cybrpunk.com

Indiana Jones and the what?

Warning: contains some minor spoilers but seriously, have you seen the previews?

Muse and I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull [omg could that title be any longer] at the theater in Tung Chung last Sunday.  We laughed our butts off, usually for the expected reasons, for the first half and then it kind of shifted gears somehow.  It was a great movie and I’ll buy it when it comes out on DVD but I think it was just too late to keep up appearances with the previous movies.

Harrison Ford is just as good in this version as he always has been although his character seemed to fluctuate quite a bit between an old man constantly thinking “I’m getting too old for this shit” and a hero that can do anything.  In the first three movies he was a lot more consistent.  The idea of him having a son was a cute idea even if the character was a little annoying.  Short-Round had more personality.  Him showing up looking like Marlon Brando was a bit odd and really set the tone for two hours of cliches and stereotypes.

We re-watched the first three movies prior to going to see this new one so we would be ready.  One thing I noticed for the first time was how over the top, campy and completely unbelievable they were.  I never got that from these movies before.  Sure they all three showed some form of mythological magic in action against evil Nazis or evil Indians but they always seemed different.  I guess now that I’m older (and wiser? nah) I had to suspend my belief in everything that happened so much more than in the past.

So when the new movie makes fun of itself or things in the previous movies it’s a nice hommage now and then but sometimes it was just too much.  It seemed to ride on the hopes that the cliches and stereotypes it showed would carry it through and in some ways it did since all four movies are basically made in the old pulp fiction style of the Golden Age.  I suppose the idea of aliens from another dimension are nothing new when thinking about the Azteks. And truthfully is that any harder to swallow than a box that melts faces, a man who can pull out a still beating heart from a human with his hand or a knight living forever drinking from a magic cup?

The special effects were very hit and miss.  The ending sequence was pretty cool.  However, as Abraxus pointed out in his post, the cemetary model that was used was really pathetic.  Like him, I assumed we were supposed to be looking at an intentional view of a model and not the “real cemetary” as we were supposed to think.  It was a total amateur presentation from one of the best special effects companies in the world which just made me shake my head in wonder as to what they were thinking.

I know it sounds like I’m bashing the new Indiana Jones movie and that’s really unfair.  I’m a huge fan of the original movies and against my better judgement I still had extremely high expectations for the new movie.  It was a fun, funny and entertaining movie.  I would watch it again.  It’s just that the Indiana Jones movies basically created the current Action/Comedy genre of movies that we have been evolving with since the early 1990’s and this movie just feels very retro and un-evolved.  Not that that is a bad thing - it’s just not what was expected.  I have no idea why.

Your iPod makes you a criminal

Maybe its just because I’m still reading Atlas Shrugged but the whole deal with Hollywood (MPAA) and the music industry (RIAA) buying the United States government to further their corporate needs just scares the crap out of me.

So imagine my surprise when I read this article: Canadian Politicians Negotiate to Join ACTA, Will Criminalize CD Copies, iPods at Border Crossings Basically this is saying that the border patrols between the United States and Canada (and presumably borders between any countries involved in ACTA) have the authority to decide if you have illegal copyrighted material on your computer/MP3 player/mobile phone/USB drives/etc and confiscate and/or destroy the device in question. No proof on their part would be required if the rumors are true.

So have you even heard of this ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)?  I hadn’t till I read this.  Since then I’ve found that this is being called the Pirate Bay Killer act which goes along with the whole copyright issue.  As stated in the linked article above, when people have tried finding out more about this through the Freedom of Information Act, all they got was the title of the act and everything else was blacked out.  From what little information can be found about this, the governments are being very quiet about this whole deal and the process to create it.

As usual, I encourage people to do their own research and make their own conclusions but this kind of thing honestly scares the shit out of me.  Not because I have anything to fear from it but because of the possibilities of the kinds of violations of rights this kind of act can make possible.  Mix this in with Homeland Security and we may be looking a little more dystopian any day now.

