I watched Spider-Man 3 with my girlfriend today. She watched the cartoon Spider-Man before and I’m just someone who so happened to have checked out Spider-Man 1 and 2 before. I let her watched Spider-Man 2 before she watched Spider-Man 3. She enjoyed both of the films and cited the action and effects as the main attraction in the film.
What made Spider-Man 3 different from its predesesors is that this time they have 2 instead of just one enemy. It makes things a lot of interesting. The whole romance between Mary-Jane and Peter Parker reaches a new low, I am starting to get sick of their romance honestly. In the middle of the movie, I secretly wished Peter Parker is gay or something and just get one with the bloody plot.
_(Venom in Spider-Man 3.)_
Spider-Man 3 has fast-paced actions and a rather slow movie plot. Either that or I was unable to savor the beautiful plot slowly. I love the graphics and sound, but the movie moves too slow for me. I’ll give it a 3.5/5.
Oh by the way, Spider-Man 3 broke all time weekend gross record at $148 million.
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My brother and my cousin spent like 5 hours queueing for donuts. What? For those freaking donuts, I would have just settled with Jollibean snacks. The queue is so long and they met a couple of mean people. They got too impatient and start making a fuss around. Not exactly the shopping experience you would expect in Raffles City, not the experience you would expect on Easter Day too.
And they brought all the donuts home and I tried a few. They’re nice but then… Well, I guess I’m not too into donuts. I don’t find them particularly special. (Yes, I followed the instruction to microwave them for 8 seconds.)
Oh no, the donuts are half eaten before I can take a picture of them! The others seemed to appreciate the donuts. (Oh man, I think I microwave 10 seconds, I knew it - must be the 2 second difference!)
The donuts are good, but not worth queueing for 5 hours. The longer people queue, the more they would buy to increase the ‘worth’ of their purchase. Maybe one day, I would too open a donut shop. Any name suggestions? I was thinking of something original like iDonut, Donut King (just afraid of the Donkey Kong association), McDonut and Donut 360. Other suggestions welcomed too.
Okay - 4/5 happy? I would queue for it still though. Haha!
[By the way, something unfortunate happened. One of the boxes got invaded by this donut-loving lizard. My mum threw away the box, much to my brother's dismay.]
Taiwanese drama Hua Yang Shao Nian Shao Nu (花样少年少女) is based on Hisaya Nakajo’s Hanazakari no Kimitachi e (花ざかりの君たちへ イケメン♂パラダイス, For You in Full Blossoms or Hana-kimi). I picked it up after I see the box lying around. And once I start watching it, I just couldn’t really stop. I took me about 16 hours to finish the whole series. Well, the story goes this way.
Lu Rui Xi 盧瑞希 (Ella Chen) lives in America and falls in love with high jumper Zuo Yi Quan 左以泉 (Wu Zun) she saw on television in a news segment. Determined to meet the man in the television, Rui Xi went on a strict diet regime and flew all the way to Taiwan and enrol herself in the same school as Yi Quan (AKA Quan).
It is an all-male school. Yeah, she blended in by disguising herself as a boy.
Rui Xi met the slightly off-frequency and comical Jin Xiu Yi 金秀伊 (Jiro Wang) who eventually got fiercely attracted to Rui Xi and starts to doubt his sexuality.
Of course, Rui Xi falls in love with Quan. (more…)
I just watched Little Miss Sunshine, about a little girl named Olive’s (image below) trip to the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant.
Her dysfunctional family includes her mother who’s often stressed up, her father who’s a failed motivational speaker, her gay uncle Frank, her silent brother Dwayne and her heroin-addict grandfather.
Her family travels to California to participate in the beauty pageant.
Unfortunately, their vehicle broke down and they all had to get down to push it.
There are down moments during the trip. The family stood by each other making it an enjoyable and touching film to watch.
Little Miss Sunshine has a simple and beautiful plot, good dialouges and acting. The film also won 2 Academy Awards - Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Alan Arkin. I think it deserves 4 out of 5 stars. It’s certainly a nice break from watching action films.
