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Archive for September, 2009
Surrogates Movie Review
Sep 30th
Surrogates, a sci-fi thriller movie directed by Jonathan Mostow who previously directed the hit movie Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Before I move on to the review, I would like to express my biggest gratitude to Nuffnang for giving a pair of premiere screening passes to me. Without the passes, this review would not have been written.
FBI agents (BRUCE WILLIS and RADHA MITCHELL) investigate the mysterious murder of a college student linked to the man who helped create a high-tech surrogate phenomenon that allows people to purchase unflawed robotic versions of themselves – fit, good looking remotely controlled machines that ultimately assume their life roles – enabling people to experience life vicariously from the comfort and safety of their own homes. The murder spawns a quest for answers: in a world of masks, who’s real and who can you trust?
I must say that this movie made me think if the world would be like how it is in this movie, what would humans be then? Somehow, this is really similar to the movie Gamer in terms of the idea behind humans controlling others; humans control humans in Gamer while humans control a robot in Surrogates. In layman terms, the brain is powerful enough to fully control a robot to do replace a human. The human just stays at home controlling his or her own robot and so, robots are everywhere outside the house down the street.
I don’t think there’s any complicated storyline here as the movie is purely about investigating the murder of surrogates’ creator’s son. I would consider this as an action-packed movie as I see more actions than anything else. I liked the ending of this movie in which there’s a choice to save surrogates or to end it, what do you think was done? I’ll leave that for you to keep guessing and find out when you watch the movie. Verdict, nothing to shout about but still a good movie.
Ho Jian at Geylang Kway Teow
Sep 29th
Hawker Square recently opened for business in Ikano Power Centre. Inside Hawker Square are three… well let’s just consider it as stalls, if I remember correctly there are three stalls there. Hawker Square is on the B1 level and it is just beside Teppanyaki. One of it sells fried food like fried kuay teow in which I will be reviewing the ‘ho jian’ or rather known as fried omelet with oysters from this stall.
This particular stall is named Geylang Kway Teow. Geylang is a district in Singapore and from some food guide books I read before, Geylang is quite known for good food. I don’t know if this stall really is from Geylang but if you see a shop or stall with this kind of name, you’ll usually expect good food.
As I mentioned earlier, I will be reviewing the fried omelet with oysters from this particular stall. It costs RM6 but if you want more, just add RM1 making it RM7 for a large one. I ordered the large one. On first impression, the oysters were just placed at the side of the plate which usually the oysters will be buried with the eggs. It doesn’t look pleasant to the eyes to sum things up. As soon as I took my first bite, I think there’s just too much flour used and I could hardly taste eggs.
They gave ten tiny little oysters. However, the oysters were not fresh at all. There’s this weird taste with the oysters as it isn’t the ordinary taste you’ll get for seafood that is not fresh. The liquid that comes out from the oysters when you bite is terrible too and I’m sure it can cause someone to puke if he or she really can’t take it.
The eggs on the other hand were fried to black. Shouldn’t the cook be watching the fire and such? Not unless the cook loves eating burnt food, it shouldn’t be burnt and this is seriously disappointing. Who would keep eating eggs like this?
In a nutshell, for this price I have to say that this is among the worst food for me this year. I strongly advise you to stay away from this stall although I’ve not tried other food such as their fried kuay teow. Please let me know how’s their other food if you have tried it before. If you want to prevent others from being a victim, kindly retweet this to spread my horrible experience here.
A note to the owner of Geylang Kway Teow if you are reading this, kindly improve the quality of food from your stall if you really want to be successful. Once improved, feel free to contact me and I’ll give it a try again.
PropWall vs. iProperty
Sep 28th
Property and real estate sites are slowly emerging in Malaysia. However, among the sites, which would be the better site for this purpose? Today, we’ll take a look at two property and real estate sites which are PropWall and iProperty. Note that this review is done purely based on my point of view.
First up would be PropWall. This site in my opinion is pretty clean and simple, as soon as the homepage loads, first word that comes to my mind is simple. There are very minimal images and I would say 90% of the page is actually texts. With the dull colour combination used in this website, it doesn’t really please my eyes. Speaking of user-friendly, I would say yes it is because you won’t need to spend time finding for a certain section and such as the different sections are all shown at the top near the header. Well, from the looks of the logo, it is still in beta stage so hopefully it’ll improve in the near future.
Next we have iProperty. A quick background check on iProperty showed that they are not new and they have quite a network as iProperty is available in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, India and Philippines. The experience does play a role as iProperty site is what I prefer over PropWall. Take a look at this site, some bright colours which won’t look too dull and you’ll see that this site is quite complicated on first glance but isn’t more information displayed better? This site is neat in another way that it packs information in and not junk. There are some quite handy features in this site as well like when you’re looking at a property, it would also match other property that meets similar criteria.
