Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Starring

Bradley Cooper as Phil

Ed Helms as Stu

Zach Galifianakis as Alan

Justin Bartha as Doug

Plot

The wolfpack is back. This time they invade foreign shores. Stu is betrothed to Lauren, a young Thai-American, and is set to wed in a beautiful beach resort in Thailand. With best friends Phil & Doug, soon-to-be-brother-in-law Teddy and unfortunately Alan toasted beer and chucked marshmallows at a beach campfire. The next morning, Doug happily woke to a nice breakfast at the hotel while head-busted Phil, face-tattooed Stu and head-shaven Alan woke up in a rusty apartment in the middle of Bangkok with Teddy nowhere to be found. A mad search ensues for Teddy which includes encounters with a capuchin monkey, tiny Mr. Chow, Buddhist monks, Russian mobsters, Thai lady-boys, Interpol agents plus encore from Iron Mike Tyson.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Review

It was funny, not as funny as the first one though.

Verdict

Once is enough.

11:29am, 18 June 2011.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Starring

Chris Hemsworth as Thor

Natalie Portman as Jane Foster

Anthony Hopkins as Odin

Tom Hiddleston as Loki

Plot

Based on the Norse mythology of Odin, King of Asgard. Mighty Thor, arrogant warrior. Son of Odin. Defies his father and reignites an ancient war against the Frozen Giant. For his defiance, he is cast into the realm of Earth stripped of his power and the mystical Mjolnir. There he meets the beautiful scientist, Jane Foster. Soon follows the evils of his step-brother Loki.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Review

The movie was excellent. I was expecting little from the Mjolnir but they did an amazing animation job on it. Chris Hemsworth eerily sounded like the late Heath Ledger. Australians. Natalie Portman is always as lovely while Kat Dennings injected the funnies. Wait after the end credits.

Verdict

Repeat again and again.

In the beginning, there were mutants.

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Starring

James McAvoy as Charles Xavier/Professor X

Michael Fassbender as Erik Lensherr/Magneto

Jennifer Lawrence as Raven Darkholme/Mystique

Rose Byrne as Dr. Moira MacTaggert

January Jones as Emma Frost

Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw

Plot

1944, in a Nazi Concentration Camp, mutant Sebastian Shaw witnessed the powers of young Erik Lehnsherr, coerced him to unleashed it. Fast forward to 1962, Lehnsherr hunts down his Nazi oppressors in search of Shaw. Enter Charles Xavier. The two became best of friends until they’ve come to realize the difference in their vision of mutant-human relations.

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Review

Nice storyline. Perfect cast. Effects was nothing special. Jennifer Lawrence is a breakthrough. I like Logan’s cameo.

Verdict

Two times is okay.

10:42am, 5 June 2011.

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Starring

Adam Sandler as Danny

Jennifer Aniston as Katherine

Brooklyn Decker as Palmer

Plot

Betrothed Danny, an aspiring cardiologist, backs out from his own wedding upon hearing his wife-to-be’s settling for his elephant nose. Later in a bar, he learned about the power of the wedding ring and uses it to his advantage. Fast forward to today, he’s a successful plastic surgeon. Meets the girl of his dreams in Palmer. Palmer finds out about the ring. Enter Katherine and her two lovely kids to the rescue.

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Review

The movie was OK. Nicole Kidman, Dave Matthews, Palmer’s yellow bikini and the British-speaking Maggie, played by Bailee Madison, saved the movie. Loved the music mash-up, listen good.

Verdict

Twice is enough.

7:24am, 5 March 2011.

But his command has its limits. Just like Frank “Frankie Five Angels” Pentangeli from the Godfather Part II. Only to his family. When Tom Hagen came to him in prison they chatted:

Tom: “When a plot against the Emperor failed…the plotters were always given a chance to let their families keep their fortunes. Right?”

Frank: “Yeah, but only the rich guys, Tom. The little guys got knocked off and all their estates went to the Emperors. Unless they went home and killed themselves, then nothing happened. And the families…the families were taken care of…”

Tom: “That was a good break. A nice deal.”

Frank: “Yeah…They went home…and sat in a hot bath…opened up their veins…and bled to death…and sometimes they had a little party before they did it.”

Frank: “Those were the great old days, you know…And we was like the Roman Empire…The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire…”

Angelo T. Reyes was a soldier. A soldier to the end. RIP.

Question is…who’s Michael?

8:45pm, 8 February 2011.

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

Starring

Rapunzel – voiced by Mandy Moore

Eugene Fitzherbert AKA Flynn Rider – voiced by Zachary Levi

Mother Gothel – voiced by Donna Murphy

Plot

You all know the story of Rapunzel, right?

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

Review

Best Mandy Moore movie ever! I had a great laugh cause I kept thinking “Chuck” (Zachary Levi’s more famous character on TV) but he wasn’t there and he could belt out a tune too. Mother Gothel was just the right kind of evil. Excellent decision of keeping Pascal and Maximus quiet, very funny couple. But 2D would have sufficed. Good first movie choice of Abbie for 2011.

