Krunk – Page 153 – Krunk4Ever!

November 13, 2005November 13, 2005

Saw II

Watched Saw II with stanman today. You can watch the trailer here. I thought the 1st one was better compared to this one and stanman concurs. The first one had methological planning and things took some time to figure out. This movie went zooming through most of the ‘works’ and didn’t really give time for the audience and the actors to figure stuff out. Also the original hint was too easy to guess.

Spoilers:

So the story begins with a detective and a son, who aren’t really in good terms. The son just got arrested for stealing and his dad came to bail his butt out. So the story continues, this time instead of having just 1 or 2 people, the jigsaw collects I believe 6-8 people and put them into a house (not a room this time). They’ve been poisoned with nerve gas and will die within 2 hours. The son was one of them that was caught. Among the people who were caught, one of them was the girl that actually survived one of jigsaw’s previous games. The cop busts jigsaw’s hideout and finds out that his son has been caught. Jigsaw demands to play a game and all he has to listen and his son will be okay. However as the 2hr limit approaches, you can realize what usually happens with cops in that situation. However, going back to the house and the ones inside (major spoilers coming up) , it turns out that the others beside the boy, were people who were set up by his father and sent to jail. Some deserved it, while others didn’t, but all of them hate the father. Does the kid survive? What happens to the dad? Why was the girl caught a 2nd time? Guess you’ll just have to watch it to find out.

November 13, 2005November 13, 2005

Patent Office

Found an really interesting quote from /.

So why does the patent office keep on granting so many obviously stupid patents?

It is not primarily because the patent examiners are incompetent, as is often suggested. Instead it is the economics of running a patent office that make sure that it becomes like this.

Nowadays most patent offices around the world are “self funded”, which means that they are funded by the fees that the collect from the patent applicants. This may perhaps seem like a sensible idea at first sight, but unfortunately it invariably leads to lower and lower standards for what is patentable.

A look at the USPTO Fee Schedule explains the underlying math.

The initial application fee for a patent is $300. In order to collect that money, the patent office has to do quite a lot of work: set up a file, do an initial formal examination, perform a novelty search, and quite often engage in correspondence with the applicant to sort out various issues. It seems reasonable to assume that initial applications “as such” do not cover their own costs for the patent office.

But once a patent has been granted, nice things start to happen to the patent office’s profitability calculations.

In order to keep his patent valid, the proprietor has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals. $900 is due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years.

For a patent that is renewed throughout its full term, the maintenance fees add up to $7,000, compared to the $300 for the initial application.

And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn’t actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.

The result can be seen at a patent office near you.

November 13, 2005November 13, 2005

Honeymooners

Saw The Honeymooners a few days ago. Storyline wasn’t that great, but it was a funny light movie. You can watch the trailer here. I’m still not too sure what the title is referring to. Does honeymooners have some adjectives associated with it?

Spoilers:

The movie is about a bus driver that always has big dreams which always fails and has a waitress that has a simple dream of owning her house. They fall in love and eventually get married. The husband keeps wasting money on ‘his dreams’ of getting rich quick and they end up never having enough money to buy the house. This is a comedy movie, so the storyline doesn’t really mean much. They find a dog one day. The greyhound was really really fast, so they try enlisting it to race and they go through some hoops and stuff which forces them to waste money training and getting ‘papers’. While this happens, there’s a house that goes on sale which everyone really likes. However, the money’s no longer there. What will they do if the dog doesn’t win?

November 13, 2005January 21, 2006

Daylight Saving Time

So I was thinking when I looked at the clock in my car today, regarding our time system and the many many faults it had. I had always wanted a single time system, no matter where in the world you are. No more PST, no more EST, no more PDT, no more China time, no more England time, no more etc etc, just 1 system. No more remember how many hours difference between here and Tokyo is. 8am in Seattle = 8am in California = 8am in New York = 8am in London = 8am in Hong Kong. That might mean going to work between 11pm and 8am, not like many of us geeks don’t already, but the time system should not dictate when you go to work. With a system like this, you will no longer get confused when you enter a different time zone. You don’t lose or gain hours anymore when you fly half way around the world. Setting up meetings across time zones becomes way much easier.