Conclusion, if you have been reading the comparison, you’ll know which site is the better for me based on my point of view. PropWall needs to revamp their site to make it more alive if you get what I mean. I don’t know about others but for me, I wouldn’t enjoy browsing a dull looking site if you were to make me compared PropWall and iProperty. In short, yes iProperty stands out in this case. 
Breakfast at Kopitiam Kemaman
Sep 27th
Terengganu, in terms of food is famous for their nasi dagang and keropok lekor. If you ask people where to get good nasi dagang or keropok lekor, most of the time people will tell you to just travel all the way to Terengganu to get it. For the Klang Valley people, traveling there would be too costly and why not just head to Kopitiam Kemaman in Damansara Utama?
Kopitiam Kemaman had been in Damansara Utama for quite some time already, since I was in my college’s previous campus. Locating this kopitiam shouldn’t be a problem; it is just along the police station’s row. The owner here talks to most of his customers so from this I could say that majority of the customers are regulars of this place. Kopitiam Kemaman serves quite a variety of food besides food from the eastern coast of Peninsular Malaysia.
You can have the breakfast set if you’re going in the morning. Perfect light meal to start off the day and it isn’t expensive too. The set comes with two slices of toasted bread and an egg. I would actually prefer them to apply more butter and kaya to the toast though so the taste wouldn’t just be more to a plain slice of bread taste.
Eggs are a good source of many vitamins, calcium, protein and many more. So as long you don’t overdo it, it is a great addition to your diet. Don’t leave out eggs on your next diet!
There’s also a choice of either a cup of tea or coffee and I went with the tea. The cup gives a kopitiam feel but the tea though isn’t strong enough and I think that drinks is one of the most important factor in getting a returning customer. Some people might just visit a kopitiam just for a drink so the drink here has to improve.
Then there’s the nasi dagang which is a favourite in Terengganu. Yes it is a small portion but they are not charging a high price for it so I would consider it justifiable. Taste wise is good but to be honest, it doesn’t match an original nasi dagang.
Honestly, I can’t really recall back the exact price for these but rest assure that with RM5-RM10, you will be able to get a meal here which I would say is affordable. The pricing here does not differ much from those economical Chinese coffee shops and the food here to me is still considered decent but surely there’s more room for improvement.
Koptiam Kemaman
No. 1, Jalan SS21/60
Damansara Utama
47400 Petaling Jaya
Selangor Darul Ehsan
Tel: 03-77221945
Opens daily from 8am to 12am
DiGi Pimp My Broadband
Sep 25th
Our current broadband situation in Malaysia is seriously getting from bad to worse with no major improvements and yet trying really hard to do a lot of promotions just to pull customers in and hope they won’t be going to the competitors. Have the Internet service providers (ISPs) forgotten to put their customers’ satisfaction first?
A major setback here in Malaysia is that the last mile hasn’t been opened up yet to other providers so there is no way for them to provide wired broadband service to the public. As a result of that, wireless broadband providers be it WiMax or 3G services are coming out like mushrooms. Wireless broadband is pretty handy in many ways such as the portability and with the ever advancing technology; the performance of a wireless broadband is up-to-par.
There are of course many reasons for one to choose wired over wireless. Latency of course is the issue here especially for gamers as they are always looking for the lowest latency possible. The speed on a wired broadband should also be more consistent than a wireless broadband but this is not the case for TMNET Streamyx though.
I believe DiGi’s attempt to make broadband right in Malaysia is heading to the right track. The speed that I was able to get out from DiGi Broadband when I did a test on it was a whopping 5.87mbps of download speed while the upload was at about 490kbps! You do the calculations on how much faster it is compared to other broadband connection for the home users. DiGi as the first Internet service provider to offer a wireless broadband via 3G with HSPA technology is also another advantage as the latency is much lower than what you’ll get on a HSDPA and UMTS. I was able to get an average of 100-150ms to most local servers and compared to HSDPA, the lowest you can go is usually about 200ms.
I wish our Internet connection here in Malaysia will be improved really soon as we now live in a digital world; we rely a lot on the Internet. How many of you had your connection let you down when you needed it the most such as for work or assignment purpose? How many of you experienced the frustration at times when you needed to chill out from stress at work or school, maybe load some videos of YouTube or visit social networking sites such as Facebook and it takes forever to load? I’m sure many of you do and you probably have gotten used to it.
I shall conclude my short writing on the broadband situation here in Malaysia with a short motion graphics I did in conjunction with the DiGi Pimp My Broadband contest titled Broadband Life. Now DiGi, will you pimp my broadband? 
Do vote for me via this link (by clicking the Thumbs up button) if you think that my thoughts and motion graphics is true! You are entitled to vote once per day so you can vote for me once every single day. Retweet this on Twitter as well if you like it! Comments are welcomed too!
