The Nintendo DS Opera Browser

Usually I like to place pictures in every entry on the blog but this time it isn't going to be quite that easy for me. The reason is because I'm using the NDSL's Opera Browser to write this entry.

I only just got the browser and have just started playing with it. I thought that this woud be a good time to test this browser out since I'm currently still working and have a little time to kill but don't have my laptop with me.

I'm currently rather liking this application and even liking it more than the Sony PSP's browser. Of course it has been months since I've gone online on the psp but even then I wasn't particularly in love with the experience.

The biggest beef I had with the psp browser isn't actually the application's fault. It's really a hardware problem. Now, I do think the psp is a good handheld, especially if you like your games to look good but surfing on the internet isn't one of it's better features. The reason is simple. The psp doesn't have touch-screen. This is the biggest reason why I really much prefer the ds when it comes to going online. The touch-screen makes typing out an entry like this a breeze especially when compared to the clunky and time consuming way of doing it on the psp. On the ds, one simply uses the stylus to tap on the screen to spell out words. It is that easy. The psp requires a combination of moving the d-pad or joy-stick and mashing on the A button to type out some thing. Correcting mistakes can be a chore on the psp as you have to move the cursor one letter at a time unlike simply using the stylus to tape at the point where the mistake was made.

There are of course a few cons. The ds opera browser is not free and certainly not cheap. The ds itself does not have enough ram for cacheing so a slot-2 ram cart is necessary to run the application. This is probably why the browser cost more than SGD60 in the shops.

The other imperfection of the browser isn't actually the browser's fault. It is really a hardware problem. The ds's screen isn't really that big and although the dual screen helps, it's still not the most ideal if one wishes to surf for an extended period of time.

Still in the end, I think that if one has the extra cash, want internet access on the go, has access to a wi-fi connection outside your home and owns a ds, this application is certainly worth the money. At the very least, it may help you keep your blog just that little bit more updated. =)

cheers

Photograph - Pinhole 1 - Fixed

Canon EOS 300D - All photos shot in Sichuan, China except for the first two which were shot in Yishun, Singapore.

Hi guys, am uploading the same pix from the previous entry. Discovered that I made a mistake in them. I was suppose to change the hue to give the photos a tint but no matter what I did it didn't seem to make that noticeable a difference. I just discovered that I didn't check the colorize box in the dialogue box, hence no tint. So have fixed it.

I've also been playing around more on photoshop and tried to make something soft-focused. So far have only done one, so check it out if you're interested.


Canon EOS 300D - Emei Mountain, Sichuan, China

enjoy =)

Photography - Pinhole 1

Canon EOS300D - Sichuan, China

Hi guys... been a while since I've posted new photos on the blog. Been so busy with work and learning some of the new Adobe CS3 software that I recently purchased, hence me not really having time to work on anything.

But yesterday was Singapore's National Day and hence, a public holiday. So I took the opportunity to spend some time working on some photos in photoshop. These photos aren't really shot by a pinhole camera. It's really a technique I learnt in a Practical Photography magazine. It's kind of cool even though I don't really know how close I'm getting to actual pinhole photography. =)

Anyway, here they are, hope you enjoy them.



Canon EOS 300D - All the photos, except for the last two, were shot in Sichuan, China. The last two photos were shot in Yishun, Singapore.

cheers

Majulah Singapura

On the 9th of Aug 2007, Singapore turns 42 and as a Singaporean who loves being Singaporean, I felt compelled to commemorate it somewhat. Although I started blogging last year, I didn't really seriously blog till way past National Day so I kind of missed out on expressing my ra-ra feelings and all. =)

Seriously though, I think in general, Singaporeans don't really like to express ra-ra feelings about Singapore most of the year, it feels a little embarrassing and a little too cocky. And it seems so much cooler to be all radical and all when everyone else around you and on the internet seems quite happy to criticize and ridicule Singapore, her lack of democracy, her mindless brainwashed citizens, her crazy national education campaigns, her staid boring exterior and the list goes on. I've heard them all and I've expressed just as many and more similar thoughts.

