False Positives

“House of Flying Daggers” (Shi Mian Mai Fu) is not to be missed! The original Chinese title is Shi Mian Mai Fu, meaning “ambush from ten direction”. The film is written as a thriller under the cover of a love story, or is it a love story under cover of a thriller?

With a stronger, more focused and intimate story then “Hero” (Ying Xiong) or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (Wo Hu Cang Long) but just as breathtaking is the the cinematography, costumes, sets and sheer colour. Zhang Yimou has contiuned to refine his techinque since “Hero”. The cast of Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau Tak-Wah, Zhang Ziyi, Song Dandan was masterful. Lots more details @ Monkey Peaches

Sony’s North American DVD of the film is slated to release May 15th.

Anita Mui received a dedication during the closing credits. This was originally going to be Anita Mui’s final appearance in film and she had already accepted the role but, because she was battling cervical cancer, her part wasn’t going to be filmed until early 2004. After her death on 30 December 2003, director Zhang Yimou decided to alter the script rather than find a replacement. One year ago today. I suspect she was to be the new leader of the “House of Flying Daggers”.

update : HoFD review and news of ~7,000 fans of Chinese pop diva Anita Mui marked the first anniversary of her death at a star-studded commemoration concert included Andy Hui, Hacken Lee, and Miriam Yeung, performing Mui’s most popular songs in her honor

categories:Asian/Movies

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Via adot’s notblog*: get acrobat reader 7. Adot’s right : acrobat reader loads pdf’s from the web very very fast, which is good ’cause it used to take forever just loading to the browser, regardless of the size of the document. So far so good.



Adot also links to the direct way to get acrobat reader off of adobe’s site.

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IFTF’s Future Now makes a point about one problem with “folksonomies”, bottom-up taxonomies that people create on there own :

None of the current implementations have synonym control (e.g. “selfportrait” and “me” are distinct Flickr tags, as are “mac” and “macintosh” on Del.icio.us).

I wonder if a Google Suggest like system might help narrow the list of “lazy” tagging for Furl, Flickr and Del.icio.us? By “lazy” I mean the habit to use the shortest possible name for something.

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Jerry Orbach, Lennie Briscoe of Law and Order, has died at the age of 69.

The Gothamist has a great obituary, and Joey links to a collection of some Lennie Briscoe snappy remarks.

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Via John Battelle’s Searchblog , A New Idea for Publishing in Technology Review magazine.

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Via Roland comes DURL, a Search Tool for del.icio.us, not far from my own sugestions for extensions of Del.Icio.us and Technorati, and new searching and learning techniques

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Tsunami are a Japanese term which has been used to describe a large seismically generated ocean wave, produced by a submarine earthquake, landslide, or volcanic eruption.

The pronunciation for tsunami is “soo- nah- mee”, and comes from Japanese : tsu (port) + nami(wave).

Incorrectly referred to as tidal waves, Tsunamis have no connection with tides.

Here’s the USGS info for the Dec 26 ‘04 Preliminary Earthquake Report. Other links on the disaster: WorldChanging; and Wikipedia has great and uptodate coverage.

For news and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer work, the best source is The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami weblog and impromptu short-notice clearinghouse.

Did the earth move for you?

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth’s center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

category:words

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A cool feature of Multimap.com is that you can get Latitude and Longitude for just about any address, or feature in the World. So, Runnymede Rd and Bloor Street (in Toronto) is Lat: 43:39:05N (43.6513) Lon: 79:28:35W (-79.4764) (and which could be used in GeoTags). Santa Claus must use a function like this.

MultiMap came up before with repect to Magical Maps, which are “only in the UK, Pity”.

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• In response, watch for TVoIP from the TeleCom’s. One question is how aggressive will it be promoted. MTS all ready covers 75% of Winnipeg with their offering.
  
• The TeleCom’s are still hoping to use regulation to delay, but are a least talking about some (long overdue) infrastructure upgrades.
  
