I’m not an Apple fanboi by any means but I’ve been fantasizing about the iPad since it was announced. I think people who diss it for “not being as good as a laptop” are really missing the point – it’s not meant to replace your iPhone, or MacBook, but fill in its own niche.
I remember subscribing to TIME for three years when I was in university. Looked forward to every issue, loved the photographs, but at the end of it, there was a huge stack of old issues I had to throw away and the pages had turned yellow and I had to go hunt through 150 magazines for an article I wanted to read again. Its potential to simply replace books, board games, and PSPs is something I’m excited about.
First try to get one has been the Big Apple Donashi contest which has the iPad as a grand prize.
Which is quite a challenge; I’m not sure how people get such fast times when by the time the images load, 2s have already passed! Maybe I need to play this on UniFi.
The most recent one that the Nuffnang office has been talking about is the Munchy’s Music contest which is offering an iPad too (and is a 32GB version to boot).
It basically asks you to create a music video centered around the wafer. Quite a few cool entries so far.
Actually why am I even blogging this if raising awareness about contests means more competition? Hm.
A death anniversary, that is. Morbid maybe, yet for some reason I think it is fitting.
Michael Jackson was the embodiment of the music industry: no need to bother with a squeaky-clean image (Chris Brown), or pretend to be our moral guardians (Tiger Woods). MJ was as weird as they come, and maybe we’ll never figure out why: vitiligo? An oppressed childhood? Pressure to be white?
At the end of the day no one could have brought us songs like Man in the Mirror or Smooth Criminal. His influence is all over MTV today, and he’s taken his place among the greats of music. He’d have been happy with this. A more cynical person would say he was already past his prime, I think we can agree though that he’d given us more than enough. How many other artists could have given us enough great songs to make a day-long tribute?
As the DJ was saying on the radio this morning: Whoo-hoo!
Tags: death, king of pop, man in the mirror, michael jackson, mj, smooth criminal
Got a Blackberry for work some time back and have been simply loving it. Typing on a QWERTY keyboard, especially on one as great as the Berry’s, makes me much more productive.
I was on a prepaid plan, using the Berry only for data with my old SE phone for calls, which worked well at first but it soon got tiresome switching between two phones. Switching to my old phone to SMS only reminded me how much faster typing on the Berry was. And I had a tendency to forget to bring both phones out with me. So I realized it was time to use my Berry for both voice and data.
Only problem here was that my then-current postpaid provider, had a seriously bad data package for the Blackberry:
You read that right: RM40/mo for 5MB and RM55/mo for 10MB, with unlimited data at RM120. Seriously, RM55 for 10MB? I didn’t even have to pay that much in the old dial-up Internet days. Blackberry email compression is good but not that good; I had a tool running that estimated my usage per month to be around 400MB.
I double checked with customer care and confirmed that this was in fact the only postpaid data plan available for the Berry. Why it’s annoying is that if I weren’t on a Blackberry, the typical data plan would only be RM58/mo for 500MB of data. I realize there might be licensing fees and all, but RM55/mo for 10 measly MB just doesn’t cut it.
Even so, I waited quite a few months to see if any new Blackberry plans would come up (as Carol was also on Maxis), but to no avail. I’m a little puzzled at this as Celcom and DiGi have been heavily promoting their own Blackberry plans.
DiGi recently came up with a brilliant smartphone plan:
Not only does it have a flat rate of RM68/mo for data charges, voice and SMS are made on a pay-as-you-use basis so there’s no monthly commitment (although you can still subscribe to a fixed plan for a better charge rate). Perfect for people like me who don’t call out much.
The icing on the cake is that if your total bill comes up to more than RM100, you get an RM17 rebate (25% of the data charge) off your bill, and if it comes up to more than RM200, you get an RM68 rebate (100% of the data charge). And according to DiGi, this is the total bill, meaning you only need to spend RM32 to get the initial rebate!
For Blackberry users, it also includes tethering (their old RM58 plan didn’t).
Other bonuses for me were:
1) Free Friends and Family subscription
2) DiGi doesn’t have “bill shock” if you are using data without a plan – you are capped at RM5/day. This is a huge thing, my sister on a supplementary line landed me RM40 in data charges in a few hours on Maxis after I gave her my old phone and she downloaded a few pictures – we never expected data charges could be so high!
3) RM5 rebate if you subscribe to auto-billing
4) If you exceed the Fair Usage Cap on the data plan, you don’t get more “bill shock”, DiGi throttles your speed to EDGE speed instead (which is moot since my Berry doesn’t have 3G :P ).
