Imagine this. You’re McGyver, and ninjas have you cornered in an office. So you pull out your Swiss knife, and fashion a giant slingshot out of the carpet and the leather from the office chairs. You then use the office cleaning detergents to make an explosive chemical to blast them away, and finally, you boot a computer out of an image you burned into your 1gb. USB drive to set it up with your OS and fave applications so you can blog about it as well!!
Hooray!!!
I believe that every good looking Hollywood actor eventually has a ‘suit movie’. In a ‘suit movie’, he gets to look great in a expensive looking suit. Robert Redford did his in ‘Indecent Proposal‘. Richard Gere did his in ‘Pretty Woman‘. George Clooney had his in Ocean’s Eleven and Intolerable Cruelty. Andy Garcia has the Godfather III. I can name countless more.
For me, Antonio Banderas ‘suit movie’ is ‘Take The Lead’, where he gets to wear nice talian threads in this movie adaptation of the true experiences of Ballroom great Pierre Dulaine, as he takes his love for dancing from the studios to the streets, via a ‘Dancing Classroom’ outreach program which had since been implemented in almost 7,500 elementary schools in New York.
The key word of course being ‘adaptation’, the most obvious sign of which, is that the students in the film are in high school, while the outreach program dealt with elementary school kids. To me, this meant that once the producers bought the license for the story, and the rights to do whatever they wished with it, pretty much every need to remain true to the story goes out the window.
So while Banderas and high school crew go through the ups and downs of their relationships with each other, dealing with such things as drugs, prostitution and such, Mr. Dulaine’s most difficult experiences may well have just been the need to occasionally keep his elementary kids’ from putting bubblegum into each other’s hair, or chasing around each other on a big wooden dancefloor. The variations of what may had truly transpired and what the studio writers produced are unlimited, and this bothered me somewhat.
Having said that, all is of course not lost, as the writers can still come up with a good movie. At this, however, they failed.
.. and conversely, Tip to coffee shops with wifi: Tell them to.
This was bound to happen. A 20 year old man in Washington, US was charged with “theft of services” after mooching off of a coffee shop’s free internet access for three months without buying anything.
“He doesn’t buy anything,” Emily Pranger, the shop’s manager, told KATU, a Portland, Ore. television station. “It’s not right for him to come and use it.”
Smith allegedly parked his truck in the parking lot to use Brewed Awakenings’ wireless access.
Continue reading Tip to CoffeeShop Wifi freeloaders: Buy Something
Press Release:
DUE to the unprecedented success of last year’s “Sine Totoo,” GMA Network is once again bringing the best of its news and public affairs programs to the big screen.
Wanting only the best for its loyal viewers, the network now gears up for a bigger and more spectacular second year offering – the “Sine Totoo Weekend” which will be held from June 24-25 at SM Megamall Cinema 4, as part of GMA’s 56th anniversary celebration.
Get the chance to personally meet some of the biggest names in GMA News and Public Affairs – Mike Enriquez, Jessica Soho, Arnold Clavio, Vicky Morales, Howie Severino, Kara David, Jay Taruc, Sandra Aguinaldo, Jiggy Manicad, Maki Pulido, Rhea Santos, Ivan Mayrina, Paolo Bediones, and Miriam Quiambao.
In the I-like-my-blog-readership-just-the-way-it-is-thank-you-very-much department, here’s some interesting local blogger news. PDI showbiz columnist Dolly Ann Carvajal recently mentioned a row between local showbiz hottie Alicia Mayer and the bouncer of a bar in Makati, article here.
A local blogger happened to have observed the incident, and blogged about it at length. Someone then informed Ms. Carvajal re said blogpost, which she duly posted on her column, complete with the blogger’s URL.
Local blogger upon realizing this, took down her post and had this to say:
The UK based Inquirer website (not our local Inq7.net!) reports “Vista Torrent site ordered to cease and desist”, with the subheading “What happens when you try to help Microsoft out“.]
I blogged about Vistatorrent.com last week. You can read their official statement here, where they post the letter from a MS representative “Internet Investigator”.
from the Inquirer article:
Chris and Jack thought that they were doing a good thing, especially after a spokesVole (referring to a post on the MS website) said, “Demand for Beta 2 has been huge – which was expected. But we are hitting ceilings on bandwidth. Right now we are serving out product keys 10x faster than we can serve the downloads. Already this is the biggest software download event in history. We are pumping out bits as fast as we can. If we pushed out bits any faster there would be a measureable impact for the Internet”.
Continue reading Vistatorrent.com to MS : But we just wanted to help!
Truly radical new thing in computing? Or just another ‘cool thing to have’? I’ve seen this 4 month old vid twice and over, and my conclusion: this commercial isn’t very good at telling us what it actually does.
Which means I wanna find out, and therefore wanna give it a spin. So I guess the commercial worked! Anyway, check it out yourself:
I talked about how Google Calendar can help folks promote stuff the other day, and I got an example available at my movie blog, Movie Exchange.
Some notes:
Cinema One @ 12: Still Celebrating Filipino Movies at its Finest (Focus on Digital Movies)
Celebrating 12 years as the leading cable movie channel, Cinema One pays tribute to the glorious past of Philippine movies and probes into the latest trend in the movie industry, Digital Filmmaking, with Classic Na, Orig Pa Anniversary movie event, which will run from June 21-25 ( Wednesday to Sunday) simultaneously at SM Megamall and SM Manila.
Classic Na, Orig Pa is a film festival which features the best movies of Philippine movie icons like Fernando Poe, Jr., Dolphy, Nora Aunor, Vilma Santos, along with the first theatrical showing of the highly-successful 2005 Cinema One Originals: Mark Gary’s Sandalang Bahay which stars Albert Martinez, Ronnie Lazaro, Nonie Buencamino,a moving movie about a family’s struggle to confront the secrets of their past; Liza Cornejo’s Sitak that features Chanda Romero, Lou Veloso, Gerry Cornejo, a film about seeing the world in a more positive outlook and giving downslopes in life second chances in a story of corporate man turned taxy driver; Topel Lee’s Dilim starring Rica Peralejo, Emilio Garcia, Mario Magallona,about a probing feature on a vigilante who is a kind-hearted manananggal struggling with his existence both as a human and a creature from the Third World; Dennis Marasigan’s Sa North Diversion Road which stars John Arcilla and Irma Adlawan, a movie which focuses on a couple on a road trip as they talk freely and bluntly about a man’s infidelity; Sigfried Barros Sanchez’s Ang Anak Ni Brocka starring Gina Alajar, Philip Salvador, Bembol Roco, Jacklyn Jose, Geoff Eigenmann, Nonie Buencamino, a dramatic search on the true identity of a male teen who tries to figure out if he really is the acclaimed director Lino Brocka’s son; and Jon Red’s Anak ng Tinapa which features Ryan Eigenmann, China Cojuangco, Atong Redillas, Ping Medina, a realistic documentary-style film about two corrupt cops exposed by a group of filmmakers.
Complete Schedules after the jump.
Finally had time to reformat and reinstall the other day, and discovered some amazing revelations. First, I’m still very much a geek, writer aspirations and others aside, and I still actually find such a thing as reformatting and reinstalling apps on my PC exciting. Sad really, and cause to ponder for some I’m sure, but there it is.
Second, I have a healthy 68% dependence on free applications (yay!), and a consistent 31% reliance on proprietary ones (boo!), albeit the latter, diminishing over the years (yay-boo!)
To wit, the installations I’ve installed so far: