Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Source: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm56923648/tt0367882

I have just watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull yesterday night.

I am a fan of the Indiana Jones series, since I watched them in RTM2
when I was a kid, and played the LucasArts Indiana Jones' game as well.

However, I would rate this movie a 5/10.

I find that the plot of the story doesn't make sense.

The old man (friend of Indy whom became mad) was said to have been to the temple where there are the crystal skulls.

He supposedly reached inside and saw the alien there, but then managed to return back to the place where he found the skull originally.

However, towards the end, when the Ukrainian girl placed the skull back to the skeleton, she was instead incinerated by the alien.

So, this brings to mind, why didn't the old man replace the skull back to the skeleton when he reached the temple? If he did, why wasn't he killed by the alien?

All in all, the movie's plot had too many loopholes that it made the film seems childish.

Melaka Land Office Mistake again?

"Some 36 property owners, whose buildings' back portions on the Malacca River’s reserve along Lorong Hang Jebat have been earmarked for demolition, want the state to spell out its plans.

One owner, Ken Lai, 55, said the 30-day notice calling for the demolition was unreasonable.

“The Malacca River project has been going on for two years and the authorities never mentioned anything although measuring the area six times,” he said here yesterday.

In February, Chief Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Ali Rustam had degazetted acquisition of 143 properties in Lorong Hang Jebat, Jalan Kampung Pantai and Jalan Kampung Hulu.

He admitted that the land office had made a mistake as the Jan 17 notice of acquisition was for abandoned or derelict buildings only."

Yeah right, it's just another "mistake" on the land office part.

Source
Property owners: Spell out plans

ESOS Tax Calculation

I had just completed my income tax online remittance. I wanted to submit earlier, but there was a problem, I do not know how to calculate tax for my Employee Stock Option Scheme's gains.

After consulting blupi and googling,I found the following page in FPAM:
When exercising your ESOS, consider also the tax implications.

Key points of the ESOS tax calculation:

1. We are not taxed for the gains made when we sell, since we normally wait until the price is high enough for us to make a profit.

2. Instead, we are taxed for the difference between the price of the stock option and the market value of the stock at the date of the stock option's offer.

3. The gain is not taxed for the current year, instead it will be counted as taxable income for the year the option was offered.

Man U 1-2 Chelsea

Manchester United had just been defeated 1-2 by Chelsea in the EPL. Goal difference is the only thing separating them now.

However, the performance of the referees' were abysmal. First of all, replay could not show whether Carrick did or did not handle for the penalty, so I will wait until I can get a clear replay of the "offence".

Now, after Ballack converted the penalty, there was a Nani pullback for Carrick, but one of the Chelsea player clattered into Carrick and clearly did not touch the ball at all. This was a clear penalty!However, nothing was given.

zzzzz.

If we lost the EPL, this will be the key incident.

AMD Athlon64 3000+

My PC, a 2006 purchase, with AMD Athlon64 3000+, Asus SLI motherboard(aka mobo), and Geforce 6600GT, has had its 'unfair' share of problems.

Back when I bought it, I was already made to wait for 1 month plus for the Asus board to arrive at Stygix.

Then, after a few months using it, the mobo's fan malfunctioned, where it refused to cool my mobo.

I sent it for warranty, which took 3 months plus(!) before I get the the replacement However, the new unit's fan also died after just one month plus. :|

Refusing to wait another 3 months, I decided to use it without the fan, and thankfully, the PC met no problems without it.

Around the stat of 2007, my beloved 19" AOC Flatscreen monitor, which served me faithfully since the last year of my undergraduate(circa 2001-2), began to show signs of its age.

The displayed screen shrunk from 19" to only around 8-10".

As such, I changed to the Viewsonic VA1912WB LCD monitor, which was fine until 3 months later, where the its power unit went on strike.

Since I bought it from PC World over here, I sent it for warranty thinking that I would get it back a few weeks from then.

However, 2 months passed, and there was no news from them. One day I went over to see Steven, and checked with him about the status of my monitor.

Steven made a few calls, and promised me that my LCD would be back soon. Anyway, a week passed, and again there is still no news of my LCD.

This proved to be the start of my countless trips to the shop to ask about the LCD. Each time, Steven's technician would help me to call to the supplier to inquire about the LCD, and each of the call would end with "it would be back soon".

Noticing my frequency of visits, Steven then decided to make a full inquiry into the LCD, and found that all along, my LCD was already fixed, but it 'disappeared'.

The disappearance was due to that back when I sent my LCD for warranty, it was sent to the supplier, which subsequently did not sell Viewsonic monitors anymore, and passed its operation to a second supplier.

As such, this second supplier, which the PC World's technician called, did not know about my LCD at all, and thought it was lost or something.

Anyway, at the end of the 4th month, I finally got my LCD monitor back, albeit with a few scratches here and there.

My latest problem with my PC is the Geforce 6600GT. The fan(again) of the GPU had malfunctioned. When I opened it, I found that the fan's base had melted.

Anyway, since I had 4 fans for the casing, I took 1 off, and placed it directly below the heatsink of the GPU.

Thankfully, my PC ran without a problem for the past month.

That is, until now.

Yesterday, just after I had transferred my research work to the thumbdrive, the PC suddenly rebooted.

My first thought was that it was the GPU overheating, but to my dismay, Windows XP would not boot. It would continue displaying the Windows XP booting screen with the progress bar running, for hours.

In fact, I powered it up - hoping that it would boot normally - before I went to sleep (around 12.30am) yesterday.

I was awoken around 5am just now when I heard the main door being opened, and some loud laughter followed by sounds of "shhhhh".

The status of my Windows?

Still loading.

I have tried Safe Mode, System Restore and Chkdsk, but it still failed.

I am running a final chkdsk, and if it still fails to load, looks like I will need a reformat.

ZZZZZZ.

Dell's Prices

Since my PC is now AWOL, I am thinking of buying Dell's laptop. I am looking out for 17" laptops since I love big screens AND they can accommodate two harddrives (who knows, I may get a SSD one day).


I checked the Dell's Malaysia website for the 172o. Current price is RM 3,399.

Hoping that Dell Singapore will offering it for a cheaper price, I found that the opposite is true, 1720 is selling for S$1899. Current exchange rate is S$1 = RM 2.3249, which means the price is RM4414.

Looks like I am better off buying PCs in Malaysia.

DIY SSD in Laptop

I have been reading up on articles on which laptop to get, on a budget.

This article from tomshardware on how to DIY solid state drive (SDD) into any laptop is great news.

However the current cost of SSD is around USD700, so it wouldn't be cost-optimal, yet.