That system would fix a lot of problems, but there is oen problem that it will not fix: Daylight Saving Time. No matter how I look at it, Daylight Saving Time is going to be causing some trouble. In the system I suggested, Daylight Saving Time will no longer work, unless you can get the whole world to follow and shift time 1hr forward or 1hr backward. I agree to the benefits of Daylight Saving Time. In this case, we’ll need to shift the responsibilities onto the companies themselves, which probably over half won’t follow due to complications, so we end up losing the benefits of Daylight Saving Time.

How would one solve such a problem. Would it worth it to give up DST and use a World System? I personally think it is.

Random Crap:

pya! Flood:

(img) (ﾛﾅ)ＬＥＧＯ – Lego Ronald
(img) ぞうきんがけするnya – Cute Kitten on Towel
(img) 乃 – Chairs on a Hill – Seems like two chairs like each other better than the other.
(img) shall we dance? – Beauty and the Beast sculpture
(img) 静馬 – Flip
(vid) 鳩にエサをやらないでください – Agitated Pigeon – I miss Trigger Happy TV.

Full Metal Sonic (from deadlock) – Another Full Metal Alchemist parody opening, but this time instead of Final Fantasy XI characters, we have Sonic the Hedgehog characters including Sonic as Al, Tails as Ed, Amy as Windy, and several others which I didn’t want to compare. hehe.

The Madagascar Penguins – In A Christmas Caper (direct download) – found this and thought it was a pretty cool short animation. Not on par with Pixar’s, but definitely cute. It’s a little Christmas story starring the penguins from Madagascar.

Riya – Photo Search (from /.) – here’s the article from Wired News. I’d love to check out this software when it becomes available for the general public and see how good it is at recognizing people. I think the ultimate test would be able to tell identitical twins apart.

NES Sniper Rifle (from deadlock) – G4 engineer David Randolph shows Kevin Pereira how he constructed the world’s first Duck Hunt sniper rifle. Apparently the light gun works just as I explained previously. When you pull the trigger, the screen goes black with a white box appears where the duck is. If the gun picks up on black, the duck doesn’t die. If the picks up on the light, it’s a miss. The Snapper (Snipe Zapper) looks pretty sweet.

The “yes” man – A hilarious student film (I’m assuming). You’ve got to wait for the punch line. Only hint I’m going to give is that it has to do with some telecommunication service provider. I

Wanted: Mate for lovesick giraffe in Mexico park – “He’s driving us crazy,” Juan Aragones told Reuters in a telephone interview. “He’s mounted a tree, a fence and even a shed.”

Apple Mac OS X on x86: a first test – Steve Jobs might not approve, but Apple’s latest operating system can be installed on any x86 hardware. How well does it function? Read our preliminary labs test to find out. photos here. The test machine was a Toshiba Portégé M300 notebook equipped with a 1.2GHz Pentium M processor and 512MB of RAM.

November 11, 2005January 21, 2006

Image Border

My alarm went off this morning at 9:20AM. I didn’t get out of bed till 12:30PM. Haha. I love days without meetings scheduled. Though I did work till 9:30PM this night, so it’s been quite a long day for me.

So I spent some time adding a border around images with links whenever your mouse goes over it. I thought it was a nice visual addition and that’s step 1 to start customizing my page layout, though who knows when the next time I’ll have time to actually work on the layout is. CSS is quite fun. I did hit some problems earlier in the stylesheet. I was actually going to code my images as:

<a href="test.html"><img src="test.jpg" style="border-color:orange" onmouseover="javascript:border='2px'" onmouseout:border='0px'"></a>

Then I googled some CSS references and playing with different settings, I finally ended up with the following which I liked:

a img { border:2px solid white } a:hover img { border:2px solid orange }

At first I only got firefox to work, but after googling some more, I realized that for some odd reason, IE required a specific order of things. But that in way made me realize there were some syntax errors with my CSS style sheet.

I hope you’ll find it as visually pleasing as I did.

