PC Fair used to be a place where you can get some nice deals, and see some nice gear on sale. But... in recent years it has just devolved into nothing might just a great big waste of time since things aren't any cheaper at PC Fair, in fact there're instances where things are more expensive then what you can get at Low Yat. While it is true that you get more freebies at PC Fair, you have to ask yourself if it's worth the time and effort of getting over to KLCC and making your way through the crowd.

So.. I made this short video detailing the PC Fair experience. It's short and boring... kinda like going to PC Fair yourself.

It's time for another Marauderz movie rants, this time for the current Best Movie Of The Year candidate Inception. Ok... so for those of you who are still planning to see this movie, you need to stop reading NOW.

Ok...

Seriously.. this is the last line of spoiler warning I'm giving you.

Ok... let's go. Here are my rants about the movie that everyone seems to be calling bloody fantastic.

• Cost Of Dying In The Virtual World - When I heard of the basic premise of the movie, I immediately brought up a list of things one would put in a movie like this, on top of that list. YOU DIE IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD, YOU ARE SCREWED. My thoughts were put at ease in the beginning when they said that dying would just wake the guy up, but HELLO... SUPER STRONG DRUGS FTW!!! I'm personally super sick of the notion that if someone made some kind of virtual world system which you plug into and experience that they wouldn't TRIPLE check it to make sure that a hard disconnect wouldn't just leave you disoriented.
• Spending a lifetime in a shared dream - Wow.. what a great concept... spend a lifetime in a dream, building the world with your every thoughts. But wait a sec! Weren't we told that the subconscious projections, the white blood cells, they're able to sense the intruder, and even if they aren't highly trained military assassins whose aiming is as good as a storm trooper, they'd just maul you to death like a pack of zombies. Of course... some would argue that limbo is DEEEEEEEEEEP within the subconscious and thus there are no projections. Ok... that leads me to the other rant
• A lifetime to build a world with your imagination - You spend 50 FARKING YEARS in a virtual world which you can mold with your VERY THOUGHTS, and all you could come up with was a plain cityscape that Wall-E could have made? COME ON!!!! A couple of dreamers... happily in love with each other (at least in the oh... first 10 years?), able to build with their VERY THOUGHTS!  And all we get are plain, gray skyscrapers?!?! Gheezzz.. where's the giant Ferris wheel the size of KL Towers (at least) Where's the weird buildings which... oh... never mind I want this to stay PG... SEE!!! I just put a picture of a structure which you could build in your imagination... But what do we get with this pair of idiots? Skyscrapers... plain..  gray... skyscrapers..
• Tourists - "I need to come with you to ensure you done the deed" First of all... you CAN'T ensure the deed, after all. They're supposed to be planting an idea, how it actually matures from there you can't guarantee that. Second of all, You didn't actually witness the deed cause you were DEAD! SLEEPING! LIMBO!!! Oh whatever...
• The Ending - Like my brother said the moment De Caprio pulled out the top "As if you didn't see that coming!" The top kept spinning at the end. Here's how that ending could have been made much much better, and all it would take is just a few more seconds, show the top wobbling yet about to fall, but doesn't. Then get someone to knock it over. You can STILL build a sequel from that if you wanted to but at least it's much better a book end. Oh.. that little after piss shake the top does seconds before the fade to black doesn't count.

First Avatar... now this, why do I have this feeling I won't be able to

On a side note, there was a little scene over at GSC Tropicana City where a father who brought in bread for his child to eat got acosted by the staff on their no outside food rule. Dad got so pissed he flattened the bread, mom got scared, son was heard screaming that he didn't want to go in and watch the movie anymore.. Seriously GSC... it's just for the kid. COME ON lar!!!

The Secret Of Lousiana is a restaurant located in Plaza Kelana Jaya.

It's main claim to fame around my office was the fact that they offered an interesting package of all you can eat Spaghetti for lunch for only RM15.

So today I went with my colleagues to try out and see how good the Secret is.

We got there, gave our orders and waited. It seemed like a very busy restaurant since I could see the waiters constantly shuffling in and out with food. Most probably because of their all you can eat package. After a while the food for my colleagues came, and I was left waiting...

And waiting....

And waiting...