[Another milestone - //beconfused just hit the 1,200 posts mark. Very nice.]
I am always slow in adopting web applications because they’re such a pain to upload and upgrade. It’s not like your usual computer applications where you just click and it’ll install and upgrade; you’ve got to be careful not to overwrite your files when upgrading.
But when WordPress 2.1 is officially released, I upgraded it within an hour. There are some admin interface upgrades, it now has a more Ajaxy interface and seems to load faster than before.
What that makes me really happy is how easy uploading images actually gotten. I organized my images files in /images/2007/01/image.jpg manually in the past. I upload it with an FTP client (Filezilla) and link it manually. The builtin image uploading tool makes blogging so much more enjoyable for me.
The Users page is updated too, it is currently still a little buggy but I can live with it. I can add users easily. It’s very useful for a multiuser web site. The other feature that I really like is how links can now be assigned categories. Categories are not just for posts now.
Version 2.1 also introduce privacy options which would be helpful for people who don’t wish their friends find their blog. It tells the search engine not to index. I don’t really use that feature but it’s still worth a mention.
My only wish is that tags can be supported in WordPress together with categories. Most of my plugins still work in WordPress 2.1.
I don’t face any problems after the upgrade. But I did do my usual back ups before attempting to upgrade, you should too. Now, WordPress 2.1 is powering this blog nicely.
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Still running well with more than a thousand posts in the database. 
This movie seems interesting so I decided to watch it with my girlfriend. She hates it. I mean, she likes it, she hates the monsters. She couldn’t sleep at night because of this creature with eyes on its hands.
_(Poster for Pan’s Labyrinth.)_
Pan’s Labyrinth is the work of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. Set after the Spanish civil war in 1944, it’s an adult fairy tale of a girl who kinda lives in her own imaginative world. She believes in fairies and a faun tells her that she is a princess and she has to complete several tasks before she can become one. Her fantasy world and the reality contrasted a lot.
It’s a beautiful film but perhaps a little overhyped due to their Golden Palm win at Cannes which received a 22 minutes applause. I mean I never even clapped for more than a minute; my hands would be so tired clapping for twenty two. It’s nominated for a Golden Globe.
I rate it 4/5. It’s good and has this artsy feeling. And there is a lot of debate going on after the film. I keep thinking about the film and trying to link things up after watching the film. I think I’ll have to watch the film a couple of times more to further understand the plot.
That’s about all I can tell you though without revealing spoilers.
It’s raining a little too much for my liking. I was out yesterday and my shoes got a little damn. I like the after effects of rain (the cooling part as opposed to the flood part).
In the end, it is best to just stay home and do some work. I’ve been helping out with some web design thing and I just completed it. It was quite tiring for me editing Blogger layouts all of a sudden. I had a lot of things to learn and it’s just so confusing designing a theme around their widgets and stuff.
Blogger’s widgets are a great improvement, I love the new labels thingy that they provided too. Labels are basically like tags and Blogger done them right. You just have the type a few letters of the tag and you’ll see a Javascript hint at the bottom for a tag that you have already. My problem with WordPress is I accidentally created new categories like ‘Photo’ when I already have a category called ‘Photograph’ - that sort of thing. So Blogger’s labels are really neat as you won’t be making such silly mistakes. My only complaint about tags is that it lacks a method to manage your tags, you can’t really change your tag names all at a go. There are still quite a lot of limitations.
Widgets certainly gives the blog owner more power to change the theme and you can add your favorite lists and even customized HTML and Javascript easily. I love how they implemented it. Blogger has limited widgets currently. And designing for widgets is quite a horror initially. It isn’t very flexible for the theme designer.
Perhaps I’ll have an easier time in the next Blogger layout. But meanwhile, let me just take a break and rest for a couple of days. My gums are kinda bothering me. It felt uncomfortable with the stitches.
And for those Blogger users who has yet to upgrade to the new out-of-beta Blogger - it’s worth doing so for the widgets and labels. Theme design is harder, you’ll need decent knowledge of CSS if you want to manipulate the looks of widgets especially.