Archive for October, 2008
Pugad Baboy at 20
My cousin Mark came back from his vacation and at my request brought me back a copy of Pugad Baboy XX. Imagine that, my favorite pinoy comic strip is already 20 years old and still, whenever I read its previous books, I still roll on the floor laughing (ok, that’s an exagerration…). Back in the Philippines, I have my collection of Pugad Baboy Comic Books and I know this latest installment would not be different and would successfully put a smile in my face.
Bought a Canon at GITEX
Finally was able to go to GITEX Shopper at the Dubai Airport Expo. It is the largest annual technology retail event here in Dubai. It offers the best in technology products in the market. When I arrived there I felt like I have to restrain myself in order not to buy so much. I missed last year’s GITEX due to my schedule at work that’s why I tried my best to make it this year. There was so much to buy that I was left drooling at all the gadgets all around me. I was just thankful that I have already done my electronics shopping before my vacation last year that I only went there to buy one gadget. I left my Sony Cybershot DSC T200 digicam in the Philippines so I was just left with my Canon EOS 400D SLR camera. Although it captures beautiful pictures it is still so big to carry around everyday. So I thought I needed another quick snapper. I decided to buy a Canon Digital Ixus 80 IS. Relying on my experience in using my Canon SLR, I opted to get another Canon, and I was not disappointed. Although the Ixus I got was not the top of the line of the Canon digicams, I could still say it produces high quality pics that would make other cameras running behind it.
See here for some of my pics taken at GITEX using my Canon snapper.
New Line of MacBooks Introduced
Just visited Apple‘s site and found out that they have recently released their new line of MacBooks.
Gone is the 17-inch version, the new line now features a 13-inch MacBook and a 15-inch MacBook Pro. The easily noticeable change is the LED-backlit display which now has a glossy, black border. I think they got this inspiration from the iMac. Also, new are the black buttons of the keyboard first introduced and seen in the MacBook Air. The Macbook is now also in an aluminum casing (goodbye to the Black and White versions!) just like the Pro but both got a little rounder at the bottom. Another upgrade is the NVIDIA GeForce graphics card which is now 5x faster than the previous version and the new smooth glass multi-touch trackpad that is bigger and is now also clickable (there’s no more button, it IS the button!).
These eye-dropping, drooling machines are now full packed with features but they are also heavy on the wallet. The MacBook starts at $1299 and MacBook Pro starts at $1999. Wow…
My MacBook Pro is not even a year old, and now this. Curse you Steve…
The Fire Switch
I saw this near our office elevator. It is supposed to be a fire ALARM switch. So, if I want fire, I’ll just turn the switch on? Hehehe…
My Two Birthday Parties
My birthday turned out to be a good one because of the two parties I had. First is at our flat here in Sharjah where I invited some of my close friends for a lunch treat. I asked my Ate Kate to cook some of my favorite foods and me and my friends savoured the Kare-Kare, Rellenong Pusit, Barbeque, Shrimps, etc. The second one transpired at our office the next day where my office mates gave me a treat and had the traditional cake cutting that we usually do whenever there is someone celebrating a birthday. Below are some of the pics take from the two parties:
My 29th Year
Wow, I just turned 29 a couple of minutes ago. That was fast. I didn’t even notice it. Tanda ko na pala, malapit nang mawala sa kalendaryo…
As I look back at the 29 years of my existence, I can’t help but ponder on the things that happened in my life. What am I today? Did I even make a difference? I went here to Dubai two years ago eventhough back then I really didn’t like to. I was kind of hesitant. I love my job back in the Philippines though I know with the work I was doing I was not properly compensated. I like Makati very much. I just love that city, everything is there: work + fun, and more. My family is there. In short, everything important and dear to me is there, right at my finger tips. The Philippines is my comfort zone and going abroad was never my option. I always have promised myself that if I would be successful professionally, it would be there back home. But I guess it wasn’t meant to be.
Circumstances out of my control pushed me to leave everything behind and come here. I felt very bad then. It is as if I left more than half of myself at the airport when I boarded the plane. Many thought that going to another country would instantly turn your life around. But that is not true. Life here was not that easy too. It took me almost four months, a trip to Kish Island, tons of resumes emailed and hundreds of Internet hours before I found a decent paying job. After that everything started to change. i was able to help my family, and most importantly myself, financially. Before, I was only earning a meager amount of money just enough for myself, sometimes not even enough. I wasn’t able to contribute or share to any of our expenses at home. But now, at least, I can say I was able to provide for my loved ones.
Although I know they are safe and living comfortably, still it wasn’t enough for me. I miss them so much that I often think of going back home. I have already spent two birthdays here in the UAE and both of it was never a happy birthday. How could it be? Occasions like this should be celebrated with your loved ones. But because I am here, I just have to settle for conversations over the Internet, seeing them greet me over the webcam, hear them sing for me over the speakers. My friends even stayed up very late just to greet me and show me the cake they prepared and blowed the candle for me… How lonely can you be? I miss the hugs and kisses, the moments together, the laughs, everything…
I guess that’s life, maybe you just can’t have everything.
I turned 29 today and I don’t know how many birthdays more will come that I have to celebrate alone. All I know is I have to be strong and endure the loneliness and emptiness I’m feeling right now, for me and for my loved ones…
Capsule TV Show Reviews: Prison Break, Heroes, Smallville
The show’s 4th season premiere has set an intense pace where the action was taken from Panama, where the last season ended, and taking the new season in Los Angeles. Here, Michael (Wentworth Miller) cornered the trio of Gretchen (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe), Whistler (Chris Vance) and Mahone (William Fichtner). But, as he is going to exact revenge, they revealed to him that Sarah (Sarah Wayne Callies) is still alive and that they needed his help to bring down The Company.
The series, as it appears on the the first episodes, revolves on retrieving Scylla, the so-called “black book” of The Company, taking all of the characters to work together in doing so. Needless to say, there are many things going on and it is made in typical Prison Break style where viewers are left breathless with every new twist and turn in the story. But the truth is the concept of the show has been stretched so far from the original series. The story lines were expanded to lengths in a bid to keep us viewers captivated. It’s entertaining, really, and that’s the only thing that’s keeping me to watch this show’s last season.
For me, the show should have ended in Season 3. Each of the characters were given a sort of poetic endings: Michael driving away with a gun and origami, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) reuniting with his kidnapped son, Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) sacrificing his freedom for a friend and T-Bag (Robert Knepper) becoming the “King of the Jungle”. I know it didn’t answer questions about the company and its conspirators, but at least it has given a closure to its characters.
Season 4 is too implausible for me to enjoy. It’s fiction I know, but i just hoped that it should have at least met the expectations of its dedicated audience. I would say the 4th season is more like a spin off of the original Prison Break and not the continuation of the series.
The final episode of the 2nd season had a bang of a finish. It was very much of a cliffhanger that I was left asking for more. As I hoped, the momentum was carried on to Season 3. I was very excited on the season’s premiere and watched the succeeding episodes. Tim Kring has accelerated the pacing of the story that in a few episodes time, so much has happened. There were so many revelations that it still keeps up to have that “wow factor” in it.
Since then, we’ve met yet more super-powered characters (despite creator Tim Kring stating there would be no new characters this season) including a female version of The Flash, a guy who gains super-strength from people’s fear, Nikki’s (Ali Larter) twin who has a freeze power. And of course we have Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy) turning into the TV version of David Cronenberg’s The Fly.
We also have two versions of Peter (well, we’re back down to one), Sylar (ok, Gabriel) partnered with Noah Bennet aka “HRG” (Jack Coleman) as well as discovering our skull-slicing pal is the brother of Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) and Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar). Then we have future Claire “saving me didn’t save the world” Bennet (Hayden Panettiere) all decked out in black leather and acting like a bad-ass assassin. Oh, and now Peter has Sylar’s power and slices skulls, too! Of course Hiro and Ando are still flailing about like a couple of Keystone Cops.
The only issue I have in the Heroes plot is the presence of time-travelling and cannot-be-killed characters at the same time. I have always assumed that Heroes is based in a comicbook guy’s point of view and of the comics genre where heroes are presented a problem and they solve the problem during the whole course of the story. I was wrong. With these characters present, the story could just revolve in going back in time, defying logic and changing the rules of the story. I just hope this going-to-be-boring type of plot will not hurl the very good start of the show.
Less Lana and Lex, my most anticipated 8th season of Smallville finally pushed through. The season premiere opens in a makeshift camp in the Arctic set up by LutherCorp in order to find Lex (Michael Rosenbaum). We soon meet a woman who is destined to take the place of Lex on the show as the manipulative baddie: Tess Mercer (played by Cassidy Freeman). Clark (Tom Welling), on the otherhand, ended up in Russia, without his powers, and is being held captive as slave labor. He tries to escape but was no match for a bunch of armed men. In a spun of the moment, Oliver Queen showed up, fakes a fistfight with Clark and figures a way to get him out of there.
Meanwhile Chloe (Allison Mack) decides to help her captors, by decoding an encoded satellite transmission, pulling out cell phone numbers. When she gets to the third one, she recognizes it as Oliver Queen’s and refuses to help further (and figures out this isn’t the government). Clark is determined to rescue Chloe, powers or not so he and Queen head to the facility in Montana (where Aquaman and Black Canary are being held after Chloe helped track them down). It turns out that the “control” aspect of the Veritas device that was so much the focus of last season was that it would just remove Clark’s super-powers, not turn him into some super-automaton.
Queen was dosed with a drug that makes him obey commands. He was told to look for Lex and immediately confronted Clark. He shot him just above the heart with an arrow as a warning. When Clark says he doesn’t know where Lex is he is shot straight through the heart. Clark saw his life flash before his eyes: His mom and dad, Lana, the farm, etc. Just as he fades, Martian Manhunter shows up out of nowhere and whisks Clark into space, towards the healing power (for Clark) of the Sun.