I reached there about 12:30PM, I waited until about 2PM. NO FOOD IS WORTH WAITING FOR ONE AND A HALF HOURS! We asked for the bill and when the waiter came I told them to cut off my set, since I DIDN'T FARKING EAT MY MEAL!

It would seem like the secret to learning the Secret Of Louisiana starts with NOT GOING ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON! The person in charge was typically apologetic when I wanted to cancel my order, but I'm still pissed off because..

1. My colleagues all got their food, why wasn't mine done?
2. It seemed like they ran out of Bolognaise sauce or something since I heard some other people  asking for their Spaghetti Bolognaise. If you knew you had a problem, shouldn't you have let the customer know that there might be some problems with their order instead of letting them STARVE?!?!

So after wasting my time, and parking fees, and on the verge of fainting due to an hunger (I was ready for a buffet man, for PLATES OF SPAGHETTI... I GOT ZERO.. ZERO!!!) I still was unable to figure out the Secret Of Louisana.

In the end, the only secret I learnt was that:- Queuing up for McDonald's doesn't take 1.5 hours.

Just got a disturbing message from my cousin, someone walked up to him in a Starbucks and ask if he could borrow his notebook for some Facebooking. Not to mention he wanted to plug in a thumbdrive to do something. My cousin sent him packing on his way, but he just kept going around asking people for access to their PCs. If you haven't already figured it out yet, you shouldn't let strangers use your PCs, and allowing them to plug their thumbdrives into your system could be just allow them to get a trojan into your system. So remember.

DON'T LET STRANGERS USE YOUR PC!

My main desktop workhorse PC was having a weird problem. After leaving it idle for a while, Windows Explorer wouldn't respond until I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up task manager and then it'd behave properly. And for a few days I couldn't figure out what was wrong, I didn't install anything on the system, I wonder if it was a virus or trojan that sneaked in from the other PCs.

Then... just now.. I saw IT.. the SCROLL FORWARD button on the wireless mouse had caved in, most probably due to the fact that WZ or mommy kicks it off the sofa every now and then. I pried the button back out, then did a test by holding the the button. Yup... when the button was held down, Windows Explorer just stops responding.

So... WHY was I experiencing the problem only AFTER the system went idle? I have this theory. On idle without movement, the mouse shuts down then when I wake it up by moving the mouse it sends the FORWARD BUTTON down message constantly to the PC, and when I pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring out the task manager it killed the message being sent to Explorer and thus I regained control.

Hard to believe one stupid button caused so much problems.

One of the things I felt was a problem with my blog was that the comments were disconnected from any sort of notification since.. well I didn't sign up for anything like that anyway. And lo and behold, Facebook goes and makes some nice commenting plugins that allows any Facebook user to comment and well.. it'll be easier to get in touch with people who are commenting I guess.

This shouldn't slow down the page TOO MUCH, just increase the bandwidth consumed.. hahahaha.

EDIT: Ok.. interesting.. if I put the comment box in the front page, the posts to the news stream would not have any link info at all. Therefore I changed my custom DasBlog macro so that on the front page it only shows the LIKE button which points to the exact link of the post, and when people are viewing the actual post THEN only the comment box appears.

I had one hell of a night yesterday, first of all at around 1AM I saw a very pissed off wife run outside the house. For those unfamiliar with Chinese customs 22nd Feb was the night where some special prayers would be done by some chinese.

And someone in our neighbourhood were launching thunderclaps NON STOP from 12AM to 1AM, and everytime one of those thing’s screeched through the sky, it’d wake up the dog behind my house, and more importantly it’d woke up my wife. So instead of letting her go postal on the people I decided to take it upon myself to find the source of the disturbance and take care of it.

I found the source which was a house a couple of blocks away from mine, there were 2 kids constantly setting off the things while their parents looked on. I appealed to their community spirit and asked them to stop. Luckily they complied, and I went back home to sleep.

Until I heard the dogs barking and someone banging on the window of the side room where my maid used to sleep in. Through the tinted kitchen window I saw a man walking around the back of the house. My father scared him off by screaming at him from behind the window, at which point I ran outside to see if he dropped anything and I found this in the drain.

