Quickies

Quick update today...Steve Irwin - The Crocodile Hunter passed away after being stung by a stingray.

Click here to view Jay Leno's tribute to the man himself.

http://flixya.com/jay-leno-tribute-to-crocodile-hunter

Manchester United

Click here to see the goals scored so far.

I know its early days, and I know the wins were against Fulham and Charlton, not exactly the cream of the EPL. Still, the team played some real breath taking football over these two games. Every player on the pitch played their hearts out and produced some exhilirating football that had been all too absent for the past two seasons.

Far too often the press has been quick to jump on any crisis in Manchester United, this season proved no different. No Keane, no Van Nistelrooy, no big name signings means major crisis for Manchester United. I guess Sir Alex had other ideas!

It may not last, but I'm sure as heck going to enjoy it while it lasts!

PS to top it off, Solskjaer scored in the mid-week 3-0 at Charlton! Class!

Manchester United 5 - 1 Fulham & Charlton 0 -3 Manchester United

Breathtaking start to the season! 2 wins and 8 goals! Great performance all around from the team!

More to follow.

Anti-Telemarketing Script

This is ace! Will make sure to use this the next time!

"Telemarketers make use of a telescript - a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance."

Read it here!

we won

We won dammit! 5 - 1!!! Take that you doom mongers and naysayers!!

Crap...still feeling crappy on a Monday but still feeling a buzz from the 5-1 win over Fulham yesterday.

More to follow.

Superman Returns - a rant of sorts

I like movies and I like comic books. So naturally, when you put these two things together it gets me all mixed up in a strange mixture of anticipation and trepidition. On one hand, its always cool to be able to see comic books brought to life on the big screen with the eye-popping effects and some creative re-imagination, but on the other, you just hope the people behind don't mess up big time. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not some die-hard fanboy who goes on and on about organic web shooters and Hugh Jackman being too tall to be Wolverine, I just want to see an honest to goodness movie adaptation that hits all the high notes.

Safe to say, its been a good ride the past few years. Wesley Snipes as Blade kicked vampire ass in the Blade series. Hellboy was an excellent introduction to somewhat obscure character. Bryan Singer went against the odds and brought our merry mutants to the big screen with X-Men. While creating a world that's wildly different from the comics, he's managed to ground the X-Men in its core essense which make them what they are. Ditto Sam Raimi with Spider-Man, his Spider-Man series is probably (in my opinion) the best series in this genre by far. Chris Nolan did a pretty good job with his Batman: Year One-esque Batman Begins, which went a long way to exorcise the horrible memory that is Batman & Robin. Heck, I even thought Daredevil and The Punisher weren't too bad. Which brings me to Bryan Singer's Superman.

Now, I'm not a huge Superman fan, but then this is Superman, the precursor of all spandex-clad superheroes. And it's Bryan Singer, the hip director who dished out The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men movies. So it's got to be good right? Unfortunately, it was not to be.

I can't exactly put my finger on it, but Superman Returns just didn't click for me. I'm not sure whether it's because Supes spent three-quarters of the movie looking like a sad, lost puppy or Kevin Spacey was totally wasted in a flat role as Lex Luthor. It just. didn't. work. I think Bryan Singer's idea of making this a sequel of sorts to the first two Superman movies didn't help things either. Start with a clean slate, making it a sort-of sequel probably weighs down the movie unnecessarily.

And make Superman smart! Like genius smart, after all this is Super-friggin'-man we're talking about! This is supposedly a Superman with years of experience under his belt, who's faced down Lex Luthor numerous times, but yet he allows himself to fly into yet another trap! And worse, gets an ass kicking from Luthor's goons. Potray him as a boy scout but don't make him a dumb schmoe, dammit! On that note, make Clark less dopey too. Maybe I'm used to how Clark was potrayed in Lois & Clark and SmallVille, but dopey-Clark just doesn't cut it.

And Luthor's plot...oh where do I begin?! All this fancy, new fangled, Kryptonian tech at his disposal and he chooses to do what?! A real-estate scheme?! Get a real scheme, Luthor. Oh and by the way, when you pick a girlfriend, look for some stone-cold, hard as nails bitch not some soft, poodle-lovin' bimbo. Someone get him Magneto's number!

OK, rant over...sort of. Guess I felt that they could have done a better job at reviving this series. As it is, it's not terrible but it ain't terrific either. Hopefully the sequel's better...way better.

Edit: OK, there is one thing I really like in the movie. The score. That iconic Superman theme by John Williams is simply awesome.

Quotes

This appeared on my Quote of the Day block on my Google homepage

"I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake, I'd think, no, actually I'ma giraffe."
- Richard Gere

Try as I might, I actually have no idea what he is going on about. I reckon he should probably use that platinum card of his to check himself into a hospital instead of buying up pigeons.

Talking to Americans

I'm feeling a bit lazy to post new stuff today so I'll just post up some links to some funny YouTube videos. Excerpts from a Canadian comedy programme "Talking to American". Basically, its a comedian pretending to be a newsman going around America to well...talk to Americans and take the mickey out of them!

So yeah, we all like to laugh and make fun of Americans. Face it, their pretty much the only people that we can make fun of in these politically correct days. Even Hollywood prefers to have their villains be rich, fat, balding white men in three-piece suits!

So anyway, on to the videos...that bit about the national igloo cracked me up!

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

New Digs

whoa hello people, moved the blog to new digs at Blogger. Some spiffy new interfaces in the admin pages. Shiny!

Left-handed coolness

Left handed are not only cool, intelligent, and creative. We are now supposedly better paid!