Screw ADT, they have Guan Yu

No more ninjas?

According to an interview with Tomonobu Itagaki over at CVG, it’s the end of the line for both the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive series of games. Itagaki is the famous creator of both those hugely popular video game franchises. He states in the interview via a translator from his native Japanese that he and his closest colleagues have accomplished everything they have wanted with those games.

Ninja Gaiden II will be available as an XBox360 exclusive on June 3rd, 2008 and is currently available for pre-orders. For nostalgia sake you can also purchase the original Ninja Gaiden through XBox Live as a downloadable game for 1200 Microsoft Points. I doubt there’s a need to do so story-wise though.

The final game in the Dead or Alive series is the disappointing Dead or Alive 4 which launched with the XBox360. My Hong Kong XBox360 came as a package deal with DoA4 and I’ve been regretting that one ever since. I’d always been a huge fan of the series but the changes to counter-attacks in the game really ruined it for me. I refuse to link to the Dead or Alive Volleyball spin-off games.

No holiday here

So I hear it’s a public holiday back home in the States.  No such luck here; I had to work today.  Although we do get about the same amount of holidays here in Hong Kong but they are at different times and have different names.  Exactly the same only completely different.

I don’t remember actually explicitly mentioning it (and I don’t have much else to say today (OMG filler)) but if you use Twitter, you can follow me there via this link: http://twitter.com/cybrpunk Yeah there’s a feed for it over in the sidebar as well but then you won’t get to see the octopus again as he reigns supreme over my Twitter page.  He also will not allow me to post all my Twitter posts as a blog post here as a cheater post.  He thinks it doesn’t count as a post.  I tend to agree.

Since I’ve got nothing much else to say today I’ll just plug A Little Scary once more.  I’ve posted Monday’s comic which you should check out.  Remember to check back each Monday and Thursday for new comics.  Subscribe to the feed while your there too.  It’s a lonely feed.

Beer

I think I feel like having a beer.  Maybe two or three.  I could probably go for a full on drunken stupor to be truthful, but a couple of beers would suffice.  It’s been a rough couple of weeks.  It’s friday evening and I’m leaving work and I still have a ton of stuff waiting for me on Monday.  Beer: yeah, I’ve earned it.

Beer.  It’s what’s for dinner.

Mutant Shrimp

I have no idea what these are really called in English and I certainly can’t remember what they’re called in Cantonese.  But they are edible and available in the seafood and wet markets in Hong Kong.  Here they are for your amusement.  Mutant shrimp.

Probably a bad thing

I… I am weak.  I’ve reactivated my World of Warcraft account.  After almost a year of not playing, I finally got drawn back in.  Well, Yoshi had a lot to do with that.  He’s evil like that.  He’s such an enabler.  And now I’m trying to get Muse to re-activate her account.  *sigh*

I know I make it sound bad but its really not.  It’s just what seems to be expected when someone admits that they are getting back into an online game that they used to play.  I don’t see it as a weakness or an evil in the least.  It’s just a game.  It can be a bit addictive at times and it certainly is a time sink, but it’s really no worse than spending hours playing “casual” games from PopCap or Reflexive.  I would just as easily spend 3 hours playing Peggle as I would Warcraft.

Anyway, if you are playing WoW and are on the Lothar server, leave a comment with your character name and I’ll see if I can find you.  However, if you play one of those evil, under-handed Alliance then I may have to try and hurt you.  Fair warning.

The mobile web

I just attended a luncheon regarding the rising opportunities in the online mobile phone markets and it was pretty interesting.  I found out the the average youth user in China sends an average of 100 text messages a day.  That’s just sending!  Considering I’d never sent a text message in my life prior to coming to Hong Kong, that just seems inconceivable to me.

However, the focus of the presentation was about the youth market and how it’s affecting and shaping the mobile web.  Basically the premise is that the kids today are deciding and driving the technology and services available on mobile devices and us old folks will just get whatever they decide on.  Lucky us.  The 2 second attention span generation has come to power.