The DG Smart plan is pretty much the phone plan to get if you are using a smartphone right now (and yes, if you already have an iPhone, you can switch to this plan). I know a lot of people who have already made the switch, and you should seriously consider it if you use a smartphone. DiGi is just much cheaper for Blackberry plans compared to Maxis. I feel dumb for taking so long – I was using my Berry as a netbook instead of a smartphone!
Tags: bill shock, blackberry, data plan, dg smart plan, digi, dumbphone, maxis, postpaid, smartphone
From Lim Kit Siang’s blog:
Sucks that our hard-earned tax money goes to helping this smug bastard pretend it’s his to dole out as he pleases.
I’m proud of all Sibu-ans for giving this idiot the middle finger. It’s your fucking job to fix floods, not use it as a bribe.
Tags: By-election, corruption, Malaysia, najib, Politics, Sibu, You help me I help you
The Invention of Lying
“Thou shalt not lie“, the commandment goes, but have you ever stopped to wonder what the world would be like if no one ever told lies?
The Invention of Lying explores this premise with vigour. Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais from The Office) lives in an alternate reality where people are genetically unable to lie. Dates tell you that there will be no second date because you’re not good-looking enough, couples bluntly point out their partner’s flaws, co-workers bitch about you to your face, and a Coke advertisement features a man proclaiming “I work for Coke. I’m asking you to keep buying Coke… it’s pretty much just brown sugar water”. As there obviously cannot be any actors in this world, movies feature people reading from textbooks.
Very conspicuous also is the absence of all religions.
You’ll spend the first half of the film in stitches, but there’s a message here about why lying isn’t necessarily bad.
When Mark turns out to have a genetic malfunction that allows him to lie, hilarity ensues as no one in the world has the capacity to see through him. He unwittingly founds religion when consoling his dying mother, with profound consequences.
Mark founds religion
The film unfortunately devolves into sappy romantic fare towards the end (I hate you Jennifer Garner!), but it’s a sterling example of how comedy can be smart. One of those movies you need to watch in your lifetime. 9/10
500 Days of Summer
500 Days of Summer is a 2009 indie hit that tells an unconventional love story.
“Unconventional” here being a bit misleading – 500 Days is unconventional in a pool of cliched romantic comedies that Hollywood throws at us year in, year out, but why most people love this film is because it is honest about how conventional relationships can be less than perfect.
The story unfolds nonlinearly as Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) reminisces about his ended relationship with Summer (the lovely Zooey Deschanel). The early days of discovery and wonder intersperse with the later events of frustration, and ultimately, drifting apart.
500 days is that love story in between the love stories, where she ultimately admits that love was “what I was never sure of with you”, and does more than other love stories with exaggerated obstacles of wars, social status, feuding families etc do, to tell us that love isn’t always simple and easy. 9/10
Okuribito (Departures)
Finally got round to watching this after missing the GSC international film screening. Daigo is a failed cellist from Tokyo who leaves for the country with his wife. Jobless and desperate, he takes up a job as a nōkanfu (encoffiner). He learns to deal with the social stigma of the job, while beginning to appreciate the closure that the encoffinment ceremonies give to the bereaved.
Japanese films can sometimes seem too drawn-out and arty (i.e. boring), but in Okuribito it fits the theme. A compelling insight to how people handle death, and how it’s compassion that makes the difference. Okuribito was the 2009 Academy Award winner for best Foreign Language film. 8/10
Alice in Wonderland (3D)
Honestly with all the hype surrounding Johnny Depp and the lopsided promotional material (Why is Depp in the center? Just call it Depp in Wonderland then!), I was quite apprehensive when I stepped into the cinema. And to be honest, I never got round to reading Carroll’s book, so the only knowledge I had was from the old Disney cartoon.
It seems like Tim Burton allowed for this though, as all the characters seemed immediately familiar, from the harried Rabbit to the engimatic Absolem, and the grinning Cheshire Cat. Helena Bonham Carter deserves mad kudos as the egomanical Red Queen. I can’t say as much for Anne Hathaway, am I the only one who found her lipstick-enhanced smile to be scary? Mia Wasikowska made for a decently delicate Alice, while Depp’s Mad Hatter was a bit overbearing (I’m sure girls will differ).
