The Prestige

The prestige, the final act of the three acts of a magic show, the act that will leave the audience astounded, mystified, shocked and overwhelmed. With the success of a prestige, acclaimed magicians will always want to find out that secret, how the trick was being done.

Robert Angier and Alfred Borden were two friends when they began their career as magicians. Through an accident that caused the death of Angier's wife, their friendship turned into hatred, which leads to rivalry. With the prestige of an ultimate trick, their rivalry evolves to a battle that promises to tear their lives down and affect everyone around them.

Intense. That's the word to describe the movie. It keeps you to the edge of your seat through the brilliant performance by Hugh Jackman (Robert Angier) and Christian Bale (Alfred Borden). To see both in a movie was almost *dreamy*, as I admire both actors a lot. Hugh Jackman is best known for being Wolverine in the X-Men series, whereas Christian Bale as Batman Begins (which I love thoroughly, can't wait for the sequel!).

This is a must watch for people who love drama, thrills, twist and turn of plots.

Charlotte's Web

How many people had grown up without reading Charlotte's Web? haha.. Well, I'm one of those few. Since young, I really dint like to read, which probably explains why my English is horrible! :P

As I said, since this is the first time I get in touch with this story, on many levels I'm not distracted by what the book actually wrote, how the plot unfolds, and more importantly, no spoilers. :D

The story is a simple and straightforward one. Of trust, loyalty, and sacrifice between friends. Do not judge a person by its cover, like how Wilbur sees Charlotte. Charlotte in turn teaches us that promises made are to be kept. Their dynamic relationship creates a spark that changes everything in their town, both human and animals.

If we apply those precious lessons to our lives, wouldn't that make our world a better place to live in? ;)

The Illusionist

When was the last time I watched a magic show? haha... This movie though, is many levels more than that. The plot was intriguing, and the ending carried such a twist it blew me off.

It was a direct pit of intelligence, between Eisenheim (the illusionist), the chief inspector and the crown prince, as Eisenheim tries to use his powers as an illusionist, to secure a future with his lover, a woman who is well above himself in regards to social status.

Prepare for the ride and be mystified. :)

The Pursuit Of Happyness

Inspired by a true story based on the life of Chris Gardner, this movie shows the struggle of a father trying to hold the family together despite of the tremendous daily difficulties that he face. His sales job was going downhill, his wife left him, his inability to pay his fines landed him in jail, he had no money for daily expenses and eventually, homelessness. In spite of these, he was determined for a career change to be a stockbroker.

The love between Chris and his son was also extremely moving. It almost seems that Chris motivation behind his daily struggles was his son, that he wants his son to be happy. In one scene when Chris was teaching Chris Jr., this dialogue left a very deep impression in me and I felt it captured the essence of the movie.

Chris Gardner
Don't ever let somebody tell you, you can't do something. Not even me. You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can't do something themselves, they wanna tell you you can't do it. If you want something, go get it. Period.

After months of being deep in mud, struggling with life and at the brink of depression, Chris finally have a chance at happiness with life when he got chosen to be a stockbroker out of the 20 that applied for it. That joy that he had was incomparable.

That joy moved me to tears.

Overwhelming Technology

This is a ranting post. :D

After army, I went for several interviews and learnt about Ajax from one of my interviewers. Ajax is a development technique for creating interactive web applications by the way, and had been around for quite some time, so it's me just out of sync. :D Included here to to make my mess sound messier. :P

Upon landing in Radixs, I got back in touch with Flash, which had moved 2 versions up from Flash MX to Flash 8. I made it point then to upgrade myself from coding with ActionScript 1.0 to ActionScript 2.0, from procedural programming to true OOP.

While playing with OOP, I stumbled upon Design Patterns, which spurred a lot of interest in me. Coming from a design background, I had always wanted to write cleaner codes which are efficient, reusable and scalable. Furthermore, it'll make me a lot geekier. :D

I borrowed the book, Head First Design Patterns, from the company's library and dived right in. It is at this time when Adobe announced the arrival of Apollo! I heard about the purpose of Apollo way back in November 2006 during the Adobe MAX Conference in Singapore, so was actually pretty excited that the alpha release is finally out! Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex(Flex?), HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop Rich Interactive Applications (RIA).

So ermz... What's Flex?? Again this belongs to the category of "something heard but no research ". Figured out that it is a SDK(software development kit) for a group of technologies to support the development and deployment of cross platform, RIA's based on their proprietary Flash platform. So on I went to seriously study on the Flex's framework of MXML and ActionScript 3.0.

At this period, Adobe CS3 was launched as well, and while everyone is so excited with the new set of tools available, Microsoft came out with Silverlight! Tada!!! What's that...... again??! It's supposed to be something flashy, like Flash(compare the name and you'll get the idea), with hopes of displacing Flash dominance on the web market. Read up some articles and found out it's a new code name for something that existed for quite some time.

***Deleted a paragraph of extra ranting on the history of WPF, the XAML & C# combination, which I felt was totally unnecessary :D***

Ok got passed that. Dint bothered with it. My hands are already full at the moment with Flash, Flex and Apollo. Then another bang came a few days ago when Sun Microsystems announces the arrival of JavaFX!! JavaFX is Sun's way of killing Flash, Ajax and Silverlight.