According to a recent report, "Left-handed men with at least some college education earned15 percent more than similarly educated right-handers, while those who finished college earned about 26 percent more".

Reuters article here

Birthdays

my, my what a strange lot...

What do the following people have in common?

• Anwar Ibrahim
• Devon Aoki
• Natsumi Abe
• Antonio Banderas
• Roy Keane

They all share the same birthday, 10 August.

Happy Birthday!

Thermite v Liquid Nitrogen

Ever wondered what happens when the 3,000 degrees of thermite meets -198 degrees of liquid nitrogen?

Wonder no more...watch this clip

US Army Recruitment Ads

Apparently the United States Army is having some problems filling in its quota. As such some rules have been relaxed to ensure a steady supply of soldiers. Apparently, there's also an idea floating around to set up a recruitment office in India!

Not only is America outsourcing its jobs to India, it may start outsourcing its fighting men (and women) soon!

Reuters Withdraw Doctored Photo

Yesterday, Reuters withdrew all pictures submitted by a freelance Lebanese photgrapher after it was proven that he had altered two pictures of the conflict between Isreal and Hizballah.

The image that Reuters originally ran:

and the original image:

Take note too that The Star ran this picture in the article "Israel creates more enemies" in the Global Trends section by Martin Khor. Let's see if there is a correction issued in the next few days.

Read how it was done here

Countdown to EPL

Just a couple of weeks more to the start of the 2006/07 season of the English Premier League. Manchester United's signed Michael Carrick and Fergie hints that he is expecting at least one more player, possibly two within the fortnight. Interesting times indeed at Old Trafford.

Updates

Wow! Time flies, and its been almost 3 months since my last post. Lots have happened since then...new petrol prices, Ninth Malaysia Plan, Milosevic bites the dust, Manchester United closing the gap with Chelsea to within seven points.

Let's hope I'll have some time to update this space this coming weekend.

Sees ya

Personalize your Google homepage

I'm not sure when this was launched by Google, since they have a tendency to sneak up on the unsuspecting public and drop new products and services on our laps, but I have been using this for quite some time and I must say it is very useful.

You can actually personalize your Google home page. So instead of getting a plain vanilla Google page with the search box, you add "portlets" onto your page, available portlets are newfeeds from most major media new outlets, Gmail. Recently, Google has even released an API so keen programmers can also create their own little portlets or widgets.

How do you do it? Well, first get a Google account and to go to http://www.google.com/ig. Then just sign in and add the content that you want. Easy!

If you don't have a Gmail account and if you want one, drop me an email at ynchan at gmail dot com

2005 Year in Review: Java Technology

First off, I have to admit that I have a certain soft spot in my heart for Java technology . Its most likely due to Java being THE programming language that I embraced back in my university days, and it was probably the only one I could readily grasp. I was hopeless in Visual Basic and barely survived C. Of course, having Michael Kölling (@ Mik) as our Java lecturer helped heaps! *Shameless plug: Mik created BlueJ, an IDE tool for teaching of Java. I still reckon its the best and coolest. End plug*

So yes, Java is very much what I've been involved in but unfortunately, I've been falling a bit behind on the technology and try as I might to read and keep up with what's going on, its just not the same as getting my hands dirty. Be that as it may, I'll try to highlight some events in the Java ecosystem which stood out in 2005.

Spring and Hibernate
In the absence of any major release of Java APIs from Sun, I reckon that the open source projects Spring and Hibernate drew the most attention. Spring started out as a lightweight IoC container. Now, there are several other sub-project "springing" up, including Spring Web Flow, which looks promising. Java application server big boy, BEA, has even embraced Spring and have committed to support Spring based applications. In fact, there are lots of articles on BEA dev2dev with regards to Spring and other open source projects. Hibernate adoption continues to climb in 2005 and I think 2006 will be no different. In fact, the combination of Spring-Hibernate J2EE applications is probably the most popular now.

Eclipse
Eclipse continues to remain as the most popular Java IDE of choice. Most recently Eclipse has released WebTools Project (WTP) plugin for developing Web-based J2EE applications. There are several other promising projects and plugins such Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools (BIRT) plugin in the pipeline. BEA has also announced that the next version of its IDE, WebLogic Workshop will be built on the Eclipse framework. Having said that, Sun has released several version of its IDE, Java Studio Creator and Java Studio Enterprise, that rivals Eclipse. All in all, this competition can only be good for the industry as a whole.

AJAX
OK, not strictly Java, but AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is one of the technology highlights of 2005. As the name suggest, it is a combination of JavaScript and XML. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but really an innovative way of combining several existing technologies and changing the way the Web application works.

What's in store?
Major releases of Java SE, codenamed Mustang, and Java EE are expected in 2006. Yes, you read right. Sun is re-branding the Java platform. The three different editions of Java will be known as Java SE, Java EE and Java ME.

2006 is upon us!

Wow...before you even realise it, 2005 is no more and 2006 is here! What a year its been! In the world of technology, innovations has continued to thrive in the Java ecosystem, Apple continues to astound with the iPod product family.

In english football, Chelsea continues to steamroll opponents (and bore us to tears) with their brand of 'effective' football, while Manchester United after some missteps seem to pick up some momentum. On the local sporting front, Nicol David was crowned world no. 1 in squash.

Many events have shaken the world in 2005, from wars to assasinations to debt relief for Africa.

And of course, here in Malaysia, we've had scandals, haze problems, and university foul ups!

Once I consolidate my thoughts, I'll get around to putting in a Year in Review of sorts and hopefully get to post some pictures from India.

Till then Happy 2006.