For all the inspired art direction of the film and characters though – it’s one of those films you absolutely need to see in 3D – the storyline read like a bad rojak rehash of Narnia. What is it with dressing kids/teens up in armour and slaying big bad creatures? 6/10
Up in the Air
What puzzles me about this movie is why George Clooney got an Oscar nomination for it – his confident, suave character is essentially an extension of himself. Which is not to say he was bad though.
The storyline is tight and well-written, with nary a moment of slack. Ryan Bingham (Clooney) is a high-flying executive whose job is to fire people whose bosses are too “chickenshit” to do it to their faces, and values his lack of attachment to anyone. He has his job down to a fine art, but a newcomer to his firm and a female version of himself threaten to up-heave his life.
What made the film work was the easy chemistry between the three main characters. Anna Kendrick in particular gave a great performance, believable as both the cool new exec with something to prove, and the vulnerable girl who breaks down a hotel lobby “He broke up with me!”.
Some of the interviews of the newly-retrenched workers were actual interviews done for the movie, which explains how terribly human they are.
I also liked the take on the high-flying life, which reminded me of Arthur Hailey novels. All-in-all, a brilliant film. 8/10
5 Centimetres per Second
5 Centimetres per Second (FYI, that is how fast cherry blossoms fall) is a classic Japanese anime of unrealized love, and how people drift apart. Beautiful art but a tad draggy, still good for a sit-down movie with snuggles :). Nothing really much to say about this. 6/10
Tags: 5 centimetres, 500 Days, 500 Days of Summer, Alice in Wonderland, Anna Kendrick, cinema, Departures, George Clooney, Invention of Lying, Johnny Depp, March 2010, movies, Okuribito, Reviews, Ricky Gervais, Up in the Air, Zooey Deschanel
The problem isn’t with 1Malaysia. We can all get behind the concept of unity, in fact what’s worrying is why it should be anything new.
But the real problem is that most of us suspect BN of just superficially pandering to the non-Malays. There is, after all, no good reason for any non-Malay to vote for BN as it stands.
Among the accusations thrown are that PERKASA is just an outsourced UMNO wing, and that DPM Muhyiddin Yassin is playing “bad cop” to PM Najib’s “good cop”; one continues playing the race card for UMNO’s benefit, while the latter publicly extols the virtues of a united 1Malaysia. Najib has also been faulted for many policy flip-flops in his year of office.
Yesterday Lim Kit Siang threw a challenge to Muhyiddin, asking him to declare that he was “Malaysian first, Malay second”.
I am Malay first!” Muhyiddin answered. I was honestly flabbergasted as I’d expected him to at least pay lip service to 1Malaysia. But evidently he doesn’t think that putting his race first goes against the concept.
Najib was quick to defend him:
Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin remains committed to the 1Malaysia concept despite his “Malay first” statement, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said on Thursday.
“What he is saying reflects the provision in the Constitution, which is based on the ethnic (group) to which one belongs.
“But Muhyiddin is also saying that he is committed to 1Malaysia, so I don’t see that as a contradiction,” Najib told reporters after launching the Finance Ministry’s MyProcurement portal.
Some may see this as excessive politicking on LKS’ part, or nitpicking on details. “Petty politics!”, said Nuraina Samad.
But what detractors miss is that Lim Kit Siang isn’t asking a question at random. He’s pulling straight from the text of Najib’s own Government Transformation Programme! It’s right there on the website, ambitiously named www.transformation.gov.my, under “Big Results Fast”:
The goal of 1Malaysia is to make Malaysia more vibrant, more productive and more competitive – and ultimately a greater nation: a nation where, it is hoped, every Malaysian perceives himself or herself as Malaysian first, and by race, religion, geographical region or socio-economic background second and where the principles of 1Malaysia are embedded into the economic, political and social fabric of society.
Muhyiddin’s “Malay first” declaration is therefore a direct contradiction to the 1Malaysia concept as defined by the government, and Najib’s defense of him another flip-flop. If challenging Muhyiddin is a political ploy, then so is 1Malaysia!
Tags: 1malaysia, DPM, GTP, Lim Kit Siang, Malay first, Malaysian first, Muhyiddin, najib, umno
Al-Jazeera interviewed PERKASA head Ibrahim Ali today for its piece on the sidelining of non-Malays in Malaysia.
Any politician would have seemed a little boorish considering that AJ also interviewed Farish Noor. But Ibrahim Ali actually has to be censored for repeatedly swearing on international TV. They couldn’t have made him look worse if they tried. Instant classic.
