Kai, The Informologist

The only alive and good friend of Robert (Will Smith) is Sam, or Samantha as it was revealed later.

Spoiler Warning – general idea of the movie revealed

I enjoyed a little over 100 minutes of close proximate intensity with “I Am Legend”. It has been awhile since I last caught a thriller, not for other reasons, simply because I don’t like to be thrilled for no good reason and having the memories imprinted in mind for several days/weeks to come. But after eyeing the movie for quite a while now, I couldn’t let it be missed.

The movie is surreal in a yet realistic sense. It’s a thriller, yet it’s not terrifying because of the mutants but the possibilities of us becoming them, which is worse. It brings intriguing thoughts about nature and man-made. The cures for epidemic disease that we are working so hard on today, when actually found, might just turn back on us. My friend commented after the movie that it is a bad movie, not for anything else, but for the reality of it, that it makes people feel gloomy.

Interestingly, I felt the central theme and the main thesis of the movie only started when Will Smith shouted back at Anna saying – “There is No God”, which somewhat contradicts with what he had said earlier when Anna said “Oh, my God”, and he replied – “God did not do this, we did.” And hence, God was involved.

I know I’m sounding kinda Christian here on a movie of this genre, but thinking about it, there was a scene where Will Smith treaded his way into a dark building in searching of his dog – Sam, he stepped onto piles and piles of cash, but nobody was caring for any of it. It reminds me of a bible verse that talks about how money is perishable compared to the treasure in heaven (if you remember, please remind me!). Wealth of money that is seemingly essential in our world today, has proves otherwise in situation like this on ‘I Am Legend’.

In the last scene, Anna did found what she had described as something she heard from God – a survivor’s colony.

Yes, this is a thriller about the mutants, or even the possibility of having them, with intensity that probably strikes one throughout the movie. Somehow however, there seems to be a calm spot amidst all these chaos and havoc.

It’s like, ‘a small voice of God’.
That, I feel should shake you more than the gazillions of mutants jumping onto you.

There is God, even at times of despair. For he said:

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. – Psalm 23:4 (New King James Version)

“Bringing light to darkness.”

I’m not sure how to recommend this movie, my roommate didn’t like it, felt its just another remake of “Resident Evil” or “28 days later”. I haven’t watched the latter, but unlike “Resident Evil”, “I Am Legend” talks about isolation, friendship and so many factors of uncertainty rather than just actions. I really like it though.

On a side note, great acting by Will Smith, he has definitely became a skilled actor following performance such as on “Pursuit of Happyness”.

Click through your Facebook album with ease, thanks to the new AJAX interface that caches the photo prior and after the viewing copy. Great news for all you/we Facebook photo surfers.

But, its bad for Facebook? I believe it should be compensate-able.

This is from real-life human experience, not some conclusive summary through readings. It also excludes the consideration of other cell phone service providers such as Sprint, Verizon or Alltel.

Update: We were charged $36 restoration fee to reactivate my line because I was behind on my payment. Unheard of in my many years with T-Mobile.

Update #2: When we started considering the use of the plan, we were hoping to be paying at most $40/month per person (since the plan was $59.99 + tax and fee). Until today, 4 months after, we have been slammed with weird fees and were paying $100+ per month. The last payment was $177 for both lines. Now with that money, I would not mind paying the $175/line cancellation fee.

I have had enough trying to communicate with the AT&T bunch and I need to write a post about my experiences in comparison to that of T-Mobile.

In this post, I will separately describe my experience with both services (T-Mobile and AT&T) with the conclusion included within my wordings (which are biased due to experience). This is not just a consumer’s review or some kind of report. But an indication of the needs of consumers in an era where information are powerful in and customer-centric businesses needs to step-up their service qualities.

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You might still be a student, or have luckily and successfully graduated from college with flying colors. Otherwise, maybe already a high-paying investment banking job or working for the Big 4? Or your creativity has taken the better of you, and you are doing freelancing work now?
And surely, with your talent and interest, you can lay a foundation for your future rock band career (thank you Rock Band from Sony).

But, wherever you might be standing today socially or mentally (say you have became matured), least spiritually.

Take a moment and think back 1,3,5,10 years, where were you standing?
How did you interact with people – do you talk with a lot of exclamations like meh, mah, ahhh, mmm, oh, leh, lah? Or were you in the era of typing LiKe tHiS, uSiNg lOweR aNd uPper cAsEs, and claiming its not difficult, its easy? This is a good one, how about the times that you have to button on the button on your school uniform each day because your high school would so love to keep their traditional school uniform (this is meant for some of the Singapore high schools)? Were you violent? Introvert? Did you use to put up those layers of make-up? Were you studious? How about self-esteem?

We all have changed, if not grown as time grinds us with numbers such as age, and life such as work.
We know where we are now, but where were we before?

I just thought it was a curious thing to dwell upon (although not fully useful).

(via my photostream)

With the continuous rise in tuition cost, it is no wonder some college students are ordering $10 pizzas to save them a few days of food cost. And as we slowly moves away from the umbrella of adolescence, buying gifts for others on Christmas has became more conscious over just receiving them. However, with limited funding, expensive purchases, even if you’d love to give them, are almost always out of the question. So what can us college students do to share a little Christmas with very little green bills involved?

