Archive for June, 2005
Monday, June 20th, 2005
(This personal review is free of spoiler.)
The last two weeks have been crazy. It’s like two regular semester (Fall, Spring) hell weeks hitting you one after another (since Summer’s kind of squished, it makes sense but never expected it). Thankfully, I’ve had free time this weekend after catching up with all the school spectacles. With that free time, some friends and I decided to watch Batman Begins.
With not many good things to say about the last two Batman movies: Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin… I was skeptical on the entertainment value of the new one. I have to mention that there were some hype about this movie as several media outlets such as Arizona Central. It reported that Batman Begins could help revive the downward trend of Hollywood films in 2005. I read/skimmed through some of these articles a week or two ago and thought… “Well, maybe if Hollywood could release some good original movies instead of just remaking old ones or making books into movies… they wouldn’t be in such a slump!” But this is really beside the point.
Anywho, Christian Bale… I’ve only seen him previously in Equilibrium which had a bit too much action for all the most random reasons. It was definitely not one of those movies where actors and actresses can flourish in terms of… well, ‘acting’ since the characters didn’t really need to portray anything other than a hard outer shell. Bale sort of had a similar role as Batman and Bruce Wayne… but instead of being member of the upper-echelon “Grammatons” of a Utopian society, he was a 6th-Generation upper-class member of a corrupt city who decides to take the law into his own hands.
Gotham was better potrayed as a “New York City” type environment instead of the Gotham that was presented in the last two Batman flicks as a futuristic-dark-City environment you’d imagined for all hero comics. The environment looked real enough in terms of a City that really needed a good scrubbing – but who wants a hero in a sparkly clean city?
I also preferred the characters as being human with a dark-side instead of the human who was good until an accident happened to them. You also see the development of Batman as both the hero and the man (Bruce Wayne) which meant you also see the development of Batman’s ‘technology’ which is always cool to see. You also see the ‘villain’ as human with a dark-side so you don’t really know who the villain is until the second half of the film. As opposed to Two-face, Mr. Freeze, Joker, and the Penguin who all seem to have some kind of uneventful thing happened to them to turn them into weird-looking villains.
I was never into comic books so I honestly couldn’t tell you how much of this movie ties in with the original comics so I suppose hardcore Batman comic people would have opinions that shift one way or the other with that aspect of the film. But I liked how this film wasn’t a straight-forward “See villain hatch plan to take over Gotham, see Batman and XXXX stop them through confrontation.” Instead, it had multiple levels which you don’t see until the very end.
Out of everyone whose been Batman, Bale out-’Bat’ all of them. He portrayed the dark-side in Batman like you’ve never seen before as the story attempts to use fear against fear. Although it wasn’t spectacular as the media hyped this up to be, I still liked it. If anything, if you’ve seen the last two Batman flicks (or all of them minus crazy ‘we need something to do’ movie Catwoman came out to be) then you should like this film if anything for the sake of completing the Batman film quintriolgy.
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Friday, June 10th, 2005
I’ve always enjoyed self-learning.
As geeky as this may sound, ever since back in the days when I was finally able to get onto the Internet with ease, it seemed like a whole new world had opened up for me. I had access to so many resources that I could use to learn about what interested me. For example, I remember when I first found Geocities. I spent an entire day learning HTML by example and even trial and error (upload and see). The work-in-progress product definitely looked like a child scribbling some gibberish on the monitor but I found it amazing and absolutely awesome.
That was when it all started. I started to seek out resources I could use to learn what I thought was awesome at that time like Visual Basic programming. My first textbox, command button, and form that did absolutely nothing other than displaying “test” in the textbox when you clicked on the button was spectacular in my mind. All the programs I’ve made during those days were all so trivial but they were still fun and it probably kept me from doing foolish things with my time.
I’m so glad that I learned the ability to self-teach. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that I am more productive learning things on my own than having to go to class and listen and take notes during a lecture. It’s a bit weird when I say it like that but I’m confident that it is true. (But of course, having a professor to go to when you can’t figure something out is something outside of this context.)
… to be continued.
Posted in g33kl0g, Time Out! | No Comments »
Thursday, June 9th, 2005
If you haven’t watched any episodes of Scrubs yet, feel free to start watching! 
I’ve decided to post memorable quotes from the TV series… here’s great one:
Do you at least remember what you were doing the day they were passing out common sense? Oh gosh, maybe you were running late that day cause you just couldn’t find the right thong for those low-rider jeans that you love so much! Or maybe you were busy bobbing along to whatever boy-band really makes your heart race nowadays and you just drove on by! Of course, I don’t know, I’m just guessing! But one thing’s sure shooting: you wound up at the dumb-dumb store and just went ahead and put as much of that in the car you could fit, didn’t ya?!
- Dr. Cox to JD in Scrubs
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Thursday, June 2nd, 2005
Last week, I spent a little less than 16 hours in lab for one lab course. We have two 3-hour labs per week; each lab is always due a week after the assigned laboratory time and each lab takes at least 5 hours to finish. On top of that, we have homework assignments for each lab which take anywhere around 3 hours outside of lab.
The kicker? This is supposed to be a 2-hour laboratory course.
In the end, I am glad that I will get this course over during the Summer instead of in the fall because 1) I’m taking one other class that is not as strenuous as other ECE courses I’ve taken so I’ll have more time to focus on this lab class and 2) Summer semesters are really never relaxed as I’ve heard but this lab kind of packs 4 months of material into 2.5 months so better to get it over within a shorter period of time instead of for 4 months.
Anyway, I’m taking a bit of time adjusting into this whole Summer semester thing. I haven’t really been too efficient with my schedule outside of getting my school work completed, I need to try to find a part-time job somewhere while starting to prepare for finding a full-time position for after Graduation.
Anyway, for all my friends not in the ATL this Summer, feel free to email or give my cell a ring! 
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