After his near death experience, Clark decided that it’s time to leave the farm behind – so at long last, we do seem to finally be moving towards the Superman mythos we know and love. Overall I’d say this season is starting off as a vast improvement over last season, and the ending actually left me with a sense that just maybe we’ll be blessed by having less soap opera-like crap on the show. I really don’t have much to nitpick about this episode that I haven’t already mentioned, and considering my critical eye towards Smallville, that’s really saying something.
My only real concern at this point revolves around the fact that they must put some closure on the Lex/Clark situation: Lex is missing but we know he’s not dead – and he finally knows about Clark’s powers. I’m hoping this final season opener was not a fluke and the show holds up to a better standard of quality than it has recently. I’m actually looking forward to watching it this season with a little bit of excitement and anticipation.
iPhone 3G Sold Unlocked in Hong Kong
Apple has finally decided to sell unlocked iPhone 3Gs, in Hong Kong. This has given consumers there the freedom to choose whatever carrier they would like to use.
The decision was totally in contrast to the exclusivity policy practiced by Apple in many countries. We all know that unlocked iPhones are openly sold in every part of the world. But surprisingly, the Cupertino-based company didn’t even make a move to even stop it.
Being unlocked comes with a price, a hefty price that is. The 8GB version is available for about $695 (5,400 Hong Kong dollars), while the 16GB iPhone costs about $798 (6,200 HK dollars), according to Apple’s site.
The “iPhone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier,” the site states. “Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation.”
I wish the same scenario happens here in the UAE. Since the government here and Etisalat, the national carrier, are against to so called anti-competitive practices (as if Etisalat has a competition here. Du, which is supposed to be a “competition”, turns out to be majority owned by Etisalat…) and does not agree to Apple’s one carrier policy.
Plurking Around
I joined Plurk last July while doing some social community hopping on the net. I never intended to actually be active on the site, maybe because at that time I still didn’t know how would these micro-blogging services benefit me. I was quite disappointed with Twitter, so hearing that Plurk is just another like it made me a little skeptical about using it.
When I came back to Plurk this September, I was surprised on how fast it grew in terms of members. I saw how interactive the site can be. I got hooked.
For those who haven’t heard about Plurk, it is a service hat allows you to post updates letting people know what you’re up to. You know, telling everyone you’re brushing your teeth, or eating donuts, or trying to break the world record on pizza eating whilst standing on your head.
Well, I know you must say “again, just like Twitter.” But the thing is it is not. Here’s what makes it stand out: No character restrictions. More elegant display of your “timeline”, with AJAX drag and drop capability. Pre-set emoticons and prefixes such as “was, is, will.” Still some might say that these are basic stuffs. Wait, actually there’s still more. Karma Points and Cliques.
Karma Points is a measure of how active you and your Plurk friends are on the site. The more active you use the site’s services, the more points you’ll gain. And as your Karma shoots up, more additional services will be available for you. Some might comment that why do you have to limit a user with basic features at first rather than making all the features readily available upon registering, just like Twitter. This strategy might woo away users, but for me, I really like this feature. At least, if you really want to be involved in a community, you should contribute actively. Just think of it as a reward for being an active member of the site.
Another feature that I really like is Cliques. It’s the ability to group your friends together into categories that you choose. Most sites really do this, but with Plurk, the possibilities are endless. Think of being able to send updates to very unique groups of people. Family, friends, possible investors or colleagues. You could spend an infinite amount of time shuffling your cliques based on what’s happening around you.
The only thing about Plurk is it requires your full attention, it is a site where you communicate with others in threads of conversations, whereas in Twitter it’s just a place to share things, you can work alongside with it and your tasks. But still, Plurk is a great place to spend time if you have free time (or scheduled time for Plurking), but it doesn’t seem to be designed as a service that will work with other tasks.
So, what am i choosing? I’m choosing both. For me, they aren’t the same. They’re two different services and I want to be engaged on both.
P.S. One more thing I love about Plurk is it lets me talk to myself. How? By the use of prefixes, it allows you to talk in the third person. Isn’t it just cool to talk to yourself?
Eid at Khor Fakkan
My cousins and I have been planning an out of town trip for several months now, and the end of Ramadan has provided us the perfect opportunity to do so. “Eid al-Adha” as Muslims call it, for expats like me and my cousins, it’s just another holiday when we can take a break from work and relax. We decided to go to Khor Fakkan Beach. It’s actually still a part of Sharjah, but in order to reach the place you have to pass through Fujairah. Going there, we passed by Friday Market for a pit stop. We bought fruits and ate some corns-on-a-cob.
Along the way we also saw the oldest mosque in the UAE, and of course we stopped and posed for a few pics.
And because it is a holiday, the open beach is, as expected, full of people. We did some barbeque-ing and swam until we got fried up by the blistering sun.
Going home, I had a very good view of Fujairah’s mountains before sundown. It was a breathtaking view.
Generally, we had fun and are looking forward for another holiday.