It's all about good story telling

I was attracted to the comics Kick-Ass mostly because of the premise I heard from the review of the movie Kick-Ass (based on the comics Kick-Ass). So I started reading the comics. After 4 chapters, I had to stop, not because the comics was bad, but because I needed to sleep so that I have energy to work tomorrow.

The comics was very well written. I have to say that I don't find the drawing particularly awesome. It's not bad, but just not awesome. The story/script, on the other hand, is rock solid. The characters are very well developed. The plots are believable and interesting. And obviously the write did some homework on teenage lifestyle, and geek fans got a lot of geek treatment, like the reference on how "Heroes" season 2 being so much crappier than season 1.

My original plan was first the comics first and then rent the movie when it comes to DVD, but now I start to wonder maybe I shouldn't wait.

Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010: first 10 seconds impression

So Microsoft just released Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 to MSDN subscriber. As a moron who constantly tortures himself by installing the latest software so that he can answer help desk support question when his many bosses come by and ask how to embed a video in Word that links to a PowerPoint, I jumped on the bandwagon and installed it on my office laptop.

The first thing I realized was that now they have separate installation for 32 bit and 64 bit, which could mean that they put something special on the 64 bit version in order to really take advantage of the 64 bit OS, which is a good thing. I also googled a bit and found that I can have both Office 2007 and Office 2010 running on the same machine. Trouble came, though, when I tried to install the 64 bit vesrion of Office 2010. The installation complained that a 32 bit Office 2007 also exist, and 64 bit Office couldn't stay side by side with a 32 bit Office. I hesitated a bit, but suddenly the angry to a grade A ahole at work came to my mind. I was angry and needed something to convince myself that work can be fine despite that ahole haven't died in cancer yet. I need something to spike up my work life. So I went ahead, uninstalled the Office 2007, and installed Office 2010.

Since I have tons of other stuff to work on tonight, so I only spent 10 seconds to browse around to make sure that everything sort of working. Here's my 10 seconds impression:

• The UI looks very pretty
• Outlook 2010 installation picked up all my setting, so when I opened Outlook 2010, I already saw all the previous Outlook setting properly set up. In fact I saw a new mail pop up right away. Yet, the UI is much prettier. It's like going home on night, and find that all all your old furniture turns into luxury version. It's the same home, just darn it's prettier.

That's it for now. Maybe I'll change myself after using it. But whatever.

Sign of getting old

Another sign of getting old: I enjoy more of the things that I hate when I was young, and hate things that I love when I was young.

Cut the middle man

I was practicing compound arpeggio on piano a while ago, and then I suddenly realized one thing: I am doing to myself what my friends do to their children. Most of my friends push their kids to learn piano, drawing and dance, while I push myself to learn piano, drawing and dance. My friends put their hope on their children, while I cut the middle man and just do them myself.

I let you decide whether I am ultra selfish or ultra efficient.

Best free video content that shows off iPad video playback quality: Movie Trailer

I can't believe that I haven't thought of it before when I was looking around trying to find something that allows me to stress test iPad's video playback capability. Then, last night this idea stroked me: I should try playing back some 1080p HD movie trailer on iPad. If iPad can handle 1080p video just like a HDTV, then iPad's playback capability will become super awesome.

Turns out iPad cannot handle 1080p HD Trailer. That make sense since the resolution on iPad screen isn't even high enough to display the full resolution of 1080p. HOWEVER, it has no problem playing the second best: 720p HD trailer, and the result is amazing. If you are interested, you can use iTune to download tons of 720p movie trailer.

finally 100% battery on iPad again

So after charging the iPad using the AC adapter for less than an hour, the battery goes back to 100%. It seems like AC adapter is the best way to recharge the iPad battery back to the full capacity.

Charging iPad ... experiment continue ....

AFter charging on my MacMini for 3+ hours, I saw the battery life jumping from 75% to ... 89%. That's kind of lame. It's almost like 1 hours of usage requires one hour of charging! That's crazy.

So now I am going to charge the iPad with the "10W USB Power Adapter". It better gives me much better result. 89%, 2:25 pm. Starts counting ...

Making your own eBook for iPad ... errr, works, to a point

iPad was toured as ultimate eBook reader. Problem comes when you try to put YOUR documents in iPad. Can you take advantage of iBook reader for reading your Word document, PDF and text file?

The answer is ok ... to a point.

To test, I tried various documents converted using Calibre, a free and so called the most economic way to convert documents into ePub format.

