a Java engine for some pretty neat games. There’s a VGA-resolution camera that you can also use to record videos albeit lower resolution. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have external memory card storage which would have been great for music files as the internal memory is only around 40 MB.

And the design is pretty cool too: simple lines, subtle accents, and a silver, gray, and black colored casing. It has Sony Ericsson’s dual-front design: The front of the phone is your traditional vertically-oriented display and keypad but the back of the phone is horizontally-oriented and designed to look like a camera. I actually like the overall design better than the K750i which, although shares the basic shape and design, has a charcoal colored casing.

Definitely a good deal.

Rating: 4/5

Last night, I dreamt I went to this race track. I was just accompanying someone to get a car fixed. I don’t know why we went to a race track for that. Probably because of all those high-performance mechanics there. I really don’t know. Anyway, I somehow ended up in a pit stop in full racing gear. I was just standing there when this red Citroen Xsara WRC drives in and I was pushed/shoved into the passenger side. I glanced at the driver and he was no other than Sebastien Loeb!!!

I quickly told him was that I don’t know squat about co-driving but he seemed all nonchalant and just asked me to do whatever. And he drives off the pit stop. So I went like “Left!” “Right!” “Hard left!” “Hard right!”. I sure didn’t know what I was doing but all the twists and turns sure made it fun and exciting. The race ended for us when I made a mistake calling a turn and we spinned out trying to get back on track.

It may not exactly be WRC because it was on a racetrack (and the fact that it was just a dream :P) but it was a Citroen Xsara WRC and the driver was Loeb. Sure is WRC enough for me. :))

Have you had a bad day? Don’t you just wish you can do it all over again? In this movie, Lola (Franka Potente) did just that, in fact she was able to do it three times. It started with Lola receiving a phone call. Manni, her boyfriend, had lost a bag containing 100,000 marks (it’s a german film) that he was transporting for a crime boss. If he does not deliver the money he is as good as dead. His solution is robbing a store to get replacement money. Lola has only 20 minutes to get replacement money to Manni before he proceeds with his plan. So she had to run and run and run. This is like three short movies rolled into one and the whole thing is exciting and hilarious at the same time.

Oh, and it’s got way cool techno soundtrack:

I wish I was a stranger who wanders down the sky
I wish I was a starship in silence flying by
I wish I was a princess with armies at her hand
I wish I was a ruler who’d make them understand

I wish I was writer who sees what’s yet unseen
I wish I was a prayer expressing what I mean
I wish I was a forest of trees that do not hide
I wish I was a clearing no secrets left inside

I wish I was a hunter in search of different food
I wish I was the animal which fits into that mood
I wish I was a person with unlimited breath
I wish I was a heartbeat that never comes to rest

Rating: 4/5

What is it with my stuff? They seem to be all dying! Yesterday, my Nokia 6100 gave up the ghost. It just powered down on its own. Powering it up is a hit-or-miss affair. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, it powers down again after a few minutes. Now I wouldn’t mind if the damned thing completely dies but all my contacts are on the phone and not on the SIM!!! As soon as I got home I desperately tried to power it up and was eventually able to. I quickly backed up all the data using a trial version of Oxygen Express which I had hastily downloaded.

The next day, my friend Eeya accompanied me to a phone repair shop that had fixed her phone a few weeks back. I showed them my phone and they promptly flashed it. Bye-bye data. Good thing I was able to back it up. When they’re done with flashing, the phone still didn’t work. All my data gone for no reason! Grrrr. They eventually were able to fix it while Eeya and I were eating lunch at a nearby Subway, so I don’t know what the problem was. But it damn sure is not the flash memory. I hate it when people use their favorite magic tool to fix all the world’s problems. Well at least the phone is now working.

After dropping off Eeya at her place, I rushed home and tried restoring my data only to find out that the trial version of Oxyen Express does not allow restore of back-up data! Curses!!! I tried looking for warez or cracks but it is so new there are no warez and cracks. Looks like I’m gonna have to order it online :(

UPDATE: I finally bit the bullet and ordered Oxygen Express. After a day, I got the download link and the registration details. I quickly installed it and restored my back-up. My phone is back!!! :)

Last thursday, my car’s air conditioner compressor gave up a few times. It seizes up and stalls the engine. I didn’t mind it much at first because I was just going slow and straight the first few times it happened. However, on the last stall, I was turning and since I’m on power steering, I lost all steering and my only recourse was to use the brakes in order to avoid running into the center island. Once stopped I turned off the AC and did not turn it on for the rest of the evening.

On friday, I immediately had the car checked and fixed at a highly recommended car air conditioning shop. They confirmed what I suspected: I’ll have to replace the compressor. My choice is a surplus compressor or a brand new one. The drawback of the surplus compressor is that it’s a 50-50 deal. You may get a good one or a bad one. And in the case of a good one, it usually just lasts a year or two. So I chose get a brand new Sanden SD508 compressor. Of course it has a big drawback: price. And also the belt kept squealing :(

I had also decided to finally fix my brakes as it is one of the best defenses against accidents. So on friday, I went to Cruven to have my brakes checked and fixed. Again they confirmed what I knew: my front brakes’ rotor discs were grooved and are already thin so replacement was the only option. My brake pads were also worn thing, mainly because of the grooved rotor discs. To save on labor costs, the mechanic advised me to also renovate the front shock absorbers. So I agreed. They replaced the rotor discs, replaced the brake pads with Bendix brake pads, and renovated the front shock absorbers. And I ended up with a hefty repair bill :(

But that’s not even the end of it yet. I’m planning to also get the rear brakes fixed soon. Of course, it would also make also sense to save on labor costs and renovate the rear shock absorbers at the same time. Even more expenses! Argh!

INSTALL IMAGEMAGICK
Download libwmf-0.2.8.4-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh libwmf-0.2.8.4-1.i386.rpm
Download ImageMagick-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh ImageMagick-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm

INSTALL IMAGEMAGICK-DEVEL
yum install ghost-script-devel
Download ImageMagick-devel-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh ImageMagick-devel-6.2.4-6.i386.rpm

INSTALL JMAGICK
yum install libtiff-devel
yum install libjpeg-devel
Download JMagick-6.2.4-0.tar.gz
tar xvfz JMagick-6.2.4-0.tar.gz
cd JMagick-6.2.4-0
./configure (or. ./configure –with-java-home=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.03)
make all
make test
make javadoc
vi Make.def
Find INSTALL and change the value to /root/JMagick-6.2.4-0/install-sh
make install

To use JMagick, libJMagick.so must be in a directory where the runtime loader can find it or you must set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH. jmagick.jar must be in your Java class path.