Into The Wild

Technorati Tags: adventure,alaska,biography,chris mccandless,drama,emile hirsch,fred,into the wild,movie

No, I am not in the wild while I am blogging this. It's the title of a movie that I just recently watched. How do you watch a movie completely from the start till the end in a shorter amount of time even though the movie is really boring? I did. When the movie gets boring, hit the fast forward button so long as you could hear the audio. Yes, it's going to be like Fred on YouTube or The Chipmunks but guess what, the boring movie becomes funnier to watch and yet you'd finish the movie off without missing any part.

Back to the wild - so this movie somehow reminds me of Cast Away which was starred by Tom Hanks. It has plenty of that tranquility or serene atmosphere where the whole screen is mainly acted by one person. Into The Wild is not for you if you're seeking full fledge action movie. In short, Emile Hirsch who acted as Chris McCandless gave up his savings to a charity and embarked on a journey to Alaska into the wild to experience what life has to offer and to seek himself, away from social norm and complexities.

In my opinion, the good thing about this movie lies in the relationship Chris made when he met with a number of people while he was on the way to Alaska. That and also the breath taking scenery. Kudos to the film makers. The movie was released in 2007, yes that was like 2 years back but if you haven't watch it then go ahead. Into The Wild falls into the adventure, biography and drama genre. My rating: 4/5 stars.

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Ramadhan and my Omnirax Clone

Technorati Tags: fasting month,krk rp5,omnirax,ramadhan,workstation furniture

Ramadhan has always been one of my favorite month of the year. What more could you ask when all the bad guys whispering and luring you to your evil thoughts and intentions are kept imprisoned for 30 days? Wouldn't it be nice if they get locked forever? Yes, but the game of life won't be that fun anymore, though I lost most of the times. I'm not preaching, just a thought to embrace the arrival of the holy month.

I finally got myself a custom made desktop workstation furniture and now waiting for the arrival of my little KRK RP5 friend. That might be on Monday or Tuesday. I hope so. Probably would put up a picture of them together when everyone's here. I knew I had to do something with the positioning of my keyboard and music gears all this while. Now it seems neater and easier to work about. The custom made table is actually a modified copy of the Omnirax Force 12 Professional Workstation (image above) and I'm glad it didn't cost me a bomb. I am just loving it as of now. Yay!

I just realized I got a weird hobby of collecting dust and junks. Do you? Or am I the only freak here? Haha. Took almost the whole afternoon to clean up and reorganize my room in order to get the space ready for the Omnirax clone to be assembled. The result is an awful body ache but I am satisfied with my current bedroom studio setup which is workable for pre-production tasks. Still feeling tired and I need a good massage soon. Sigh!

I have done music creation at work while fasting before. It didn't work quite well. It gets tiring very fast after repetitive listening. Hope to be able to write some stuff at night then. Anyone can share me some soundproofing tips?

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One Fat Day...

Technorati Tags: calories,chicken,fat,food,Kevin James,KFC,Secret Recipe

"You're fat and I'm fat. See you in the kitchen in 10 minutes!" that was what Kevin James said to his wife in one of his routines for his stand up comedy shows. One of them in particular is "Sweat The Small Stuff" of which you could have seen before. Awesome comedian!

Speaking of fat, today is one hell of a fattening day for me. Not because that I am not supposed to be eating during the fasting month that I should eat till I die today. Suffice to say that I was just going with the flow. Don't get me wrong, I don't eat what I had today regularly. It's really a once in a while thing for me and I'm not an all that food and health conscious person. Two hundred pounds and go figure.

At least breakfast wasn't that bad. Had a bowl of rice porridge, half of a boiled egg and some fried anchovies to go along with it. Nutritional facts can wait, you do the math for that and for the coming menus. Breakfast was pretty much like a late one and just like three hours after that, lunch was waiting.

So I went out and had lunch with one of my buddies at Secret Recipe. There came a Chicken Chop with Mushroom sauce / gravy, rice and salads with a soft drink for the main course. No appetizers needed and the simple menu ended with a slice of Chocolate Indulgence cake for desert. I swear the slice of cake itself could have stuffed me for lunch.

Back home after going here and there, accompanying my buddy doing his errands and I am still stuffed that I could last a few more hours without feeling hungry. What's next? A Zinger burger and fried chicken from KFC. To make matters worse, I ate those in less than three hours after I got back while still feeling full.

For once in a blue moon, still that is considered too much to consume. But I don't eat like this everyday. So I guess it should be alright. I get that Supersize Me stuff playing in my head as of now. Where's that weighing scale?

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The Future of Music

Technorati Tags: the future of music,manifesto for the digital music revolution,music book,music reading,david kusek,gerd leonhard

Recently I just finished reading a book titled "The Future of Music - Manifesto For The Digital Music Revolution" authored by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard. I am not really that much of a bookworm but I do read stuff that interests me, sometimes. I am not really that active in songwriting in regards to the local music industry so I reckoned this book is a good read to assess what's going on with the music industry both locally and globally.

To my surprise, it was rather painful to accept the points and facts mentioned and elaborated by the authors. The real issue of illegal music download seemed to affect the "recording industry" more rather than the "music industry" in terms of sales. It has affect the mechanical royalties for artistes and songwriters too but the one mostly at stake is the record and music publishing industry. Artistes survived or actually earned more from ticket sales of live shows / performances and the act of downloading their songs illegally were like the best free approach to marketing. Pretty ironic but the power of massive file sharing and word of mouth seemed to help increase the artistes popularity and public recognition as well.