Random Crap:

Iowa Woman Finds Dead Turtle in Coffee – Morris, 77, of Ainsworth, found a dead baby turtle in the 2-pound package of Folgers coffee last Sunday. …Morris, who has kept the turtle, said she would continue to drink coffee, but that she is now a more mindful consumer. Sounds like the turtle was still alive! I want to find a turtle in my coffee! For some reason, I’m imagining a very extremely cute turtle. *blushes*

Man buys virtual space station for US$100,000 – Jon Jacobs, a director of independent films who hails from Miami, FL, has purchased a virtual space station from the Swedish software company that owns and operates the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) Project Entropia. This is believed to be the largest single purchase of virtual real estate by an individual. So after we learn about someone buying a virtual island for US$26,500 which I posted about yesterday, some other person buys a virtual space station for US$100,000. Those programmers at Project Entropia are making bank!

Cemetary Telemarketer (from deadlock) – Comedian Tom Mabe records incoming telemarketing calls. This is one of our favorites. Cemetary telemarketer gets owned by Tom Mabe.

Tom: This is so bizarre. I was sitting here just contemplating suicide and I was praying, asking God for a sign. You don’t understand, just 5 minutes ago I was praying God for a sign, and you called. Something’s in control, but you’re the angel of death.

What’s so funny, is after awhile, the telemarketer tries again to get Tom to buy his services and even tells him to hold off killing himself until he fills out the paperwork.

Tom: Do you do financing down there?
Telemarketer: Mr. Mabe, you know you just got done saying about taking your life. Do you have a credit card or a checking account?
Tom: Hold up. *sniff*
Telemarketer: Let me ask you this. If I got the paperwork out to you say this afternoon, do you think you can hold off till tomorrow.

The Promise (無極) trailer (from fuzzywuzzy). The trailer is really high quality and 11 minutes long. At first I thought this was computer animation, but it turns out to be real people. hehe. Would that be a compliment or a criticism? Not really too sure what the movie is about yet, but it seems to be set in ancient China and some war is going on between the civilized and the uncivilized. There also seems to be a love story involved. I couldn’t find the official movie site, but I found a Japanese site and also MonkeyPeaches has a page on it. The movie looked pretty but the choreography didn’t seem too impressive.

Vincent (direct download) – A very nice short animation by Tim Burton. Got this off bittorrent. Somewhat dark like all his movies, but quite enjoyable. It’s about a depressed little boy and how his real life constrasts with his imaginary life.

November 11, 2005November 11, 2005

The Unsaid

The Unsaid was quite an interesting movie. You can watch the trailer here, but I personally think it revealed a bit too much if you’re planning to watch the movie. It’s a suspense thriller type of movie, where you try to solve what really happened before the movie ends and reveals it. The storyline was pretty typical about psychopathic patients who repressed their memories, but I found it rather close when it started to show similar behaviors to myself. As the title suggests, the most important things to ourselves are the things left unsaid.

Spoilers:

Movie’s about a psychiatrist named Michael Hunter who long has given up his practice, but instead now writes books and gives seldom lectures, but he’s still quite renown in his field. A old student of his, Barbara, which has become a rather good psychiatrist herself requests the help of her old professor to look into a boy. This young boy saw his mother get killed by his father when he was 6 or 7 years old. He’s turning 18 in a few weeks and she believes that he’s not ready to leave the nest yet. He’s shown no signs of being affected by the incident at all and she believes that he is repressing it all and requests the help of Mike.

Mike initially rejects the request for help. He himself gave up practice after his own little boy died. It was quite shocking to find out why and I could’ve never guessed. But somehow that boy reminded him of his own son in some way and he decided to go help him. Then there’s this long story between Mike unraveling the past and the relationship developing between Mike’s own daughter and this boy Tommy. What I found odd, was that what Mike did wasn’t really spectacular and how he was able to start getting Tommy to crack while no others did was somewhat unbelievable. Tommy actually cracked quite easily. However, do note, I was able to guess exactly what happened midway through the movie so I’m feeling quite proud.

Though both the reasons for Kyle’s, Mike’s son, death and what really happened with Tommy were quite disturbing… though that itself may have revealed too much…

Repressing emotions is a really bad thing, but it’s the easiest way to escape feeling down.

November 11, 2005November 11, 2005

Detective Academy Q Episodes 28-29

Thanks to Shinsen-Subs for realeasing more Detective Academy Q (also known as Tantei Gakuen Q). Anyone know why their titles of their episodes are mixed with 2 different colors (red and black)?

