Harry Potter (and the Half Blood Prince...wait what?)

(May contain spoiler. Steer clear should you not want to be spoiled)

Initially I wasn't interested to watch HP:HBP, until I saw the trailer to the 6th installment during our rewatching of Star Trek (which QJ got free cuz of his birthday in June thanks to GSC)...scenes we saw were heavily packed with rich CG that actually made me go "ooooo....OK now I wanna watch" ...'sides, it's been a while since I've seen something from the fantasy genre ;3

Went watch with Kel and his GF (yes that bastard has a GF and he didn't bother to tell his friends! boo!) and his bunch of friends...had no expectation...nor much memory of HBP cuz the last memory I had of reading that book was probably before I got together with QJ. I vaguely remember holding Dexter's copy of HBP inside Baswira riding back from town...scribbles in the potions book and debates over who exactly is this Half Blood Prince...

Overall...I thought the movie was decent. I thougth the filmakers did what they could do best with the material they were given...afterall all the book did (the parts I did remember anyway) was run in circles about who this Half Blood Prince was...

What the movie did was...remove this 'frustrating running around in circle' and put only minor emphasis on the Half Blood Prince...No Harry and his friends didn't really ponder much who this Half Blood Prince was...they never really suspected it might be Tom Riddler...they never really put too much thought to it until in the end the owner of the book just steps out to say "Oh yeah btw...I'M the Half Blood Prince" .....kinda makes me feel that the whole title of the movie's rather pointless since it does not seem to be the main focus of the movie....but in a way I suppose it makes it less dull....

Instead..the movie focused A LOT A LOT on Ron Weasly's love life...as well as Harry's....much more than I remembered anyway...actually make that every girl in Hogwarts. Hormones seem to be raging this year...*shudder*...very little on classroom life in Hogwarts, and all the side characters got minimal screen time. What was excellent was that all the casts have pretty much settled snugly into their characters like its their skin. Everyone's grown up so much, and their portrayal of their character is so much more 'in character'....even when Harry was supposed to be 'out of character' after drinking the Felix Felicis. Luna's as charming (in her own way) as always...the girl really knows how to play her character well...gotta love her. Dumbledore felt like Gandalf. McGonagall aged so much in the past 'academic year' of Hogwarts...that it felt like she was gonna double over anytime >.< ...Draco drank some 'manly potion'...shot up so much that you'd almost forget that he was that white haired whiney kid he used to be...but also made him lose whatever 'sleekness' he had in him previously...repetitive scenes of him 'pulling cloth from cupboard' got a bit meh after awhile....

Nitpicks aside...I had a good time :) It wasn't 'true blue' to the book...but I felt it was good.

...and some guy behind us actually said Transformers 2 was actually so much better than HBP.....well at least Harry Potter actually HAD a plot... =.=

Envirosax

Envirosax are eco-friendly bags made out of durable waterproof lightweight polyester, built for toughness and extra strength. 

Well...in short its a shopping bag for all you eco-friendly people so that you wun be taking more plastic bags for your groceries. What's great about it is that its waterproof, so if it messes up you can just wash it....and it rolls up neatly and can be secured with a button so it wun be take up much space in your handbag. Nice design is definately a plus.

The first time I heard about Envirosax was Christmas last year. Sis bought those (not sure if tis the same brand but must be la) from Singapore and I find them rather nice. But I kept feeling like its gonna tear if I load them with my usual groceries (says there they can last up to 20kg and by then I think my arms would have fallen off)...That...and I don't think I wanna spend about RM24.90 for a bag like this when I usually just use my small backpack for groceries...maybe when I have more cash to splurge la.

Here's some of the designs...makes my eyes go @.@ at the choice...

And the Kids version....

Distributed by Living Wing (same people who carry BROS), I suppose you can expect it to see it in Jusco or something (newsletter says  it should be available in One Utama in Homing, Living Quarters, and Parkson, Jusco Sunway Piramid, and in Isetan KLCC and Lot 10)

http://www.envirosax.com/

Nintendo DS Lite: My Chinese Coach

Yes, I'm a banana.

Banana: Chinese who don't speak chinese. Well in my case, I guess you could say its half ripe cause I can actually speak chinese (I have no problem with hokkien and even kanto, thx to TVB dramas...mandarin's a bit challenging)...but when it comes to writing...i'm pretty hopeless. Thankfully I still know how to write my name so...its still cool.

QJ and a few other friends got me a DS Lite for my birthday last March. Been a lovely companion during journeys back home as well as times when I don't have my PC to use :D . Games aside, I've been using it as an ebook, mp3 player, I can even watch movies with it but quality kinda sucks compared to PSP (of course).

Last week while I was surfing for new games for my DS Lite, I found this interesting 'game' by Ubisoft: My Chinese Coach.

This is not the first language coaching game. My Coach series include French, Spanish, word coach, life coach and even weight loss coach (ok I gotta check this out XD )

So far I've only tried the Chinese one. And I find it kinda great. I don't know how long I'm able to stick to this lessons (I've taken chinese lessons before..but that was kinda long ago :P ) but I'm gonna give it a shot since its free lesson for me.

How do they teach you? After going through a placement test, I started off with lesson 3. Most words were taught in romanized (pingyin) form. Audio sample of the pinyin's pronunciation is also available and what's nice, you can also record your own pronunciation of the words and compare it with the sample provided.

One of the games that I really really enjoy is the Fading Character game. They'll show you how to write some words in chinese, with the strokes in the correct order. After that, you're required to trace the strokes in the correct order and correct number of strokes. In the last frame, they will only show the word briefly and you're required to re-write them from memory. Something I've been looking forward to have on the NDS.

Another game that I've unlocked so far requires the player to match the pinyin/word to the english word given, or the audio sample provided. There's also a lesson that teaches you the 4 different tones in pinyin. I found this sentence very interesting: Mama(1) ma(4) ma(3)...means Mum scolds the horse...pretty much like phonetics :P ...just pronounced in different tones.

Too bad this game relies heavily on the audio...otherwise it'd be nice to play during clas- whoops! XD

My Japanese Coach will be released on 14th October 2008 for $29.99. Will definately get my hands on the program then :D