Supposedly, 50 Cent and young Japanese girls have something in common.  They are doing something called Lifecasting.  They basically wear their phones around their necks and let it record constantly throughout their day and it auto transmits these images or video to an online accessible site.  Personally, I’m not sure how I would feel about this but I guess it would keep Fiddy from doing illegal activities since he’d be broadcasting whatever he’s doing to the world.  The japanese girls will probably get flooded with dirty old men though.  But maybe that’s what they’re going for.

It sounds like more and more content on mobile devices will be branded as well.  Just like you can’t have a college bowl game without some companies name and logo plastered all over it.  Just like you can’t play certain video games without seeing billboards in the games advertising everything from soft drinks to cars.  Now your mobile content will also be branded.  Considering the size of the screens, I hope that you can still see what you were looking for with all those logos.

Of course since this meeting I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of making this site and A Little Scary more mobile friendly.  I found this Wordpress Mobile Plugin that looks like it makes your site mobile phone compatible and thought I might give it a try.  If anyone out there has any opinions on the matter, please leave them in the comments.

My computer is broke. Nuh-uh!

Dealing with technical support at the best of times can be difficult.  Dealing with tech support in Hong Kong can be absolutely infuriating.  The DVD-RW drive in my Dell XPS M1710 computer has been slowly dying for months but Friday it decided to give up completely.  This is a pretty fast PC but it would take six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD because it reset every two seconds.  Now it won’t even read a disk.

In a nutshell, here’s how the conversation went:
“My computer’s broke.”
“No it’s not, that’s normal.”

Yes tech support in Hong Kong will regularly flat out lie to try and keep from actually sending someone to fix something.  It’s not just Dell or even computers.  Getting service in Hong Kong is painful.

Actually the Dell Optiplex support line is pretty good and they speak English.  When you call the Dell XPS support line, you get transferred to Mainland China somewhere and they don’t speak English.  Knowing this, I had an admin make the call for me and warned her that they may not even speak guangdong hua (Cantonese).

Sure enough, the first person to answer speaks putong hua (Mandarin) only.  Luckily most of the local staff in my office are at least able to handle most conversations in Mandarin but they still get mixed up sometimes.  Oddly enough, the tech must not have liked the admin’s knowledge of his language because he hung up on her.  So she called back and luckily this time she got someone who speaks Cantonese.  Mind you, this is a Hong Kong phone number we’re dialing.

Instead of going through all the details of what happened, I’ll just give you the excuses that were translated to me.  There may have been more that I didn’t hear or understand.

• “Has Windows been re-installed?” - This insinuated that it’s not the drive but that Windows is the problem and needs to be re-installed.  No.
• When the call was made I had a burned copy of Symantec AV in the drive.  He told the admin that “there was just an incompatibility in the way that the burned disk had been created.”  So he told her she needed to put in a CD provided by Dell and if it worked then it wasn’t their problem.
• So I put in the XPS Drivers and Utilities Disk.  Standing near the PC you can hear the drive spin and reset over and over and over.  I told her to tell him about that noise.  He responded with: “That’s normal.”
• When the Dell CD didn’t come up, he had her try another Dell CD because it must be a problem with that CD.  We entered another one which made the same sounds and didn’t work.  He told her “the drivers weren’t loaded” even though we told him it’s been working for almost two years.  He had her check Device Manager and sure enough there was no Exclamation Point marking a problem.
• When I told her to tell him it took six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD-R, he started questioning the software we were using and blamed it on that.  He told her then that “the software you use is just not updated.”  By this point I was well beyond pissed and glad he couldn’t understand what I was saying on speakerphone.

The admin started getting confrontational with him at that point because he was wasting our time.  We had spent 30 minutes on the phone at that point.  Finally he relented and told us someone would contact us tomorrow to replace the drive.

Of course I thanked the admin since I’ve made similar calls before and they were just as painful except neither person understood the other.  Imagine trying to convey “video card” to someone who only speaks Mandarin and you only speak English.  Painful.