Verdict

See it again, and again, and again. Bring the kids too.

2:07pm, 5 February 2011.

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Starring

Anne Hathaway as Maggie Murdock

Jake Gyllenhaal as Jaime Randall

Oliver Platt as Bruce Winston

Hank Azaria as Dr. Stan Knight

Josh Gad as Josh Randall

Judy Greer as Cindy

Directed by Edward Zwick

Plot

Jaime is a great sales rep. Too great of a salesman, he also gets the girls. Lots of ‘em. Then he meets free-spirited Maggie. Leading the life the she wants, alone and content. It was a match made in hospital heaven.

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Review

I kept on hoping it would jump to the present day and Maggie dies. It didn’t. Nevertheless, it was a fun movie. Cheesy at times. Once is enough. But if you like seeing Anne naked, got at it for more.

P.S.

For all you pervs, here are the pics you’re hoping to see in this blog post. Courtesy of In The Raw.

11:04am, 29 January 2011.

Abbie and I went to the second outing of the “Rush” (the first was held last November 19-21, 2010 at Eastwood City Mall) Rockwell Powerplant Mall in Makati yesterday to avail of the promo for the new Samsung Galaxy Tab. Cool new phones! Free food and drinks too (first day only). Processing queue was crazy long though. I suggest you get there early, line up before the mall opens. Promo runs until Sunday, 5th of December 2010. Be there.

3:48pm, 5 December 2010.

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Starring

Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko

Shia LeBouf as Jacob “Jake” Moore

Carey Mulligan as Winnie Gekko

Josh Brolin as Bretton James

Susan Sarandon as Sylvia Moore

Frank Langella as Lewis Zabel

Directed by Oliver Stone

Review

Gordon Gekko is released from prison. I initially thought Bud Fox was the one who put him there for insider trading, the movie proved it was something much bigger. Jake is in love with Winnie, Gordon’s daughter. Jake is obsessed about meeting Gordon. Winnie wants nothing to do with his father. Ends up reconciling with him and eventually marrying Jake, have a child and be in one happy, legitimate family. The end. That’s pretty much it. Love, Rumors, Money, Family. Maybe that’s why Abbie slept in most of its boring parts. Not that she wants to. The first one had more depth of character.

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Trivia

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is the first and only sequel Oliver Stone ever made.

Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), from the first Wall Street, appears in a cameo role.

Director Oliver Stone appears in the movie a couple of times as a stock broker.

Verdict:

Rent it.

8:16am, 25 September 2010.

Saving your battery life isn’t rocket science—the general principle is to get rid of the things that are draining the battery the most, and trim down other things that you need to use, but maybe can tweak a little. Keep reading for the full explanation.

Use Android’s Built-in Battery Usage Screen

There’s a screen built into Android that most casual users probably don’t even know about, and it can tell you exactly what is killing your battery. Head into Settings –> About Phone –> Battery use to see what has been killing your battery life.

From this screen, you can usually see what apps are the worst offenders, and you will probably notice that the biggest problem—at least, the biggest one that we can fix—is actually the backlight on the phone. Personally I’d prefer to talk less to other humans, but that isn’t always an option!

Note: on my phone, I’ve already configured the backlight to not be very bright—normally that number would be a lot higher.

Adjust the Backlight to be Less Bright

Since we’ve already determined that the backlight is usually the biggest problem, you should probably adjust the settings. Head into Settings –> Display –> Brightness, where you can choose to automatically adjust, which usually works fairly well, or you can just turn the brightness down to the lowest acceptable level.

You should make sure that the screen timeout value is set to turn off quickly as well.

Disable Your Wi-Fi When You Don’t Need It

Wi-Fi can really speed up accessing data on your phone, but it can also be a big drain on the battery if you don’t need it enabled, especially when you are out and about… The phone will try and scan for a wireless network even though you may not want it to.

To enable Airplane mode, you can head into Settings –> Wireless & networks–> Airplane mode.

You can easily toggle the Wi-Fi on or off with a widget or shortcut—there’s a built-in widget included in Android phones, or you can use the AnyCut or BetterCut utilities to create your own shortcuts to directly turn them on or off without requiring a widget.

Disable Bluetooth if You Don’t Use It

If you aren’t using a wireless headset, there’s no reason to have Bluetooth running all the time, and you should probably cut it off to save the battery life. If you never use it at all, head into Settings –> Wireless & networks–> Bluetooth.

You can also enable or disable the Bluetooth when you do need it, using the power widget.

Use the Power Widget to Easily Toggle GPS, Bluetooth, Wireless, and Screen Brightness

Android includes a built-in Power Widget that can easily toggle these settings on or off—just long press on the background of one of your screens, choose Widget –> Power Control to add it to the screen. You’ll notice in this example screenshot that I’ve got my GPS enabled but I’m not using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth at the moment—the icon all the way on the right lets you easily toggle the screen brightness settings.

This is probably the simplest and easiest thing that you can do to save your battery without having to dig into the settings all the time.