Here's my finding:

• Converting PDF with mostly English text with some illustrators: works great. You can choose bigger font size, and the layout still being preserved (to a point).
  
  
• Converting PDF with mostly photos: you can still read it, but the problem is that you cannot ZOOM into the photos. For comics or photo gallery, this totally ruin the experience. You better look for other PDF viewer solution.
  
  
• Converting PDF with Chinese character: the result was a total mess, but this time I think the blame is on Calibre . It seems like it doesn't reformat Traditional Chinese characters properly. Someone needs to step up to write a tool that works for Chinese community.
  

So there you have it. Sort of working, but not quite. I'll stick with my Tablet PC for a little long while.

One tidbit: it seems like dragged .epub files directly into your iPad device under iTune can BLOW UP iTune. So remember to first put your .epub files in the Books area in your local Libray first, and then drag the ebook from the Books area to your iPad device section.

iPad Battery test: what happen if you watch video non stop , part 2

I stopped the test at 3:50 am because I was simply too tired to continue. So 5 hours passed, and the battery life droppe from 100% to 60%.

So unless the battery indicator lies with hell, I would say the battery life is very impressive.

Yeah, charging iPad is an issue

Just as Engadget reported, charing is an issue for iPad. For instance, I used my old iPod Touch charger (connect to the power outlet on the wall). After 9 hours (8 am - 11 am), battery increase from 60% to ....74%!!!! I am pretty sure that there will be iPad specific charger coming out soon. Actually I already recognize that charging with my old charger was kind of bad (charged for a while and it still stayed as 97%) but I didn't realized that it can be this bad.

So let me try charge the iPad with my MacMini and see if I get better result.

iPad Battery test: what happen if you watch video non stop ..

So here's the battery test that I wanted to do ever since I read about the iPad specification. The purpose is to see whether iPad is a good video watching device. This is particular important for those of you who want to use iPad as a video playback device during those ultra long trip, like a flight from Houston to Hong Kong.

So here's the setting:
WiFi : Off (dude, you don't use Wifi on flight, plus Wifi kills battery big time)
Sound: Max
Screen brightness: auto

It's started at 10:45 pm, and I keep playing podcast with it. Let's see how long it last.

Traditional Chinese fonts are SUPPORTED on iPad

Even though you CANNOT enter Traditional Chinese character on iPad (using handwriting recognition), you can still browse Traditional Chinese based web site, and even copy and paste content in Traditional Chinese. For instance, a while ago I copied some text from MingPao.com, paste them in NotePad, and everything works fine.

Reading manga on iPad ... so close ...

Back in the good old days when I first got my iPod Touch, I was trying to use Touch as a portable manga reader by loading JPEG files (scanned manga) in Touch using Apple's photo sync. That DID NOT work well because Apple decide to do some OPTIMIZATION on those JPEG so that they all have reasonably small file size. That totally mess up those Manag JPEG in a way that when you try to zoom those mange pages, instead of seeing cleaner lines, you see more JPEG compression noise.

Now that iPad is released, I tried to do the exact same thing. This time, the result is more acceptable. After all, the iPad screen is bigger. HOWEVER, iTune still optimize the file. So if you have a 2Mb detail scan of a page, don't expect that detail transfer to iPad. If you want to have a free jpeg/photo offline library in your iPad, look for those third party apps to do the job.

Another problem of using Apple Photo view as manga reader is that there's no guarantee of how the JPEG files are being ordered in the photo album. I tried syncing a folder of a book of manga. The file name of files in that folder are the order number (001.jpg, 002.jpg ...) After I synced to iPad, I found at least one file went out of sync, while the rest being ordered decreasingly. So I think eventually we need to wait for a better manga viewer.

This is just the first few days of iPad release, so I am sure that soon there will be much better app available. That's why I don't think people need to RUSH to get an iPad. Just wait til your favorite app release first, like wait for your favorite game release before you get a PS3 or XBox360.

Dreaming of LMF?

I had an interesting dream last night. I was hanging around with LMF the crew (however they looked more like the US hip hop group the Roots), watching their new music video, chatting a having a good time. There were some reporters there, and one asked a moronic question, "so what is the message this new song?" I was like, **tch, couldn't you understand Cantonese? This song is obvious ***king people who pretended to be what they were not, just like you **tch pretended to be well educated and did not understand Cantonese foul words and such. I looked at the bands, and they were all confused by that reporter's stupidity just like I did. So we were all laughing. It was fun.

And then I woke up.