Red Cliff Part 1

I am an avid fan of the "Romance of Three Kingsdoms", back since the day I bought a Taiwanese comic book about the title.

After watching countless war movies, such as Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, and other English titles, I have been waiting for the day Romance would be shown on the big screen.

As such, when "Red Cliff Part 1" is out, I went to watch it straight away.

However, the movie is a major letdown.

Sure, some of the battle scenes were very intense, such as the part where Zhao Yun went to save Ah Dou.

But, in the last battle of Part 1, the battles involving Zhang Fei and Guan Yu were atrocious, to such an effect that it looks like some kids wrote the script for that.

Instead of using his trusted snake-headed spear, Zhang Fei rushed out to face countless enemies, and resorted to headbutts and punches?

In another scene, Guan Yu threw out his big sword, so that he could fight unarmed, using his enemies' spears instead?

Both of these scenes doesn't make sense, given that any self-respecting martial arts practicer would never leave his/her weapons behind.

Another thing that annoyed me is the dialogue for Xiao Jiao.

Gems such as "You are better than Chao Chao, because he does't have friends" not only pained the ears but also made my hairs stand.

For the main characters, Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang, the portrayal is different from the "Romance", which I guess is due to that it is based on the more factual "San Guo Zhi."

Anyway, overall, I would rate this movie at 2/5.

For avid fans of "Romance", avoid this at all costs.

I hope Part 2 will be a lot better. :|

IEEE citation style for Word 2007?

I still remembered I made a complaint about Office 2007 a few months back, especially about Powerpoint and Groove.

Anyway, I have been working on a paper for the past few weeks, and it's the first time I have used Word 2007 to write it. Previous papers were done using Word 2003.

To my pleasant surprise, Msoft did get something right this time.

Word 2007 has several useful features for writing papers. One of the major cause of headache when writing a research paper is the need to keep constant track of the references made, because we have to number the references according to their appearance on the document.

Eg. I have put paper A as reference [1], but suddenly I found that I need to quote paper B before that paper A. This means I need to renumber paper A as [2], and paper B as [1].

Now, when I have 20+ references, the changes are going to get ugly.

However, in Word 2007, under the "References" toolbar, there's all sort of tools to help in this bibliography. It can even auto-generate the table of content.

The only problem now is, we can only choose a few citation styles which is built-in, and that list of styles does not include IEEE's style.

I found a page that teaches how to create our own citation style, but I find it a chore now, since I wanted to finish my paper a.s.a.p.

Hopefully some good soul out there can help. :)

I signed up for PayPerPost!

I had signed up for PayPerPost.com, which pays bloggers to post reviews about their customers’ products. It’s fabulous, considering that it pays good, and opportunities are aplenty.

I had joined lotsa online ads companies since my undergrad days. Back then, Starcraft was "the game" and I devoted a website totally for that game. I put it on geocities, before it was took over by Yahoo. However, it's gone now, but that was my first website, coded using plain HTML and that was what got me started in web programming.

Since I started the website, I then searched for ways to earn from online ads by joining several pay per click and pay per lead companies. It was the height of the dot-com craze then, and companies were paying big bucks for any clicks and leads to their site. I still remembered a certain free webhosting company was paying USD2 for every signup at their site. At first, money was slow, but as my traffic picks up, so does the money.

However, as we know, the dotcom bubble burst, and basically that meant the slump of online ads as well, I mean at least for small-timers like me. However, now that blogging has become mainstream, opportunities to make money are growing once again. PayPerPost is one such chance for us bloggers to make some money, especially since we are paid in USD. A simple example: once you signed up, and make a review like this post of mine, you will get USD 20! (note: this is subject to their approval, of course :)

The things that I loved about PayPerPost (apart from the $) are its great customer service and not to mention the simple and clear-cut interface once I logged in to the system.

In a nutshell, if you are blogging, and wants to help reviewing and get paid for it, join PayPerPost now by click on the image:

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Happy blogging! (and earning :)