Disable Apps that Sync Constantly

The built-in Email application (not the Gmail one, which uses Push technology) can suck the battery badly, because it syncs on a too-regular basis, especially when you have lots of accounts—each one of them is set to sync every 15 minutes. You’d be better off setting it up to sync manually, but if you want it to sync automatically, you should set it to sync less frequently.

Open up the Email application, head to your account, and choose Account settings –> Email check frequency from the menu. Change this to something more like an hour… or never. You can always hit refresh manually when you want to read your email.

The same thing holds true for other accounts, like Twitter clients, which are even less important to update all the time. For Seesmic, you can head into Settings –> Background Updates from the main screen. For the official Twitter app, the settings are similar.

The Facebook application polls automatically in the background, and you can customize the refresh interval for that as well—if you don’t need Facebook updating all the time, you should set this value as high as possible.

From the main Facebook screen—the one with the icons—head into Settings –> Refresh interval from the menu.

Disable the GPS Location Features

One of the biggest battery sucking features on my droid is the GPS… When I have navigation going, the battery dies far too fast, so I end up having to keep it plugged in the whole time I am driving. This makes sense… but what you might not know is that a lot of other applications use the GPS as well.

You can also change the GPS to use wireless networks, and uncheck the option for Use GPS satellites—this will make the GPS a little less accurate, but it will save your battery. Note that you probably want the real GPS enabled if you’re using Google Maps Navigation.

Additionally, you should turn off the geolocation features in your Twitter client, weather application, or whatever other apps that you really don’t need them in. If you want to keep it enabled, that’s great, just realize that it does drain the battery, so uncheck this option to help.

Use a Task Manager to See What is Always Running

It is a wise decision to have a copy of Advanced Task Cleaner or a similar application installed on your phone to help you kill applications that don’t need to be running, but more so that you can see what exactly is launching itself repeatedly in the background. You can setup an auto-kill list for applications you don’t use that often—make them cut off when you shut off the screen, or after an interval.

Note: If you’ve configured your application settings to not pull down lots of data or do checking in the background, it’s not quite as important to keep tasks killed all the time—that’s really what kills your battery, not having them sitting idle.

You can also configure advanced task manager to show you CPU usage for each app, which is a more useful meter than memory usage when it comes to battery life.

Disable or Remove Applications That You Aren’t Using

Once you have identified the application that you don’t want running all the time, check in the settings to see if it can be removed from running in the background. Some applications will give you an option for notifications that can be turned off if you don’t need them, making the application not check in the background so often.

It should go without saying, but we’ll say it anyway—you should remove the apps that you don’t need anymore, especially the ones that are draining your battery as determined from the android battery panel or task manager. Head into Settings –> Applications –> Manage Applications and then you can click the Uninstall button for an app.

Disable Home Screen Widgets You Don’t Need

If you’ve got loads of widgets that are pulling data from the web, that means they are likely pulling down data in the background all the time. You should try not to go overboard with these, or remove the ones you don’t actually need.

Disable Animated Wallpaper

Yeah, that sweet animated wallpaper doesn’t help your battery any. Get rid of it for a small extra battery savings.

Use APNDroid to Kill Your Entire Data Connection When You Don’t Need It

If you’re using a phone that’s on the AT&T or T-Mobile networks, you can use the APNDroid utility to kill your data connection entirely with a simple widget. It doesn’t work on Verizon phones in my testing. It’ll disable the data but still allow regular calls and SMS.

Keep the Battery from Getting Too Hot

One of the quickest ways to kill a battery is to leave it out in the sun—try and keep your phone somewhere that isn’t too hot whenever possible. You’ll end up needing to replace the battery a lot quicker if you don’t.

Additional Notes

There’s a number of other things you can do to extend your battery life a bit—one of which is to use a rooted phone and install the Autostarts utility, which you can use to keep applications from launching themselves automatically. Since this isn’t something you can do on a stock phone, we’re not covering how to do it here.

You can also use an application called Tasker to automate certain actions, like turning on or off the GPS or Wi-Fi when you launch a particular application, or scheduling a time of day to make sure that Wi-Fi is disabled. Lifehacker has a great guide to using Tasker to automate your phone, and they also explain how to use a  configuration to scale back data usage at night.

Reblogged via How-To Geek

10:44pm, 5 September 2010.

Last night, Dads Ultimate Buffet had an anniversary special. The Eat All You Can Tempura. To celebrate Saisaki’s 33 years of existence. Abbie chose to have the regular Saisaki buffet since she is not a big fan of tempura. I, on the other hand is

For only P330, you’ll get a bowl of soup, a cup of sticky rice, bottomless iced tea & all you can eat tempura. At first, they gave me 3 tempuras & 2 crab sticks. The second round, they gave me 5. On the third, 4 more. And getting oilier by the round. For the last round, 4. On paper, I ate 16. The truth, 14 & a half. After all that, my heart was pounding like a racehorse after the Kentucky Derby. But it was well worth it.

7:52am, 27 August 2010.