Harsh J

Saw this movie at the theaters today. A very nice concept packed into a slightly-bad movie with a good star cast.

The moment of the movie when the Earth actually stands still, was the best part among all other. Honestly I got interested in this movie only cause it had Keanu Reeves in its star-list. And he was pretty good as the visiting extraterrestrial. It’s kinda weird to say that, since it was only his body in use.

The movie should have had one scene of an actual speech. The people should have known why they were being hit by those forces. Instead, it ends abruptly leaving no cliffhanger. The visitor and his assistance, all just go away. The original 1951 movie had a better plot, with more details on the violence and harm humans caused. This was pretty fine otherwise, including humor just when it begins to get boring.

P.s. So the universe does have the cyclops, I suspected so for long!

ThinkDigit.com, the online presence of one of the best selling Technology magazines Digit, has quite recently upgraded the website and its features and have added quite a lot to it. Previously, they only had a forum and a few additional magazine related links. Now, they’ve extended it with new sections like:

• Product Reviews, where the team posts various new product reviews and test results.
• Blog Watch, where you can find links to some of the best blogs online related to various topics of technology.
• Tech Q&A, a more interactive version of the discussion forums which helps solving all technical questions and answers.

And also a few others, and enough content to launch them smoothly into the new age of the Internet media.

The discussion forum is one of the most active in India and has a lot of great members who are ready to answer and troubleshoot any technical queries or problems a member might have. Apart from this, they also have a great off-topic and debate sections that have posts definitely worth reading in them. All this supported and moderated by a great team of administrators and moderators.

About something new in this re-invention of their web-presence, the free classified ads section is surely something very much welcomed by the community they have gathered online. It allows people to post free classified ads related to buying/selling of technology products, services and even jobs.

Along with this free service there does exist a paid option too; using which a company can publish to a 125×125 pixels banner that will appear in the Classifieds section of the ThinkDigit website. This costs 5,000/- INR and an additional 3,000/- INR could get you this and a 6×9 cm block in the digit magazine under the same classifieds or the web watch sections (Which is for online businesses). This is pretty low cost for a very good coverage of the Indian technology community.

This new site is a good start to expanding the Digit magazine’s online presence.

Last time I’d used Flock browser was back when it was 1.0 or something above it. It worked nice then too, and the not-so-recent version maintains that with even more features.

Around 15 minutes of starting the browser, I had over 8 services integrated with Flock with just simple logins on the sites of each, ranging from this Blog (This’s posted by Flock) to Facebook (A service I’ve just started to use).

Twitter works well with it and so does the Flickr and YouTube media browser implementations. Things I miss are very few actually, one being Google Reader integration. Mozilla’s feed-reader Liferea was supposed to have gotten that by now (GSOC), so I’ll check that soon.

But what overshadows all its feature and gloss is its ability to work smooth even when its all loaded up with services and other enable-able things. Its clearly built for this, one can have no doubts. Firefox loaded with a couple of extensions on the other hand works much slower and the drastically long close-times proves that well. The optimizations are well seen in Flock.

Currently am using it without any of the Flock branding, thus named ‘Minefield’ like my Firefox is named ‘Gran Paradiso’. Managing so many Web-2.0 accounts can’t get easier than this over a browser!

Continuing my movie-watch-and-kill-holiday-time run, I saw the third part of Rush Hour today. Nothing’s changed in it. Chris’s still the reason I liked it, Jackie’s still the reason I enjoyed it. And as always, the credits are crazy too!

Though compared to Rush Hour 1 and Rush Hour 2, this one is a bad one. Jackie’s getting too old. He should be playing Pat Morita roles, as is rumored now. Chris Tucker, he should try Opera singing, he’ll rock the Operas.

I’d rate it a 7/10. Medium entertainer, worth killing a lazy afternoon for it.

I wish the fights were more fun like the first part.

Saw the first part (Die Hard 1) today, and it was very good! Just enough action per frame to keep one going without scrolling the bar front.

But funny thing about the movie is that there are some rather weird scenes and lines. Like for example that media thing. There wasn’t a need for showing that media guy’s rise to fame and that punch at the end, etc. Likewise, when the LAPD first attacks the building, the soldier running across the bushes makes a silly ouch as if some rose thorn pricked him. No connection to the movie whatsoever *shakes head*.

But Bruce Willis, he totally rules! This is the oldest movie of his I’ve seen so far. He hardly looks like his young self anymore! And the movie wasn’t bad at all for a 1991 one. It was realistic in its approach too, unlike most of these bollywood movies that still are.

I’d rate it a 9/10.

Next up is of course, Die Hard 2 and Die Hard 3. And if I can get 4 later, perhaps that too.