Appleseed (2005) vs Appleseed Ex Machina (2007)

Geek rant:

Appleseed (2005) – Trailer
- Has genuinely nail biting action sequence in the 1st 15 minutes
- Has a WOAH fight sequence with 3 female robots
- Has a believable multi-layered plot
- Has great character chemistry
- Has at least 3x rewatchable rating

Appleseed Ex Machina – Trailer
- Is produced by John Woo
- Has a cuter Hitomi
- Has zombies
- Has robot doves in slowmo (what is it with doves mr woo??)
- Has Matrix sentinel attack
- Has a villain shooting himself in the head to escape the hero
- Has lines like “Does Kestner still have a hold on you?” followed by “No, there’s been only 1 person who has a hold on me.” between the male and female leads
- Has vehicles/landmates/mechs that looked worse than the ones in Appleseed (2005)
- is a major FAIL

Unlocking phones

Friend of ours came by and gave us a free Nokia 1600 phone she got from Orange. Turns out to be locked. Googled and found out it could be unlocked. Online.

Step 1 – check imei number

Step 2 – http://nokia.unlock4all.com/1600.php

It worked! Jodie’s got a new Nokia phone lo. Saaaaa-weeeeeet. Google rules.

The visa appointment

We went to the prefecture today at 3pm for our visa appointment. It was kinda scary coz they changed the requirements (again) this year. So the lady helping us was in trepidation coz it meant more documents to prep. The guy attending to us seemed a bit antagonistic and sent me to retake the passport photo (same photo ok for the last 2 years). When we came back, he handed us the slip for the collection date (?!?!?!) and told us that we just needed some additional minor stuff. We were shocked that it was so easy.

We have papers to stay for another year. Thank God, one hurdle crossed. =)

DBS Internet transfer experience

Client has a DBS account, so have I. So I thought “why not ask client to do a internet transfer? should be simple enough”. Here’s the reply from the client:

>I just tried transferring the funds, but found out
>that I need some iB code or something, which I
>can only apply by mailing in a form and then
>waiting a couple of days. Can I just send a
>Sing $ cheque to someone in Singapore?
>That’s much easier for me.

DBS security – internet verification not enough, must mail in a form some more.

Wonderful.

Visa akan datang

We’ve been running around prepping documents for our annual visa application. Fun fun fun. :p

Hitting the prefecture on the 28 April to see the officials. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a yearly thing that we have to do to legally stay in Paris. We’ll know the results somewhere in July.

Manual focusing on the 5D

I like to use 3rd party manual focusing lenses on the 5D, their performance are sometimes way better than the Canon equivalents. I decided that i had to try the EE-S screen for the 5D since it was pretty tough to focus on the default screen. I got the screen a few days ago and it’s great, focus snaps in and out easily and I don’t have to guess where’s the exact point.

I did some critical testing yesterday and it turns out that even though the image looked sharp on screen, the actual image was not sharp. In fact, it turns out that the image need a 1degree focusing turn (towards infinity) to ensure critical sharp focus. AF focusing is NOT affected.

I was surprised and googled for some answers. I found this on www.fredmiranda.com:

“The 5D has manufacturing tolerance problems with the mirror box and the focusing screen tray. People have had problems with manual focusing, because the focusing screen may not sit in the exactly correct position. You may need to place shims under the focusing screen to correctly position the focusing screen in the image path.”

That makes sense. I tried adding shims (scotch tape) on the EE-S screen and it made the problem worse. This would mean that I would have to shave the screen to ensure correct focus. I am not going to do that, too much trouble, I’ll just compensate.

Now I know another reason why the EOS 1D series are more expensive – manufacturing tolerance. Well, I get what I pay for. Drats.

Wes

Update: Upon advice received on the forum, I took out the copper shim in between the focusing screen and the focus points. It was really dicey, didn’t want to scratch the focus points, now I know how a surgeon feels like :p. The shim came out, I tested it, put on 2 thin layers of Scotch 3M matt tape on the edge of the EE-S and the focus is 100% PERFECT finally. woohoo. Come to think of it, I spent 12-15 hours of DIYing vs spending 5k to 10k to upgrade to a 1D series for perfect manual focusing, I guess time IS money.

Data Corruption

2 years ago, Joe shared with me an story about how 3 (or 4) hard disks in his PC got all their data corrupted. His jpg pictures were inflicted with weird stripes. Needless to say, it was a bad thing and the jpgs were not salvageable. This scenario is probably the *scariest* thing that could happen and it’s completely out of user control. Even worse, it is not a outright hardware failure that can be detected immediately, data corruption gives the impression that things are still alright when things are going crazy in the background. I wasn’t sure if it was a motherboard or hard disk issue since I don’t have much knowledge about data corruption.

I chanced on this article which cleared some of my doubts. It seems that some motherboards did have this type of problem with data corruption.

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3279&p=4

Wes