Well, first off, don’t get too fancy with your gift list. You might want to buy an iPod for your cute little niece who just turned eleven or maybe a North Face jacket for your brother who is studying in Minneapolis. But with a budget of possibly just a little over a hundred dollars, any of them could make a dent in your shallow pocket. So the first step is to plan your budget – carefully, and accordingly. Also, try not count on your future earning to pay for your purchases, you don’t want to be paying overdraft charges during holiday season, it won’t be fun, I promise.

So what do you do after you have made a budget? The only thing left to do – shopping, or rather, finding deals to shop for! It is a lot of fun (at least for me) to look through online deal-searching sources and find your favorite item at … any discounted price! So, here are a couple of deal sources that I’d use to search for deals:

• Woot.com – This should be one of the most popular discounted deal site online, however, it only offer up to one deal per day, although there are occasional woot-offs, where new deals are introduced whenever one is sold out. Woot also offer daily shirt and wine deals.
• Dealsea – Dealsea provides a list view of deals offered by online retailers. It is also accompanied by comments from moderators and sellers that gives more information about the deals.
• Deal Plus – Here you can see items displayed in ‘thumbnail’ view. The extra bonus for this site is the ‘Freebies’, where moderators and users contribute freebies online in various forms – couples and samples are some of the ones I have tried before.

Sounds good?
No? You are asking what if you like customized and non-generic products? Well, as long as there is demand, there’s always supply. Here is a list of non-generic products that I had used before:

• Threadless – this online community based tee-shirt company accepts and prints polled shirt design submission. Unlike the many others you might have seen online, most of the content here are actually G if not PG-rated. Making it a really positive environment for consumers
• Snapfish.com – yes, this is one of the many online photo-printing services that has been thriving in recent years. My preference for this site over the rest is most because of its generosity. Yes, generosity towards new customers. Of course its high-quality and rather cheap (12 cents per print) are its distinguish qualities, but I am certainly attracted towards Snapfish because of the 20 free prints it offered to any new customers based on email. And 20 prints per recommendation that you make. Comparing that to my experience with dotPhoto, which denied my print because one of the print has been printed by my friend previously (meaning you can’t print one photo twice with two accounts).

AND, if that’s not enough guide from a personal blog, feel free to visit the MSN’s guide to holiday shopping – 20 easy gifts — that aren’t gift cards.

Happy Holidays!

(via NY Times Review)

Following the footsteps of several mega-box-office-hit animations, we can now expect at least 2 to 3 animations per year. And no, not all of them are as fun or memorable as stories like Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, or Cars, most of them are just animations. And that’s the problem – after a series of animation craze years, just like how Atari-owned Warner Bros caused a near collapse to the video games industry, consumers including myself are starting to feel numb towards the cutesy animations. Even though I have been a fan of Pixar’s animations, the thought of a rat being funny or the movie being of any profound value didn’t hit me.

So I didn’t watch it in the theaters, and even when my roommate’s girlfriend got a copy of it from Netflix, I wasn’t too crazy over it and didn’t bother to ask them for it. But to demonstrate the use of $1 per day DVD rental at Kroger, I checked out Ratatouille. And last night, I watched it.

I know my words are not those of Ego in the movie, but I still want to say that, it is a great movie.

I was impressed by the way it was started, then the way the water was animated. Every detail of Remy was paid specific attention. I like how the artist gave him emotion that can be related to that f real-life rats. While there wasn’t a profound meaning behind the movie (such as stop over-fishing with ‘Happy Feet’), the DVD does include a short animation with some history of rats and how we (human) should stop poaching them, because they didn’t cause the Black Death. Finally, the music totally topped it off. And there’s no way for a music illiteracy to describe it, you just have to watch it and let yourself be immersed in it.

So I discovered the joy of Threadless lately.

Customization of t-shirt has been booming in recent years, with randomized words, phrases, and of course images being printed of t-shirts of all colors. Websites such as CafePress allows you to design not only your t-shirt but your own mug, your own stickers and all that good stuff. Personally, I have been to many online t-shirt stores but none were as high-quality as Threadless, in terms of shirt design (nothing nasty or offensive) or services (including its addictive web features).

How are the t-shirts selected? With established reputation and a good number of customer base, user submitted designs were voted on by other users, and determined by the staff before printing, and those that landed on the shelves are A-class coolio stuff. So send in a design or two if you have the crave!

What other features? Like some of the other e-commerce retailers, there’s the ‘Street Team’ feature that motivates user to promote the shirts to friends and family. If a friend bought a shirt through your recommendation, you get credit for it that you can use towards your future purchases. (Thanks to my host mum, I’d received my first credit!) And if you are inspired to take photos of yourself in that t-shirt you’d just bought from Threadless, you get credit for just submitting the photo and if it were featured – more credit!

I’d just purchased a pair of ‘You Really Grate On Me‘, but I’d to return mine because of sizing issue – I thought I’d fit into a 20, but guess not. So I’m gonna get an exchange for it and just be happily green.

I recommend Threadless for y’ll t-shirt fans out there. And what’s more – everything (excluding da hoodies) is only $10 all the way until December 16th! So shop your hearts away. The only reason that’s stopping me from shopping for more is because of the size, so we’ve concluded that even though I’d hope I’m a medium, I’m not. Now the question is to large or to x-large?