There is a theory that music in the future will be ubiquitous so some great measures should be taken into consideration to satisfy everyone involved in the making, distributing, marketing, buying and listening to music. It all began with live performances back in the days and later these live performances were recorded into vinyl which then evolved into cassette tapes, audio compact discs and digital mp3 as of today. In short, music may be synonymous to water and electricity bills in the future. If you're looking for a good read in relation to music, this book might be good for you.

Two things that I'd conclude after reading this book. Firstly, I felt like the whole picture is going to go back to square one where music at large is going to be performed live which is pretty much biased to the experience of "live entertainment". Secondly, having music bills like water bills is a degradation, far from music appreciation which would jeopardize musicians who depend on prerecorded music to earn a living.

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Funny People

Technorati Tags: adam sandler,comedy,funny people,jonah hill,movie,seth rogen

With actors and comedians such as Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill I would expect the movie "Funny People" to be hilarious without going much further into the detailed synopsis of the movie on IMDB. But it was cool to get to see a mixture of comedy and drama in the movie. Typically I would assume that it would be insanely hilarious or at least laughable (for some) just like "You Don't Mess With The Zohan" starred by Adam Sandler.

Without the intention of creating a spoiler if you haven't watched this movie yet, suffice to say that "Funny People" doesn't necessarily imply that the movie is funny (literally?). The truth is, it is about the life of a comedian, George Simmons (acted by Adam Sandler), who was suffering from an illness, a slight variation of leukemia and how his life changed because of that.

From IMDB, "When seasoned comedian George Simmons learns of his terminal, inoperable health condition, his desire to form a genuine friendship cause him to take a relatively green performer under his wing as his opening act."

Pretty awesome to watch I would say. I'd give it a 4 out of 5.

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Apple iPhone 3Gs 32GB vs HTC Touch HD - a tough decision...

Technorati Tags: Apple iPhone 3Gs 32GB,HTC Touch HD,Samsung Omnia,BlackBerry Bold

Despite the endless battles between Apple iPhone's fanboys and those who would relentlessly be labeled as "haters", I'm seeing myself stuck in between the two. You just can't have the best of both into one single device, not as of yet. Each comes with the pro and cons to it. I don't want to be biased to any of the devices as much as I can but the followings are my findings and comparison between two amazing devices that caught my attention: Apple iPhone 3Gs 32GB and HTC Touch HD.

Lets have them in tabular format so it would be easier to digest what's cool and what's not for both of the devices.

	Apple iPhone 3Gs 32GB	HTC Touch HD	Favorably
Processor	ARM Cortex A8 600MHz & PowerVR SGX Graphics	Qualcomm MSM 7201A 532MHz CPU	iPhone
Operating System	iPhone Mac OS	Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional	Both
Display	3.5 inch 16M colors	3.8 inch 65K colors	HTC
Handwriting Recognition	No	Yes	HTC
Memory	32GB storage	micro SD	iPhone
Camera	3.15 mega pixels	5 mega pixels	HTC
Secondary Video Call Camera	No	Yes	HTC
Radio	No	Yes	HTC
Java and Flash	No	Yes	HTC

Most of the other features of both are pretty much the same and not really that worth to mention in my opinion. From the table it would seem that HTC is more favorable so far. In terms of speed, iPhone has 600MHz which is fast. The use of internal storage of 8/16/32GBs helps as well. The only competitors in terms of processor speed I found out so far is Samsung Omnia which uses Marvell PXA312 624MHz CPU and BlackBerry Bold which uses 624MHz CPU as well.

Probably the reason I would get an iPhone is because of the graphics. I kept getting this notion that iPhone is over hyped due to the massive media promotion but as a whole the device is very appealing needless to say. If you like the iPhone's interface, I've seen that one done on a HTC. Watch the YouTube video below. It does look impressive.

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Pidgin... a pigeon? Not really...

Something that is pretty nifty you might want to consider after that long exhale when starting multiple chat applications, logging into each one of them and eventually coming to an abstract resemblance of multiple chat windows...is a universal chat client called "Pidgin". Look it up on Google and you should be able to see it first on the SERP's (Search Engine Result Page) list.

Just what the hell am I talking about? In my previous post I mentioned about Flock, a web browser that integrates various social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. "Pidgin" is somewhat similar but on the other hand, it organizes chat applications such as Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN, Google Chat and even Facebook's IM into one simple but effective application. I'd like to make a shout out to Chris for mentioning this cool application.

Well, currently I am still trying out this application and I think it deserves to be known and to be more popular in the future. It's an open source chat client which is free to download and use. Although not as fancy or graphically stunning as applications like Yahoo Messenger or MSN, it does the job of maintaining multiple accounts from different chat platforms and keeping things simple and workable. The user interface is simple and easy to use. Try it out, you might not be amazed by the "look" but the functionality is worthy to be tried out.

Pidgin's tagline says it all... "IM all your friends in one place"

So in short, my two cents on Pidgin...

• Simple and easy to use
• Some cool plugins to check out (Facebook plugin is there too... yay)
  
• Not that really easy to install as you need to know how to get around and look for the right installer file
• The chat client's look and interface needs a lot of enhancement to be done
  
• Might be buggy (but more fixes coming up on a regular basis)
  

I'd give it a 3.8 over 5 stars! :)

More about Pidgin chat client here - http://www.pidgin.im

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