Detective Academy Q Episode 28 – Underground Cell SOS

Detective Academy Q Episode 29 – The Murder Collector

Spoilers:

Yet another 2 exciting episodes of Detective Academy Q. We last left off with Kyuu and Meg trapped inside the cell and Meg got bitten by a pit viper. Kyuu does the honor and tries to suck most of the poison out, though he did acknowledge not all the poison is out. One thing I remember about snake bites is that you’re NEVER suppose to try to suck the poison out because you yourself is very likely to intake the poison into your body. Kinta, Ryuu, and Kazuma hears they haven’t gone home yet, and starts to get worry. They go to school to investigate and by the clues left behind, it turns out that Kyuu and Meg are somewhere on campus. They find their backpacks in the trash along with the container that held the viper. After learning this Kinta immediately rushes off to get the antivenom and hopes he’ll make it back in time.. Kyuu on the otherhand frantically tries to figure a way to get out. He finds a water pipe and starts banging on it and creates a hole and starts flashing his flashlight in SOS patterns. Like fiber optics, the light travels through the water pipes and comes out the other end and Kazuma notices it flashing. Somehow Ryuu manages to find door behind the shelf and crack the puzzle almost immediately (just like Kyuu). When they unlock the door, Kyuu rushes up to them and tells them they need to hurry and get the antivenom. Before he finishes his sentence, Ryuu assures him everything will be okay and at that moment Kinta rushes in with the antivenom. Kyuu falls onto his knees exhausted.

It was quite an emotional episode. You really felt that Kyuu was going to regret for his entire life if Meg dies. Even afterwards, Kyuu apologizes big time to Meg for getting her in danger. At the end of this episode, the truth is finally out. Ryuu aparently is part of the Pluto group and is only attending DDS according to his grandfather’s wishes, but he demands that nothing happens to Class Q or else…

The next episode talks about Meg and Ryuu getting assigned to impersonate high school students to investigate on a Snuff Video Collector. Snuff videos are videos of actual people getting murdered. There’s a girl that has gone missing and on the school message boards, rumors was that she was killed in a snuff video. Before leaving, Kyuu begs Ryuu to take care and watch over Meg because he felt the last attack was purposely trying to kill Meg. Soon after infiltrating High School, they start following leads. However, this ended up Meg getting kidnapped by the Collector. What will happen now?

November 10, 2005December 10, 2005

Black Cat Episode 4

Black Cat Episode 4 – Smiling Cat

Tons of action in this episode, but no much was revealed.

Spoilers:

So Train and Sven has 2 different goals as seen in the previuos episode. Sven wants to rescue Eve because she’s just a little girl at heart being forced to become a weapon, while Train and his group sees Eve as a weapon too powerful to control and must be destroyed. Apparently, there was continuation of the nanotechnology research in the basement lab of the mansion. However, it was destroyed before Rinslet got there and her only guess is that Black Cat (Train) must’ve gotten there before she did. However, the anime seems to tell you otherwise. I have a hunch it’s that other partner of Train that adores him. Eve didn’t want to change, but the bad guys stuck an NS Amplication Device on that force all the nanomachines in her body to be uncontrollable and then both her hands and hair bangs became swords of some kind and started to attack Train. Train, although super fast, was only able to defend. Sven goes and risks his life trying to remove NS Amplication Device and Eve somehow manages stab right through him… Does Sven die? Does Black Cat kill Eve? You’ll have to watch the episode to find out!

November 10, 2005November 10, 2005

Blood+ Episode 5

Blood+ Episode 5 – Beyond the dark forest

Not much happen in this episode, basically more story building. No vampire slayings and transformation for Saya, though the sibling relationship has gotten quite tense.

Spoilers:

In this episodes, David requests for Saya’s help and Saya agrees. Kai and Rick demand to help too since this is their father (foster) that has been kidnapped. There’s a chance that the father could turn into one of those vampire like creatures, but he hasn’t yet. But it sounds like a good storyline to go this route. Apparently the U.S. government is secretly doing genetic research in an Enviromental Protection Center Exhibition they dontated to the Japanese government. David tells Saya to come along since vampires may appear. Kai demands once again to come along and help, but David shows him that he is weak and he’d only drag the team down. I really love this quote after Saya coldly refuses Kai’s help repeating the harsh words that David said awhile ago.