• StratSat’s (high altitude blimps) used as communication platforms and/or WiMax will allow wireless VOIP , TVoIP and internet but not till 2006/7. Cable and Telecom companies have that long to get their act together. (StratSat’s also make great surveillance platforms in warzones or for borders/coastlines. This is where they will show up first)
  
• As a side effect, the new end broadband speeds will be ~20 Mbps down.
• HDTV and new display technologies will slowly rollout but not become the norm until you can get a 40 inch HDTV for ~ $1,000. Late 2006.
• MultiCore chips designs become commercially available in 2005, first from AMD then Intel, Sun and IBM. Thread Level Parallelism will be very import in 2006. Multicore and 64 bit will be standard for servers in 2006 and desktops in 2007. 64 bit is important because to support more than 4 Gb of ram.
  
• +1 Gb ram, +200 Gb hard disk space is stardard for your AMD/Intel desktop.
• The floppy disk is dead. Booting off cheap 256 Mb flash keys and/or USB card readers to 1 GB memory cards (take your pick but I prefer CompactFlash or SD cards) is the way to go.
  
• IBM Cell processors will ship before the end of the 2005 in Sony’s PlayStation 3, as will Microsoft’s Xbox2 will also ship (using IBM’s PowerPC chip design).
• Linux and OSX will make major gains on the server and desktop.
• Microsoft’s Longhorn will be further delayed and ilrelevent.
• Microsoft will not ship a IE 7 till the end of 2006. Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird will make major gains. Only full Xform (+fully stardards supports) support might allow IE to make a big come back.
  
• Intel will be having another bad year.
• Hand held devices will continue to morph. PDA’s without phone or always on email functions are already low end commodities. If it ain’t connected it’s ilrelevent. (That could be the theme for the next 5 years).
• Digital Cameras will show up everywhere, standalone and on celphones, better and cheaper than ever. Look for mp3 players showing up on high end celphones using flash memory or robust mirco harddrives. Privacy prudes and security squealers will have a very bad time.
• Bloggers will continue to confuse the mainstream media and upset more privacy prudes and security squealers.
• I will have a better year. Somewhere, if not by March. (I promise ET).

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Update: Septebmer 2005: new listing at the new url :Saturday Night Hong Kong Films in Toronto (Omini TV ) Fall 2005

March: Now updated Here for March, April and May.

Omni TV 2 listings (they changed the url! bad tv,bad!) for Jan and February 2005 are out now for what they call “Super Cinema Night”

All the movies start at 9pm and go to 11

The schedule for the Last half of 2004 is here

Saturday, December 25	Driving Miss Wealthy	Sean Lau Ching-Wan, Gigi Leung Wing-Kei • Driving Miss Wealthy goes by the Cantonese title Juet Sai Ho Bun.
Saturday, January 1	Love is a many stupid thing	Eric Tsang Chi-Wai…silly with Infernal Affairs riffs. Fun
Saturday, January 8	Forever yours	Bad, silly stupid moive with singing. “Love Boat” without any redeeming features. run away…..
Saturday, January 15	Love battlefield	romantic-action-drama. Very Good.
Saturday, January 22	One night in Mangkok	41st Golden Horse (2004) Award winner. Daniel Wu (Ng Yin-Cho), Cecilia Cheung Pak-Chi. Excellent Film. Cecilia Cheung is great in a role much more dramatic than her usual airhead.
Saturday, January 29	Super Model	HK version of the American comedy Zoolander; Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei, Karena Lam Ka-Yan…(also Tony Leung Chiu-Wai)
Saturday, February 5	Heat Team	amusing throwback to early nineties Hong Kong cop comedies. Aaron Kwok Fu-Sing, Eason Chan Yik-Shun, Yumiko Cheng Hei-Yi…
Saturday, February 12	Three of a kind	comedy. Michael Hui Koon-Man, Miriam Yeung Chin-Wah, Sean Lau aka Lau Ching-Wan
Saturday, February 19	Throw down	Action with Director Johnnie To Kei-Fung. Cast: Aaron Kwok Fu-Sing, Louis Koo Tin-Lok, Cherrie Ying Choi-Yi, Tony Leung Ka-Fai. Former Judo fighter challenged by new Cocky Judo champion to a duel. http://www.throwdownmovie.com/
Saturday, February 26	Six strong guys	Six very silly guys
Saturday, March 5	Cop Unbowed	HK cop-triad thriller

categories Movies/Asian/Toronto

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