Fountain thingy

An abandoned fountain that is no longer working.

Diablo III announced

PC RPG fans worldwide cheered and chanted in unison yesterday like a Red Indians on Red Bull(or so I imagined), as Blizzard entertainment announces the third installment of their RPG hit Diablo.

Blizzard has been teasing their fans for days with different illustrations everyday on the splash page of their website, fueling wild speculations and unprecedented anticipation as to what is the new game that they are going to announce.

Me, I've never really been a big fan of Diablo or it's sequel Diablo II. Having my Amazon killed on the first quest of the first act really didn't do it for me. Nonetheless I would be eagerly looking forward to the awesome game visuals and cinematics that has always been the cornerstone of Blizzard games. Oh, the same goes for Starcraft II.

The announcement comes with a cinematic trailer available at this youtube page, as well as gameplay videos here and here. Of course, real fans go to Blizzard's Diablo III page to get the high res videos.

Short Film - E.T.A

A nifty little short by Junkworks, titled E.T.A.

Include major tributes to the Alien and Robocop Films. Get the high res version from here.

Movie - Kung Fu Panda

Bought this from McDonalds. I was tempted to get the whole set (eight characters in all, if I remember correctly), but I decided I need petrol more than toys. Note Michaelangelo and Leornado flanking our ass-kicking Panda.

I was half expecting the panda to wake up and say

"I know Kung Fu..."

and Shifu replying

"Show me..."

Of course, there wasn't a scene like that. That's what set it apart from all other Dreamworks Animation films: it did not rely on contemporary celebrity and pop references to make it's laughs, something that sourly plague their other animated features such as Shrek and Shark Tale. It managed to stand on it's on feet with it's own brand of humour

Jack Black was fantastic as the voice of Po, the titular character, so was Dustin Hoffman as his master. The animation was great as expected, but the visuals was simply stunning, emulating the epic vistas and vivid colors seen in the 2002 Chinese movie Hero.

It has been receiving raving reviews so far, some of them going as far as hailing it to be the best Dreamworks animated feature to date. I've seen it, and I like it, so there.

New laptop

Got it last weekend, yay!

Lesson learnt: Avoid buying FreeDOS laptops (Laptops that come with the FreeDOS operating system than the usual bundled OS eg. Windows).

I didn't want to install Windows Vista either, so I opted to install XP myself. Sounds straightforward enough: pop in installer, format HDD and run installation. Except for the fact that even fresh off-the-shelf XP installers does not come with a SATA driver and hence failed to recognize the HDD. Vista installers wouldn't have this problem, but like I said, I didn't want Vista.

After a bit of research, I disabled the native SATA mode in the BIOS settings so that the HDD will run as an IDE. Windows installed, no problem. Then I read in a few forums that Compaq / HP computers were notorious for their lack of XP support. They have a full collection of hardware drivers for Vista on their website, but most were missing for XP.

What's more perplexing is that the XP drivers were available elsewhere on the net. After a fair bit (4-5 hours) of scouring, Phoebe and I manage to get all the neccesary drivers from various websites. What's that about, HP?

Anyway, after much trial and error, I have finally managed to install all the drivers and got all the hardware to work properly. There were a few nail-biting moments especially when I was attempting to install the controllers for the SATA HDD and reboot in with SATA mode enabled.

At the end, I finally got a fully working laptop in 6-7 hours, with no less than 4-5 re-installations. Needless to say, I do not want to do that again...