Tags: al jazeera, ibrahim ali, perkasa, racist
The Saturday of March 27th saw TEDxKL being held at the Petronas Twin Towers and inaugural PERKASA assembly held at PWTC.
Yoon Kit summed it up succintly:
TEDxKL: What Malaysia Needs;
PERKASA: What Malays Want.
“What Malaysia Needs” being of course the theme of TEDxKL 2010 (a local spinoff of TED) . Topics discussed ranged from broadband and connectivity to the independence of media, and the importance of education.
PERKASA’s assembly, on the other hand, had the usual blabbering about the Chinese “stealing” wealth from the Malays and veiled threats. Haris Ibrahim did tear into Ibrahim Ali’s “67% wealth should go to the Malays because Malaysa are 67% of the population” tirade by summarizing it as: “Don’t need to work, just make babies!”.
And as we all know, Mahathir’s son is one of the 20th richest men in Malaysia. Ahmad Ismail, the UMNO politician who refused to apologize after going on a tirade against Koh Tsu Koon a year back, managed to go from bankruptcy to owning luxury bungalows in two years. Perhaps they should stop blaming the Chinese and take a good look at themselves instead.
Yes I’m a little tired of all the racism too. We all are. I’m even hoping the NEM, due out tomorrow, will actually implement actual change. It’s exasperating that apparently the more successful you are, the more you are “stealing” from the Malays.
I wonder whether Malaysia will ever see the day when people flock to TED talks instead of PERKASA assemblies.
Tags: ibrahim ali, Malaysia, perkasa, racism, tedxl
Most of you will have heard about the rollout of TM’s High Speed Broadband (HSBB) branded as UniFi (“Fi” stands for fiber-optic by the way, and yes it sounds ridiculous if you pronounce it in bahasa baku).
UniFi Rates
TM still has not fixed its glitch on the main site that renders it unusable by all browsers other than IE and Chrome (seriously, with all the millions spent, you’d think they could afford a competent web developer); the UniFi pricing can still be accessed by going to http://www.unifi.my/index.html, reproduced and summarized below:
5 mbps: RM149/mo
10 mbps: RM199/mo
20 mbps: RM249/mo
At first glance, the charges are high, but a closer look shows the packages are quite competitive. Fixed line rentals are packaged in (worth about RM10), with free fixed-line to fixed-line calls (worth another RM10), with fixed-line to mobile calls at 10 sen a minute. Installation is also completely free.
Comparison with Streamyx
For comparision between TM’s existing Streamyx packages and UniFi, see below (Taken from Streamyx):
512 kbps: RM90/mo, bundled with fixed-line rental and free calls between fixed lines and calls to mobile lines at 15 sen/min.
1 Mbps: RM110/mo; calls to mobile lines at 10 sen/min.
2 Mbps: RM140/mo.
4 Mbps: RM160/mo. (TM has slashed this package to RM140/mo after the UniFi rollout).
Streamyx also has an under-promoted “Cool Uni” package aimed at first- and second-year university students at bargain prices, with a netbook thrown in for free.
Note that the old Streamyx packages are based on ADSL; upload speeds are at a flat 384 kbps even for the 4mbps package. UniFi however will provide symmetrical upload/download rates, a huge plus especially for businesses.
UniFi data cap controversy
The launch of UniFi was marred when netizens found out that a Fair Usage Policy (FUP) would be implemented on all consumer packages. Twitter was abuzz with criticism, and The Star ran the story the day after:
The consumers bristled when they learned that the 5Mbps service is capped at 60GB of data per month. The 10Mbps service is capped at 90GB while the 20Mbps service has a 120GB cap.
They were even more disappointed to learn that the data download caps are calculated on a daily basis.
Consumers were further horrified to learn that if they exceeded their daily download limit, their high-speed broadband connections would be throttled down to about 10% of the purchased speed.
The problem here was not so much about the FUP itself, as most ISPs have it. But the cap was simply too low for “high-speed” broadband.
Take the 5mbps package for example. 8 bits = 1 byte, meaning 5mbps/8 = about 625KB/s.
A daily download limit of 2GB (60GB/30) would mean that if your UniFi line functioned at full speed for only 1 hour, you would already have downloaded 625/1000/1000*60*60 = 2.25 GB of data.
Or to put it simply:
A 5 mbps line would hit the cap (2GB/day) with 53 minutes of full usage.
