Here are some recaps of what happened in Year 2008 for me in no special order:

• Redesigned this blog in XHTML5 and CSS3. It was fun until Yellow Death of Screen starts kicking in because of issues that I cannot control (more often than not, delicious feeds from Yahoo! that contain unconforming tags)
• Completed 42.195km full marathon. Not something that I would even dream of participating in the past. But this year I did and not only did I dream, I acted on it. Exercise, toughen one self and get to donate to people who need it at the same time, why not? Even though the timing was not made of win, the fact that I participated and completed it deserves enough credit for me.
• Joined Wego Travel Search, a company that does meta travel search engine, as part of their team of front-end web ninja(okay, I’m getting there) where I really enjoy working alongside colleagues who actually cares about Web Standards. It’s like a geek wet dream come true no less.
• Finished my 2 years NS stint in the Army in September and I can’t believe I actually didn’t blog about it. I guess it is just not a big deal once you’re done and over with it, besides it was good while it lasted. Go, 3SIR and 9SIG!
• Started fishing all over again and can’t get enough fishing already. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten my fish lines reeled out by the fishes.
• Finally started using Mac OS X for daily use at work. It is great experience by the way and the greatest advantage of using one is its user interface and ease of use–intuitive comes to mind when you use it. For the record, I still use both Mac and Windows–fan of Windows XP by the way. Hi!
• Got into photography as a hobby with a few friends. So many things to learn, so little time! So many items in the wish list and so little money!

Year 2009

And here are some possible plans for Year 2009, again in no special order:

• Go up Mount Kinabalu with a couple of friends and plant my personalized flag. Great stepping stone to eventually getting to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro!
• Partake in a full marathon again and complete with a better time every year until the year I’m lazy or manage to convince myself that I’ve reached the best timing I can ever achieve.
• Watch the Serengeti Migrations live with my own eyes. Trust me, this is the craziest idea in my life yet. My friend is still doing research on the details of the entire journey so I will say this plan is still in its very infancy stage.
• Go to a Kelong or beach resort(Redang Island?) in Malaysia for my fishing frenzy. Also to chill, I like peace and quiet in my life.
• Learn diving. Yes that is right, I’m considering diving when I haven’t even gotten my driving license, because I dive to places as a form of transport.
• Save up for a few luxury items (from most wanted decreasing order): MacBook Pro 2.53GHz, Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L USM and Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM. Yes I have my burning desire for luxury items too, surprise surprise. BTW, if you’re feeling really generous any time of the year, you are always welcomed to give me a belated Christmas 2008 present or even early Christmas 2009!
• Start learning to write PHP and JavaScript the proper and leaner manner. I’m thinking about OOP/MVC(Kohana framework) for PHP, and jQuery framework for Javascript for a start. I am starting from scratch so yes, it takes time.
• Procrastinate less and prioritize more with regards to many things in life. Friends, family, passion, hobby, work and fun. A healthy doze of right place at the right time with the right person for the right reason to be applied externally. Some things in life just aren’t meant to be so perhaps it’s high time to let them go and move on once and for all.

In a nutshell

So in a nutshell, the lists probably sum up what happened to me in the year 2008 and what may happen to me in the year 2009. I’m not saying I will do all the above mentioned this year but I figured it’s a good list to start a new year with knowing what you might want to accomplish in life and set off to doing them.

It’s a magical world, ol’ buddy, Hobbes… let’s go exploring!

Merry 2009 to all of you! May you find your very own magical world soon too!

It’s been 3 months and I never thought I could feel this happy by loving a person and being loved in return, not until the day you appeared in my life. What you have given me, no one can erase–the fond memories of the many days and nights we’d spent together, are ours to keep.

Let our love be built on commitment and trust–commitment that I will always be there for you and trust that I will give you the happiness I promised.

I believe we have many tomorrows, and ever after. But I hope tomorrow will never come for I want to savor every single moment that I have with you now, for fear that in the days that you should no longer be with me anymore due to whatever destiny had planned for us, I can pull through with these memories once upon a time.

For all that’s good and pure, here comes Avenged Sevenfold - Afterlife in its original glory, and its rock band counterpart.

Seriously, that’s some really sick solo, real guitar or not.

If this weekly drama program works for you too, it’ll be my honor. Here goes:

Monday

• Family Guy

Tuesday

• How I Met Your Mother
• Heroes
• Gossip Girl

Wednesday

• Dexter

Friday

• Supernatural
• Smallville
• My Name Is Earl
• Grey’s Anatomy
• The Office

Enjoy, at least till May ‘09! :-) Till then.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint Exupery

Sometimes, perfection should be left alone. Director Yann Samuell seems to think otherwise though. I suspect the only good thing he did for the remake is to cast a really gorgeous girl, Elisha Cuthbert, and even she couldn’t save the show.