But once a year, during the period of July and August, many Singaporeans, who normally couldn't be bothered begin to feel a sense of pride in what we've achieved and a feeling of unity of what more we must do for the future of this land we call home, suddenly experience a stirring of emotion deep within for this little red dot on the globe. And although I'm seriously not a very patriotic person, each year when National Day comes around, I do feel all sentimental and all.

Of course I know many Singaporeans who don't feel anything or get all disgusted with the propaganda-ish National Day songs every year during this period but I've also meet many who suddenly feel all touch-feely during this period too and I am one of them.

While I know many who have emigrated from Singapore and love it in their new home, I also know several who made the decision to come home to Singapore and I'm one of them. While I'm not entirely sure if my experience studying, working and living overseas had anything to do with me feeling more mushy about National Day and Singapore, I can't completely discount it either because one of this year's National Day songs really moved me. Penned by Jimmy Ye and sung by Kit Chan, the song "There's No Place I'll Rather Be" really spoke to me. I lived in the States for years but never truly wanted to stay there. My thoughts were always about home and my family. Even Mavis Hee's song "Cheng Li De Yue Guang" would trigger thoughts of home in me and that song isn't even a National Day song and isn't even specific to the city lights of Singapore but I would think of home.

So here it is, from Youtube, Kit's "There's No Place I'll Rather Be". Majulah Singapura (Onward Singapore), Happy 42th Birthday.



enjoy

Sichuan - part 2

Hi guys. Here's the next Sichuan entry. Yes, I know it has been a while but I've been awfully busy, thanks for understanding. =)

Okay, after dinner on the first day of our trip to Sichuan, we were scheduled to watch a musical called Jinsha (金沙) , click here for English version. According to the Sichuan guide Xiao Xin, the musical was staged in Singapore during the Huayi Festival in Singapore. The Huayi Festival (华艺节), the Chinese Festival of Arts, is usually held in Singapore sometime during the early part of the year and is an annual event celebrating Chinese theatre, dance, music and visual arts.

I've not watch a large-scale musical in a theatre since watching Mamma Mia! at the Esplanade in 2004, I think. Xiao Xin (in case you've forgotten, he was my Sichuan guide) said that when Jinsha was staged in Singapore, ticket prices were going for about SGD100, now I'm not sure if what he said is true but from the pictures that I saw of Jinsha in the brochure, this musical looked relatively ambitious and I was looking forward to watching it.



But what I certainly was not prepared for was the theatre culture in China. Now, that's not to say that theatre culture in Singapore is great. I still remember quite clearly an article in the papers about crying babies at a SSO performance and annoying ignorant Singaporeans complaining about not being let in after they arrived late... eh... where have they been? It's been like that for decades and I still remember running like some kind of desperado to try and make it on time 20 years ago at the Victoria Theatre. Anyway, rant aside, the thing I wasn't prepared for was that some people were smoking at the back of the theatre and I had to breathe through my handkerchief for a bit. And get this, after the first half hour, you're allowed to take photos and video of the performance. I actually found the popping flashes distracting and couldn't bring myself to shoot any photos during the performance of a musical that obviously has aspirations to be the Snow Wolf Lake of Hong Kong or Forbbiden City: Portrait of an Empress of Singapore.

The musical itself was quite ambitiously put together and featured several lighting and other special effects which was pleasantly surprising considering the fact that the theatre itself wasn't in tip-top shape and when I first sat down and took a look around the place, I actually felt it was a bit on the shabby side. That said, a lot of thought and effort did go into the visual effects and even though the theatre was on the small side, they managed to create the illusion of grandeur and the sense of the epic nature of this tale.

The music isn't really that great. At least it isn't of the standard of many of the great musicals in the world and not even as memorable as Snow Wolf Lake and Forbidden City which had several powerful signature tunes that stay with you even after the performance. I must say that a lot of effort was put in but unfortunately too many of the songs sounded too similar and felt like an uncomfortable fusion of Chinese pop and Western musical styles. The music isn't terrible but just lacked a little something that's all.