With so many new technologies appearing at seemingly such a short period of time, I must say I'm overwhelmed. Carefully, I thought through all these things, and came up with this "insight", or rather common sense. :P

All these new technologies, new scripting languages, are just for people who are specialised in that particular field, to leverage their existing skill sets onto more kinds of platforms, allowing them to build more interactive products that are able to reach a deeper and wider market.

Personally, I'm an advocate for the Flash Platform, but the competition between the major companies got nothing to do with me! All these new technologies are good to know, just in case one day I need to know them to deploy something, and that one day is not today!

My plan will be to stay focus on Flash, Flex, Apollo, learn AS3, MXML, Cairngorm, design patterns and some server side coding and database language to get up to speed with deployment(most probably being PHP & mySQL here). Focus focus focus... that's the way to survive all these bombarding new tech. Oh gosh... I wonder what's next.

I don't want to become a jack of all trades, but master of none anyway. :P

Twitter Homepage Wallpaper

Ok I know this isn't the best title, but I couldn't think of anything better. haha.. This is the wallpaper that I've created for my twitter homepage.

I haven't touch design for ages now and this is like the first attempt in years. Really plan to get back that right brain of mine. haha.. In other to hope to improve, all comments are welcome!

Available Resolutions:
1280x800
1280x960
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Parish Retreat

May 1st. Labour Day. Holiday. Parish Retreat!

What's a Parish Retreat? Well here's some reference from one of my favourite sites nowadays, http://dictionary.reference.com.
Parish - an ecclesiastical district having its own church and member of the clergy.
Retreat - a retirement or a period of retirement for religious exercises and meditation.

I was invited by Raphaela to attend this Parish Retreat held annually by her Catholic Church, Church Of Saint Anthony Of Padua. Most of you will know that I'm a Christian, so may be thinking, "Christian? Going to a Catholic event?". Well, though I knew it's an event organised by a Catholic Church, I knew too that it's the same God and the same Saviour we're worshiping, hence it dint bothered me too much. hehe..

It'll be a very long story if I elaborate on every single detail, and I know not all readers are gonna have the patience to run along with me, so I'm gonna cut the whole story shorter(could have been much longer than this ok!). I'm not going to miss out the important details that made this Parish Retreat one of the best holidays that I've experienced so far this year though. *winkZ*

That morning was cool with slight drizzles. The time was 6am(I must add that it was a bit too early for me, considering that I slept at 1:30am!). Everything seems to be perfect for sleep. hehe.. Pulled myself together, got ready, and went to meet up with Raphaela for the first time in months. We took a bus and headed off to her church in woodlands. The people there were warm to each other, though I'm not quite used to that culture(yet!). From there, we took another bus to a "secluded" church, which was probably the mother church of the one we went from.

Praise and worship got started very early that day, much earlier than my usual 11:15am service on Sunday. It was a good warm up though. Priest Terence took over right after and began a a session of what I would call as "silence practice". We were to keep quiet, close our eyes, and not to think about anything. The objective was to be able to dominate our brain rather than the other way around.

It was so hard! Other than stopping my brain from running in circles with thoughts, I had to combat the sleepiness that still lingered on. Had to try very hard to calm my heart and mind down, and yet stay awake. It was no mean feat.

After the second try, it was peace that got onto me. I never did practice the art of controlling my brain, which was the whole purpose of the silence practice. In that 20 minutes or so of silence, I was able to completely void my brain of thoughts, which was coupled with a strange feeling(slight numbness at the back of my head). No thoughts, nothing. Being at peace with God was a magical feeling.

After that, Priest Terence continued to talked about God's Word, about how people in church naturally formed tribes and kept to their own groups. In his effort, he made us mix around and sit with people whom we don't know. For me it wasn't such a difficult task, since I've always attended church alone. :D Listening to Priest Terence had also been pretty easy too, the lively way he spoke, the energised tone, and not to mention the wacky jokes he made, allowed me to overcome my lack of sleep. :P

The next high point of the day was actually really simple. We were given some time to read the letter of John. To be exact it's the book "1 John". Raphaela and I headed out to the garden and spent some quiet time there, reading God's Word. It's another first for me, when I felt nothing else excepted the anointed atmosphere of God all around me.

I feasted on the Word, it was peaceful. The greens in the garden, it was peaceful. The gentle wind, it was peaceful. Having God around, without the distractions of the everyday life, it was peaceful. Recalling the scene of quiet time now brings back an unusual sense of peacefulness into my heart which can't be explained. *float*

It was a day without technology, without computer, without work, without internet, without games, without phone calls, without sms, without distraction, without ambition, without competition, without pride and without self.

All I had was the bible in my hand, and God in my heart.

That was sufficient, and it proved to be much better than the endless things that I was chasing in my everyday life. The retreat ended with my heart rejuvenated, invigorated, and ready for God.

Many thanks to you, Raphaela, for the invite to the Parish Retreat, for I really enjoyed myself that day. Though I'm not used to the Catholic Church culture for the most parts, the important thing was that I felt God. :)