Admittedly, trying to remake a show that’s so perfect is difficult but at least try to be as related as possible? If there’s a need, copy it full sale since it’s a Hollywood remake of a Korean show with Hollywood cast there’s no need for creativity, no?

Can’t stop narrating

What made the original so great is that instead of narrating everything, emotions are shown through the acting. Take for example, you can feel that the main actor falling deeper in love with the female lead during the piano scene when he took off his mask and follow through with the flower giving, mildly dazed. And then it ended very romantically with the close-in shot portraying the couple in their own world.

What did the remake do? Narrated a whole lot, and ended with a really unromantic line from the actress: I don’t wear underwear on days I play the piano. ’nuff said.

Hell with dialogues

Rewriting the dialogues during the scene when the 2 of them were being held hostage by the soldier is really a bad idea. The original storyline revolves around letting go of love, moving on with life and accepting new love as can be seen when the sassy girl told the soldier if it’s not true love that he shares with his girlfriend, then it’s of no point holding on to it after she’s decided to move on on her own, and it’s time to let go (the same way the sassy girl’s trying to forget her own boyfriend’s demise).

Oh, and the dialogue of Jordan with the old man couldn’t be more corny, and I couldn’t relate to how sad the letter was when she read it non-nonchalantly that she could actually start crying. In the korean version, all she had to do was to listen to a “number not in service” and my tear ducts started working. Masterpiece.

The sassiness

The directory had also decided to take away the Sassy out of My Sassy Girl — all the unreasonable slapping and beating disappeared in this show, and the dialogue during the slapping game about the sun, the moon, how the reason he was given birth is because of her, all gone. Not cool, not cool at all. That is exactly how you show that she is sassy — by saying all those nonsense — and the director had them removed. Epic fail.

The cut scenes

I couldn’t blame the director for not including the director’s cut scenes but if he did, it would have added greater depth to the story. The original version that I watched fortunately included the scene and I can’t be more thankful for that.

The ending

I still can’t believe the director could screw up the ending.

First, he positioned the girl in the direction that she could see Charlie when he entered the restaurant. In the original, we couldn’t see him until the auntie started pinching his cheeks and the look on sassy girl was priceless.

Second, he made them kissed. I am sorry but that totally ruined the entire show. The original had them holding hands under the table with no cliched dialogue, and that’s timeless.

Conclusion

There are many more negative modifications from the original but that’s all I am going to mention. In conclusion, the dialogues were bad, the screenplay could be better, and I couldn’t bear talking about it more.

To be fair, like I mentioned earlier, I’m a My Sassy Girl (Korean) fan boy so it matters to me that this remake misses the mark. You could think otherwise, but that doesn’t make the show any better in my opinion. Besides this show is not without its merit: Elisha Cuthbert is really hot though she too misses the mark as a sassy girl.

Nice try, but let’s move on to better remakes like The Lake House where the main leads actually have chemistry.

If the combination of the soundtrack and the animation in this small segment of the movie is not pure cinematic magic, then I don’t know what is.

Live your Digital Dream with Canon.

But even that is no easy feat.

Okay, now there is no easy way of saying this so I am gonna say it pure vanilla style: Most of the computing/web developing/programming modules in my course were useless.

The documentation fundamentals and presentations for projects were pretty good though, now that makes two parts that were done relatively well. See, I said it. Now let’s move on to the bad parts and how it could be possibly be improved.

Programming & subversion source control

My course was all about programming(of Java, HTML/CSS, ASP, etc.) and many modules required project works (usually in groups of 3-4) to be submitted at the end of the semester. Yet amazingly there was no mention of subversion source control at all.

There should be evidence of deploying svn, possibly with all its tags and branches for weekly accessing, to let students have a feel of what it is like to be programmers. There is no project too small to use svn on, seriously, even for back-up purposes.

Web designing/developing

Designing

More emphasis could have been placed on typography, colour combinations, web layout and the likes.

Above-the-fold concept is outdated, let’s move on to fluid, resolution-independent designs already. Educate about what is user-centric design so we know how to arrange things on a web layout to facilitate the visitors. This is web design, this is how the layout should communicate efficiently with the visitors so they can find whatever they are looking for. Anyway how exactly do you expect to squeeze contents that fit in a 1024×768 screen into a mobile phone above-the-fold?

Look, some colors just don’t match. I know it, and you as a lecturer do too, but you just couldn’t find the heart to inform Paris Hilton over there about her choices of pink, red and more shades of pink. Admittedly, done correctly it can be a good combination but you know her work is not one. Tap her shoulder, drop her an e-mail or a sms, slip an envelope into her bag, just inform her already!

Tell us the latest trends in web design. Teach us how to convince potential clients that this new trend is what the users want, instead of what’s 10 years ago. And for Pete’s sakes, 9 pixels text is not sexy, however you look at it.