Where this musical does fail is in the story. The story is at once simple yet complicated. It is simple in the sense that it is really in essence the story of a love that transcends time. It is a story of thwarted love over many reincarnated life-times. The backdrop to this love story is the discovery of the Jinsha ruins in Sichuan and the travel back in time to show the audience the lost Kingdom of Sun and how the lovers are torn apart time and again, lifetime after lifetime, till our current time in history.



Unfortunately, what should have been a simple tale of love is complicated by the far too many reincarnated lives and after a while the audience is lost. I know I wasn't the only one going "huh?" when the female character keeps dying only to reappear in some vastly different setting that didn't seem more modern than the previous. If each reincarnation had seem more modern than the previous, I think the audience would have understood that it was a different life. But because each reincarnation was set in yet another fantasy-like world, it made it hard to figure out if it was indeed another lifetime, the same lifetime or just a dream.

It also didn't help that the most interesting characters in the musical aren't the two lovers Sha and Jin. It was the Jester that I liked the best and while Fish, Jin's maid I think, was under-developed, she had an interesting relationship with the Jester and that in turn gave her character just that little bit of depth.



However, that said, the producers of this lavish musical must be applauded for Jinsha has many things going for it and is certainly a good enough production to kick-start this form of theatre in China. And while I didn't think they were entirely successful in trying to fuse Western and Chinese styles in the music, the story-telling and the costume design, yet they did manage to achieve so much that I think that Jinsha will prove to be an important piece of work in the history of modern Chinese theatre.

Jdorama - Nodame Cantabile

Cast of Nodame Cantabile

I think you can easily tell from the title that I've been bitten by the Japanese drama series bug. And although I've neglected this blog because I've been really busy with work, I just felt I needed to write about this series, so here you go... =)

Aside from HK's TVB dramas, some of the stuff made by Mediacorp Singapore and a few Mainland Chinese series, I really don't watch any other types of series made by the Asian TV industries. Even then, the last Jdorama I watched was Shomuni 1, 2 and 3 which I really enjoyed but I was never truly into Jdorama's since I wasn't able to get good recommendations to the kind of Japanese dramas I liked.

How I came upon Nodame Cantabile is actually a little unusual and makes a mildly amusing story. =) Since Elite Beat Agents on the Nintendo DS, I have been hooked on rhythm games and hunted down Ouendan 1 & 2 just so I could play them. In the process of looking for more rhythm games to play on my NDS, I came upon Nodame Cantabile. While EBA and Ouendan used songs from popular music, Nodame Cantabile differed from them because it used only classical music.

Now I really like classical music and my familiarity with it made playing Nodame Catabile the NDS game a breeze. But what made me really fall for the game was the quirky girl that kept showing up in the story parts. In this game, one takes the role of a conductor and tries to conduct a musical piece by taping or performing movements on the touch-pad with the stylus. This quirky girl didn't seem to have too much to do with the music parts but she kept showing up and even though I didn't have a clue what they were saying to each other, I pretty much figured out she lived in a messy room and made a lot of cute quirky sounds. Now it sounds silly but I for some reason, really liked her character in the game.

So just last week I was in TS video shop when I saw Nodame Cantabile the TV series being sold on DVD. I didn't even have a clue then that Nodame Cantabile was first a manga before it was made into a hit TV series, an anime series and a video game. For some strange reason, I was drawn to the series and the prospect of finding out just exactly what this quirky girl with the funny expressions story was and so I bought the series.

What I definitely didn't expect was just how wonderful this series turned out to be. The series has a cast of quirky characters that are not just for laughs but who influence each other and the story, giving this series depth and warmth. This series is heartwarming without being maudlin. The exaggerated manga/anime-ish moments are also well thought out as they aren't use merely for laughs but also to take off some of the edge of the serious moments so that the series isn't weighed down by melodrama. The background music is mostly comprised of classical music which is very well used and the music is so striking that I do consider the music to be one of the stars of this series. Many of the orchestra performances are also very nicely setup and really do bring across just how grand and moving a live performance can be.