Kai: So I’m useless, huh?
Rick: That’s not true. Saya-nechan (older sister) just doesn’t want to put you in any danger.
Kai: I know that! That’s why it hurts.

Most of the times, you get characters that misunderstands the person’s reasoning for rejecting you coldly making me hate those characters cause they are literally idiots and they go outta their way to get involved and what ends up happening is now they have to take care of this extra baggage. But I never really realized how powerful and emotional it can be for a character to understand the true intentions behind someone’s actions.

November 10, 2005January 21, 2006

So tired…

It’s been so tiring these past few days… I can hardly keep my eyes open.

Random Crap:

pya! FLOOD:
(img) トミカタワー – Tomy Car Tower – I’ve always dreamt of a parking system similar to this, where all you do is drive into this spot and some sort of elevator will take you to a free empty spot. But then I realized the delays that will make system fail, though with a circular system, you can really have many many elevators.
(img) 宇宙船（ホンダ製） – Universe Car (Honda) – License plate shows ACURABOT. Totally a rice car.
(img) ねえねえそこのお姉ｓゴフッ – Super Kick
(vid) ヴォイスパワー – Voice Power – I want to learn how to hit that pitch to break glass. Is it the same pitch for all glass, or is there some way for the screamer to feel the resonating vibrations to know which pitch to scream at?
(vid) 目覚まし時計 – Malfunctioning Alarm Clock – I wouldn’t want this to be my alarm clock.
(img) BABY – cracking baby. pretty nice art
(img) 朝から散歩。。。眠いwan – Walking the sleepy dog in the morning – puppy is so cute!

Virtual property market booming (from /.) – A gamer who spent £13,700 on an island that only exists in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers. Treasure Island (6000 Acres/25 km²) – for US$26,500, Zachurm “Deathifier” Emegen purchased a virtual island on Project Entropia. A large island off a newly discovered continent surrounded by deep creature infested waters. The island boasts beautiful beaches ripe for developing beachfront property, an old volcano with rumors of fierce creatures within, the outback is overrun with mutants, and an area with a high concentration of robotic miners guarded by heavily armed assault robots indicates interesting mining opportunities. Quite amazing!

Crab vs. Pipe (from kobashi) – This is a video taken in 6000 feet of water. An undersea robot is sawing a 3mm wide slit (1/10th of an inch … remember that width) in a pipeline. The pressure inside the pipeline is 0 psig, while the pressure outside is 2700 psi, or 1.3 tons per square inch. Then a crab comes along….

Samsung announces five slim phones (from artemyst). Honest to god, I didn’t even notice the females holding the phone. Probably because the phones themselves are so sexy! But is it just me, or is the left 2 phones very similar to the Motorola RAZR?

Final Fantasy XI Online (from eddo) – A remake of the Full Metal Alchemist Opening intro, but with Final Fantasy XI characters! Pretty cool if you’re a fan of both!

Skater falls through roof (from deadlock) – saw this video before, but the Mario music compliments it very well!

Funny ricer (from deadlock) – probably a joke video, but it’s still hilarious to see how this ricer explains how great his Civic is. Wait for it… Wait for it… BUSTS OUT A GRAPH! HAHA!

3D Rendering of a Ford Engine (from deadlock) – a very nice video of all the different components of a Ford engine rendered in 3D. Pretty interesting. Would’ve been nicer if they explained what was happening too.

Three die playing catch with grenade – A hand grenade being used instead of a ball in a game of catch exploded early on Saturday killing three youths in this Bosnian town, police and news agencies said. … Police said an inquiry was under way and declined further comment. It was not clear why the grenade exploded. I’m pretty sure the reason while the grenade exploded was because the pin came off (either on purpose or accidentally). Ungsunghero thinks they might’ve been playing Hot Potatoes, that man version. Anyway, I’m more curious on why the police are investigating why the grenade exploded and not why they were playing a with a grenade.

Ship Blasted Pirates With Sonic Weapon – modern day pirates get fought back with modern day technology!

Firms make profit by paying too much tax – Because the Dutch Treasury pays 5 percent interest on any excess amount paid that it returns later — more than commercial banks would offer — some firms gladly accept an estimate that is too high, Dutch Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm complained on his weblog Monday. Maybe the USA should do this!