June 30, 2007

maxim's mx

even how they did for rebranding, i still believe they are the weakest among the field.

the menu is not popular, only strange stuff shown; the price is not competitive; not all stores are modernized completely; the food quality is much worse than other two, dry egg, not nice looking fried fish, and not well prepared tomato sauce...

latest feature of adsense cannot be found in blogger template

latest entry of adsense blog said new shape is available but i cannot find that yet on blogger template. so when will it be implemented into blogger template?

June 24, 2007

five little pegs

even the book was written in 60 something years before, but the description of elsa greer by cecelia williams still suits today.

"... Miss Greer had had, I presume, a proper education, but she never opened a book and was quite unfamiliar with current literary allusions. Moreover she could not sustain a discussion on any intellectual subject.

She was entirely taken up with her personal appearance, her clothes, and men."

p.s. season two of marple will be shown on atv world from july 4.

ten feet high

as a hardcore fan of the corrs, news for the solo album from andrea corr is attractive to me. even music company works so hard on promoting the album (from myspace to youtube), i think this album may not be as success as those corrs' albums.


the song style is different from working with her siblings, they are a bit sensitive to political. the first single, shame on you, is not the right one to be the single. other songs playing in acoustic in youtube suit more. that was just like waht they did for borrowed heaven (actually i think that also happened in avril's best damn thing). even they are produced by celebrated producer and executive produced by her friend bono, lyrics are too simple, you cannot believe that title is kept on repeating continuously.

it's may be wise for warner music hk that they don't promote the album at this moment.

medieval ii: total war & civ 4 bts

swasted weekends of few months concentrated on medieval ii: total war. but i think this one is not as good as rome: total war and its first expansion. there are two things making it less lovely even patch 1.2 is out already.

turns are too short which the faction is not fully developed to gain enough resources to build massive armies to fight around.

and timurids are too damned strong. same amount of army in western world cannot win the war against same amount of timurids' army. that's why papal states are not lost to them.

the latest expansion pack of civilization 4, beyord the sword, sounds quite promising while comparing to kingdoms, expansion from medieval ii. despite the lead programmer of civ 4, soren johnson, has left firaxis to ea (maxis) for spore, the hand-on previews shown (extracts on civ fanantics' center) show very good response, some even call it civ 5. if it comes out with few bugs, it should be a big hit.

lemon grass = lemon + grass?

p&g hk recently promotes new shampoo for head & shoulders. but from packing they really mix up lemon grass & lemon which are so distinctive even to the kids.

p.s. anyone got that ad online?

June 19, 2007

white notebooks & beta software

recently one of my friends wanna buy a notebook in white, but in the market only few choices can be chosen, like benq, toshiba, fujitsu, and apple. if you don't care about where it was made or what os bundled into the book, macbook is the best for price over performance and design. but obviously my friend is a normal user, she won't choose mac anyway.

but as usual, not all apple products are as cool as you think. like ipod, you may suffer from battery time, poor bass, or not supporting radio directly. and recently apple pushes their own broswer, safari beta, to windows. i think i will never use beta programs on windows again (except boot camp which my friend is using on his macbook). maybe it can only be run on english interface. it's missing stuff. please don't ask it to save and open bookmarks...

on the other hand, those open beta products from windows live are ok. from messenger to writer, they perform normal and can run nearly all functions. and they are kinda stable.

some betas from google are ok, like toolbar for both browsers. those web applications are also cool, like reader (still far from graduation, like more options for starred items, some keyboard shortcuts bug for IE. but better than those desktop ones).

June 03, 2007

microsoft surface

the coolest thing from microsoft recently must be microsoft surface. and i think it suits the environment of hk. it can serve all kind of things, from table, computer and tv. this saves a lot of space with a tiny house in hk! you cannot afford the thing yet, but pretty soon you can see it inside the property companies' sample flat.

google gears = dead of desktop rss readers?

i'm using google reader since it showed up. at that moment, all desktop readers loved taking memory for their own and ran so damned slow.


current one is the second beta version and i quite like it. and the recent upgrade is groundbreaking. a minor one is putting reader trends (specialized google trends) on top left column.


while another should be desktop readers killer, the first application to integrate latest product from google, google gears. just ignore the background of gears, it allows people to read 2,000 items offline. 2000 entries, that need you some time to read and normally your desktop reader needs a lot of time to load. and your don't need to worry when your computer is down, you lose all subscribed feeds.