It really helped that this series was very well cast and although Ueno Juri isn't the lead in this series, she played Noda Megumi with so much passion, energy and charm, and so perfectly that without her, I don't think Nodame Cantabile would have been superb series that it is. That's not to say that Tamaki Hiroshi who plays Chiaki Shinichi the protagonist in this series was bad. He was really good too. He was very convincing as the arrogant, very talented and at the beginning very self-absorbed music student. And Tamaki Hiroshi needed to be good because even though this series is titled Nodame Cantabile, the series isn't about Nodame (aka Noda Megumi). Although it is Nodame's love for music and life that influences Chiaki Shinichi and changes him, the story is really about him, his growth as a person and a musician and how the influences of not only Nodame but also Mine, Masumi and a hold host of other people help him to in turn influence them and others to seek out the best in themselves.


Eita as Mine Ryutaro and Mizukawa Asami as Miki Kiyora

Other notable characters and actors in this cast are Eita (plays Mine Ryutaro - violin), Koide Keisuke (Okuyama Masumi - timpani) and my personal favourite among the secondary cast, Mizukawa Asami (plays Miki Kiyora - violin). And yes, the only reason for this paragraph is because I just had to mention them. =) Truth is a lot of the supporting cast is very good, suitably cast and quite memorable.


Support cast

If you love classical music and heartwarming stories about love and friendship, then I urge you to check out Nodame Cantabile the TV series, it is that good. =)

cheers
p.s. now I'll have to hunt down the manga and the anime. =)

A Change of Destiny 天機算 (TVB) - review

copyright TVB

Before I left for Vietnam, I finished A Change of Destiny. I'll try and keep this review relatively short as the truth is there is virtually nothing good to say about this disastrous 20-episode series. TVB's track record this year has been pretty dismal. And although I've yet to see all the series released, I have seen the majority of them and most of them have been frustratingly below par.

So back to this series. This is probably as bad as Devil's Disciples in its aimlessness. The script lacked focus and showed a lack of ideas, research and worst... effort.

It's a real pity as I felt that this series had some potential but far too much time was spent on setting up the relationships and the personalities of each of the major characters. While this is important, it really doesn't take more than half the series to set up the protagonists' personalities and history with each other. Seriously, I don't think I need to see 15 episodes of the two main male characters Yip Yeung (Benny Chan Ho Man who was horribly annoying and really over-acting in this series) and Yuen Hei (Steven Ma Jun Wai 馬浚偉) being idiotically juvenile for me to know that they are immature and that Yip Yeung is a bratty rich kid while Yuen Hei is a poor kid who wants more.

This series also suffers from a very common TVB series failing and that is the over emphasis on the romance in the series. Now if this was a romance or romantic comedy or a typical idol series, the concentration on the trials and tribulations suffered by the various couples would not only be fine but warranted. But A Change of Destiny isn't a romance and by placing so much emphasis on the silly romance and worse, the more juvenile aspects of romance, it only makes this series seem either devoid of ideas or lazily scripted.

The characters in this series are also terribly badly written and they change at will depending on where the writer feels he wants the story to go. With 20 episodes to play with, it is appalling that the writers/producers of this series didn't make better use of it to focus on character development so as to better illustrate the theme of this series. It just won't do to have characters like Yip Yeung and Yuen Hei flip-flop without any proper explanation as to how or why their characters change the way they do, or how their relationship with each other can change so drastically. They go from enemies to friends in the space of one scene. Just giving the viewers one scene to say that they are in a similar predicament and hence, begin to feel sympathy for each other after episodes on end of them hating each others guts just doesn't cut it. It is difficult for the viewer to figure out just how and why they would begin helping each other out.

Yip Yeung and Yuen Hei's characters are horribly contradictory and while I know the writer hopes to show that these are imperfect characters, his decision to place too much emphasis on their juvenile and immature antics and rivalry for a good part of the series gives them so much imperfection that it is difficult to reconcile the better parts of these men's characters with their worse halves. And in the end, they come across more ridiculous than imperfect.

It doesn't make it easier when the series introduces unrealistic and inconsistent characters like Princess Fei Fung (Mimi Lo) and her maid Sum Yi (Selena Li Sze Wan 李詩韻). While they do try and setup the fact that Princess Fei Fung is an atypical princess, she has so little princess in her character that she's more like just a girl from a rich family which lends little credibility to her character. Her maid Sum Yi doesn't fare much better. She is at times too streetwise to be a palace maid and at times so naive and pure that she seems like the typical cloistered maid of the imperial palace. Sum Yi, like the rest of this series, makes very little sense.