A 10 mbps line would hit the cap (3GB/day) with 40 minutes of full usage.
A 20 mbps line would hit the cap (4GB/day) with 27 minutes of full usage.
Small wonder that the twitterverse was baying for @TMCorp’s blood after the caps were published!
TM’s big mistake was taking ADSL data to calculate HSBB caps. One does not subscribe to HSBB to check email and Facebook, after all. TM has consistently whined about Streamyx bandwidth being used by 20% of its users (Seriously guys, go back to school and read up on the Long Tail already. This is perfectly normal), but what it missed is that the power users from Streamyx will be the normal users of UniFi HSBB.
TM pacifies critics by adopting “wait-and-see” approach to FUP
Someone at TM finally went “Shit, the people we’re pissing off are also our target market!” and so TM announced (on Twitter, aptly) that FUP would not be implemented until they actually had the data:
Score another one for the power of the Twitterverse!
UniFi’s goals?
It seems that a decade of mediocre ADSL has affected me: I couldn’t immediately think of a compelling reason for anyone to upgrade from a typical 512kbps or 1mbps package to UniFi. Well yes, I am one of those who regularly download Linux ISOs *snicker* through Bittorrent but wouldn’t one eventually run out of things to download? Youtube is going to be even more of a timesink than it already is, that’s for sure. As for online gamers, experience shows that the speed of the line has nothing to do with latency, which is the real problem, although with HSBB being based on fiber rather than copper, chances are it’ll be better.
The bundling of Hypp.TV in all UniFi packages indicates TM’s aims though: video streaming. While competing broadband providers have focused on wireless capability, e.g. Digi/Maxis/Celcom broadband, P1, etc; TM likely has Astro in its sights and is building a consumer base to cash in on pay-per-view. Which makes perfect sense – while TM has been criticised for its lack of innovation, Astro is probably even worse.
Astro has only launched five HD channels at relatively expensive prices, and standard-definition Astro looks positively horrendous on HDTVs which are a rapidly growing market. If Astro stays complacent, video-on-demand would rapidly replace it among urbanites within a few years. (And it would function even in the rain, too!) The net-savvy already find Astro horrendously behind when it comes to international series, with Lost, Heroes, House etc all aired one season behind, and looking terrible in SD.
UniFi currently has limited availability
Right now, UniFi is only available in selected areas. The site initially had a dynamic map search a la P1 Wimax, but it seems the service areas are currently so limited they just listed them down instead. If you live in Subang Jaya, Shah Alam, Bangsar, or TTDI, then you’re in luck.
So what are you waiting for? Try it out now and tell me if I should be looking for a new place!
Tags: astro, broadband, fiber optic, hsbb, hypptv, internet, internet penetration, iptv, Malaysia, streamyx, tm, unifi, unifi pricing, video on demand, video streaming, youtube
Browsing through some issues of National Geographic recently, I came across a feature on tribespeople in Africa.
I was horrified to see that these tribespeople were inconsiderate enough to actually walk around mostly naked! How could they do this to us? Sure it might be the norm in their culture, but relativity is from the Devil. It expressly says in holy books that nakedness is shameful! What if I got aroused by seeing naked children running in the fields? What if I noticed that they have exactly the same anatomy as all other humans?
Fortunately, our censorship board had the foresight to block out every single instance of genitalia with black markers:
It was then I got to thinking how under-appreciated the people who do this are.
- How much do they earn? I sure hope they get as much money as Quran reciters. I am sure proud that my tax money is financing this.
- Do they get paid commission? Or do they work on a per-item basis like translators?
- Do they ever get carpal tunnel?
- Do they groan every time a new National Geographic feature on aborigines is printed?
- Are they provided with tissues?
It is not just National Geographic that is guilty of this of course. Even business magazines like Fortune have been foiled in their attempt to tempt us into drug addiction (from Wong Chun Wai’s blog) by showing an illustration of medical maurijuana on a woman’s T-shirt:
Marker pen censorship is a testament to the ways technology has changed our lives; before marker pens were discovered the censors had to manually tear out offending pages, albeit with the added bonus that the corruptible rakyat would not be able to even read the article to picture naked tribespeople in their heads, and for good measure anything on the other side of the page as well. That is not to say the censorship board doesn’t black out articles that could corrupt the rakyat if read though.
If you are a marker pen censorship executive and are reading this, please tell us your story!
Tags: censor, censorship, Malaysia, marker pen, national geographic, parody, satire, stupidity, tribespeople
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