At first I thought this was a condom wrapper from afar, but it turns out to be chewing tobacco according to friends who can read the words. Now I’m just afraid if the person will return and try to take any action against our house since we pissed him off..

sigh…

After how everyone who went to saw the movie was twitting about how great the film was, bla bla bla. I finally caught Avatar today and boy was I disappointed! I wasn't expecting cinematic gold here but I was so surprised when Dances With Wolves kept coming up in my head as I was watching the movie. As my brother mentioned this was from the "Go Native" formulae of the movie playbook. ie. Guy comes from one advanced background, joins up with native people, learns to love the land, love the chick, then choose to fight against his own people.

Ooops, did I just spoil the movie for you? It's not like you wouldn't have seen how the story was going to end coming from a mile away.

From my twits I can see how people keep talking about how great the graphics are, and how James Cameron DESIGNED AN ENTIRE WORLD to fit the story in. I play next gen video games so seeing entire lush beautiful worlds that have been DESIGNED for the story? I see them all the time.

Since the pretty pictures can't distract me from concentrating on the story. Here are my nitpicks following in the vein of my Star Trek nitpick post. Oh yeah... stop reading if you want to try and spot them yourself.

• The humans keep talking about how dangerous the planet and the people are. It makes you think that the humans have been fighting the Navi for at least 10 years. (one way trip to Pandora takes about 5 years) But considering the technology gap (We're talking poisoned arrows vs armour plating here) and the WAAAAYY too well equipped military force the humans have you'd have to wonder why the humans haven't already WIPED THE NAVI OUT!! ALL OF THEM!
• Since they were talking about how dangerous the Navi are... do we hear of Navi raiding parties on the mines? Do we see guerilla assaults on the mines by the Navi?
• It is mentioned the Navi are hard to kill, hmmm a few bullets seem to do the trick. When the humans were fighting the battle never once did you see this Navi that's pretty hard to kill actually getting an upper hand.
• Rape a dragon into submission so you can ride it... What a nice way to put it. (Why rape? Our censors spared it for us but think about the hair connector for a second. First time Sully plays with it Grace says "You'll go blind if you touch it" The act of connecting 2 connectors is called a link. If there was a way for 2 creatures to share a bond greater than physical, how do you think they'll have sex?)
• A venerable FLEET of flying dragons vs a FLEET of helicopters with vulnerable propellers, and the best tatic Mr Marine could come up with was slam into them and hope you can toss the helis aside? I was expecting death from above, rocks, tree trunks... Heck.. even the Ewoks tried to throw rocks at AT-STs! I can't believe I just said the Ewoks are better than something!
• "We are familiar with these lands" but instead of planting traps to try and entrap the giant mech suits approaching your hideout. You decide that the best tactic against mobile artillery with escorts is a cavalry charge? But you don't even have HORSE ARMOUR!
• Against an enemy that's holding out in an OPEN AREA, you decide that even though you have SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGICAL advantage against your enemies you'll just charge straight into their front door and BOMB THE PLACE TO HELL! Even though you know that that area is strategically disadvantages to you. You have SPACE FLIGHT capability, ever heard of Orbital Bombardment or heck just mere Kinetic Bombardment. You want shock and awe? Isn't a MESSAGE FROM THE SKIES shock enough?!?

Yes.. I'm just disappointed with the flick.

ps. In case you're wondering I didn't lookup on anything about the movie before watching in. So I had no preexpectations of it.

This is a pack of instant noodles that is just so WRONG!

1. It's BAH KUT TEH flavored!!! How can something that's cooked with about 11 herbs and spices be distilled into powdered soup mix? That is just wrong!
2. On the pack itself it says it's SUITABLE FOR VEGETARIANS!! But it's BAH KUT TEH!!!
3. There's a HALAL certification sticker on the main pack (It comes in a pack of 4)!! That's just so wrong!!

But, the main question is obviously how does it taste? It doesn't taste horrible, and if you had a craving for bah kut teh in the middle of the night and you're too lazy to go out and get some. Yup... this will satisfy your taste buds.

It's still so wrong though...

Why do I have the urge to get more?

Must be the damn MSG.

What follows is a detailed list of the various plot holes in the Star Trek reboot movie, do not read if you want to watch the movie and not be spoiled.