In the end, the only characters I feel favorably for are Fok Yi Na (Shirley Yeung Si Kei 楊思琦), Li Sing Tin (Yuen Wah 元華) and Yuen Zi Yan (Rebecca Chan Sau Chu 陳秀珠). Although, I usually find Yuen Wah more annoying than effective in most TVB series, his Li Sing Tin is a good person and his actions are relatively well explained and can be easily understood. The same goes for Fok Yi Na and Yuen Zi Yan's characters. But these characters aren't the focus in this series and they aren't even that memorable and hence, aren't able to add too much to this dismal series at all.

It is a real pity that the executive producer of this series didn't exercise better control of this series. It really did have the potential to explore the greater themes of fate, destiny and free will. It is also the perfect opportunity to introduce audiences to one of China's lesser known mystical books, the Tui Bei Tu (推背圖), loosely translated as "Back Pushing Diagrams". Click here and here for more info.

The series begins by detailing the historical backdrop for the series and introducing the audience to a lesser known Chinese book of divination and prophecy called the Tui Bei Tu. The reason why I call it a lesser known book is because the book that most people know is the I Ching. The easiest way to describe the Tui Bei Tu is to say that it is like a Chinese version of a book written by Nostradamus. It is a book about prophecy and it is as open to interpretation as the prophecies written by Nostradamus.

The basic question this series asks is if one can use these traditional Chinese methods of divination to try and predict the future and to change one's fate. Several characters are obsessed with trying to change their fate by either predicting the future using the existing signs or trying to manipulate things and people so as to swing things in their favour.

So the series begins the story in the Tang Dynasty and first introduces to audiences the joint creators of the Tui Bei Tu, Li Chun Feng 李淳風 and Yuen Tian Gang 袁天罡. The series then briefly talks about how these two men became bitter rivals and how the Tui Bei Tu was then divided between the men and passed on to their descendants. The Li family held on to the diagrams while the Yuen family held on to the inscriptions for each of the 60 diagrams. Without the pairing of the two parts, it would be impossible to decipher the prophecies. With that, the Li family and the Yuen family parted ways and they also agreed that their two families will have nothing to do with each other in the future. Now as we all know, in any story, this wouldn't do and so naturally, their descendents do meet and everyone from Song Emperor Zhao Guang Yin to Yip Yeung would like a piece of it.

Now in the series, Li Shing Tin holds the diagrams and Yuen Zi Yan holds the inscriptions and the key to unlocking the secret of the Tui Bui Tu. While looking for his long-lost wife and daughter, Li Shing Tin will take on Yuen Hei as his disciple and he will also meet Yip Yueng. What is interesting about Yuen Hei and Yip Yeung is that the two young men are born on the exact same day and at the exact same time. Yuen Hei is thus puzzled and dissatisfied that he should be an orphan and poor while Yip Yeung is a rich and spoilt young man. The question that Yuen Hei wants the answer to is if Yip Yeung and him have the exact same horoscopes, then how is it that he doesn't live a better life. Yuen Hei wants Li Shing Tin to help him to change his destiny. Meanwhile, Yip Yeung will face several trials later in the series and he too will want to change his destiny.

So the stage is set for the opportunity to discuss more interesting issues like whether a man's life and future is beholden to powers beyond him or if a man's destiny lies in his own hands. The series makes a few feeble attempts to answer the various interesting questions they bring up but all these attempts are quickly squashed under the weight of poor scripting, characterization and plot progression. And while the series does try and reach for a more powerful ending by suggesting that Yip Yueng and Yuen Hei's destinies lie in the decisions they make, still it is too little too late as these more important plot points come far too late in the series and they are surrounded by too much inconsistency in the plot and the characters for the series to make any significant statements about the questions it asks.

What a pity, what a waste. In short, do not rent this series. It's certainly not worth the money nor perhaps the amount of time I took to write this longer than expected review. =)