Browsers quirks

Everyone and his dog know that there are more than one web browsers. But back in the days we were only taught to use IE6.

I say expose us to more choices, teach us about the quirks and why some things refuse to work the same everywhere. This can only greatly benefit us in our jobs next time.

HTML/CSS

Not surprisingly, table-layout was the norm for laying out web pages. Epic fail. I actually went through one full module following Dreamweaver textbook about how to do ugly JavaScript and map/area hacks in web pages through the WYSIWYG interface to achieve what could have otherwise been done using clean HTML/CSS. Oh, and CSS was used purely for font and colors in those lessons.

Why undermine CSS? The module should start teaching hand-coding of HTML for structure and CSS for site layout instead. Choice of coding programs will change but HTML/CSS won’t. Even future revisions of these web languages are backward-compatible (who needs XHTML2 when you have HTML5!!!) so there is no worry what you’ve learnt will be outdated.

I mean, seriously how difficult is it to write HTML/CSS? Even bloggers on Blogspot can do simple editing (albeit doing it all wrong). If I can be self-taught, I am sure semantic HTML and layout via CSS at school is not asking for the moon. Right?

ASP

In another module, I was supposed to be learning ASP. Even though I was hugely involved in the front-end and the back-end of the project, I did not learn anything about ASP except how to add the pre-scripted codes via Dreamweaver interface. All it takes is for Dreamweaver to change their interface (like Microsoft did with the Ribbon interface) and I will be as good as not having attended the course.

Teach us how to do ASP like how we were taught Java. Tell us about the syntax, show us the magic of hand-coding it instead of making us click around menu bars in Dreamweaver. Let us troubleshoot our own errors, and learn from it. True, it will be more difficult, but at least I will learn something!

Being reasonable

I believe my suggestion is reasonable for polytechnic level education. Perhaps some of the worries is that those less IT-savvy would not be able to catch up. I don’t see Maths being removed from the syllabus because it’s difficult. In fact, Maths was a lot more difficult than programming.

Instead of wasting time of those who wish to learn by setting the standards low to accommodate those who don’t, why don’t we set the standard a little higher to benefit the true learners? The others can wait to drop out.

Isn’t that a tad better than wasting everybody’s time?

Life goes on

There are actually more, but I’m done with my bitching and I doubt my previous school (or any school) would heed my advice anyway so I’m going back to job hunting.

If you’re employing, don’t forget to check out my resume and let me know if you’re interested. Otherwise please help me pray that I get a job soon so I can feed my family of lenses fishes.

1. Wall-E - August 27 2008 (this is a movie aired 2 months later than most other countries, damn it!)
2. Robot Chicken - August 31 2008
3. Supernatural - September 18 2008
4. Smallville - September 18 2008
5. How I Met Your Mother - September 22 2008
6. Heroes - 22 September 2008
7. My Name Is Earl - 25 September 2008
8. Grey’s Anatomy - 25 September 2008
9. The Office - 25 September 2008
10. Dexter - 28 September 2008
11. Family Guy - ?? September 2008 (can’t find any exact date, but reliable source says autumn of 2008)

Oh, besides these shows, I can’t wait for September to arrive so I can finally ORD too. It’s been a while, mates.

Another time-line to watch out for — October 5th — wait for it.

Till then.

Then it was hours of waiting before I felt something pulling my rod. Exciting, I stood up and reeled the line back but whatever was hooked to my line was pulling away from me. After a few minutes of out and in with the target, it finally showed itself jumping out of the water in an attempt to break free. Then it was over — it was worn out by the struggle — so we left it swimming in the water tied by a line. It was a kim bass.

My prized catch of the day — a kim sea (oops, thanks Eugene) bass.

Now everybody was excited by the fact there was actually bigger fishes out there, so we got back to our positions and continued our waiting session.

Then Eugene’s patience paid off when his rod bent over under the weight of something relatively heavy.

Eugene’s target is hooked — see how his rod was bending under the weight.

Close-up of Eugene’s target — it’s a stingray.

Me helping Eugene with the lifting of his stingray.

Eugene smiling happily with his prized catch in hand. The thing that’s coming out of the ray’s eyes is actually the long grass’s end.

Me joining in the excitement, smiling happily with Eugene’s ray.

From this point on, the rest of the catches — puffer fishes, gugu fishes (by miss Sylvia), etc. — were relatively small and were all released back into the water.

I wonder if Noel was there to fish or to take pictures of fishes — can’t stop messing with his DSLR.

I had enough of the sun and so surrendered under the shelter of my umbrella (see right). The circular frame is Noel testing his Polaroid filter.

We left the place at around 5pm as the tide was lowering. Till the next time. :-)