Back when I read The Da Vinci Code, I never expected it would make it into a movie. Unputdownable book? Yes. Movie material? Apparently.

I went to see the movie on Sunday with Kim (who's linked on the right). We were looking for the cinemas that were playing this movie and the closest one was a 6-mile bike ride. For every movie before this one that I've seen at the cinema here, we've gone in packs and at night. And since we went in a large group, we went by car. And since we took the freeway on our way there, I had the impression that, subjectively speaking, these cinemas were "awfully far away". This one, 6 miles away seemed more like just "far away" in comparison. So, we started biking. The scenery on the way was extremely beautiful, mostly because we took a wrong turn and passed through this area of silicon valley where companies (some of whose names I recognized) had set up shop and had built these exquisite structures of glass and steel surrounded by beautiful gardens and ponds. Eventually, after getting back on track, we arrived at "the Cinema" and I was most surprised to see that I hadn't recognized it by its name when we were looking it up online and that it was actually the place that was "awfully far away" where we had gone to see V for Vendetta.

The movie itself was really good. Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon had both its ups and its downs. On the one hand, he was clearly unsuited for the role because Langdon was, in my opinion, supposed to be somewhat better looking than Hanks - the pretty boy with brains. On the other hand, having Langdon as not-so-handsome also meant that the movie avoided taking the path of romance which would have honestly disgusted me no end. The liberties that the movie makers took were, in my opinion, well done and quite justified. The book sort-of trailed off towards the end in some sort of spiritual way which doesn't go well with materialistic humans like me who wanted to see an actual, physical Holy Grail and the movie, I'm pleased to say, fulfilled that need. Also, how cool is it that Audrey Tautou (who was Amélie in Amélie) played Sophie Neveu?! The movie was rather long, in all, clocking in at 149 minutes, which is about the same time as the longest DotA game we ever played.

Ah, DotA… DotA?

Labels: English

So, for ten days, I was in New York City again. By this point, you have to realize that I have been to New York City way too many times and it holds only about ten grams' worth of charm for me and that's also only because of its trains. I am not a big fan of the enormous amounts of security procedures everywhere in NYC, totally dislike the $50 bills every time I visit a grocery store for, like, orange juice, some fruits, milk and bread and I think the traffic lights here are probably better anyway. Here = California. I spent some time there visiting the 5th Avenue glass cube Apple Store and I have to say that it looks pretty sweet. I wish I could have visited it at night when it reported looks even more sugary but it's okay and I got more than the gist of it. I also went on random rides on the Subway simply because I like the NYC Subway and I admire the future planning that was put into it in the early 1900s. The trip to NYC though, in the end, was inevitably boring as I had little to do. I was with my family though, and beyond the nagging, we had a fun time with me getting as many hours of sleep as I wanted and having a general blast. While I was there, we thankfully visited no friends and family in the area and I was deeply thankful for that. It also didn't rain while I was there but, as I was leaving, it started pouring and the radio-guy said, "It's raining today and it's 72 degrees and it looks like it's going to rain tomorrow, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday". I just found that incredibly funny - don't ask me why. Coming back from New York, my flight was delayed by three hours. It was scheduled to depart at five-thirty in the evening. It was raining and there was lightning and the captain said that they couldn't refuel with lightning and so they waited for like an hour for that to stop. Then we waited for another half an hour for this Air France plane next to us to leave, and another hour and a half we waited in the queue for take-off because, by then, about 30 planes had queued up in front of us and we all wanted to leave the dratted airport. One of the funny things was that the captain kept apologizing to us that they couldn't serve water while we were waiting for three hours to take off because they had limited supplies and wanted to save it for the air. We were in New York City, it was raining and the captain was acting as if we were stranded in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Eh… but he was funny and kept making comments every fifteen minutes or so to keep us awake, which I'm not sure I appreciated, being of the mind to go to sleep.

It's so good to be home again…

Labels: English

First, here's the picture I found in some random forward which supposedly depicts an iceberg from top to bottom and explains the common proverb; I thought it looked a bit frightening to be honest.

Anyway, I realize that I can probably never ever finish my entry on Leopard. Considering that I'm writing about something that I haven't even seen and about which I have very little to no information, it's amazing how the entry just keeps growing and growing… I am never satisfied with what I write in it and I'm probably never going to publish it. Let's just say that using operating systems is a task that is very dear to me and I can go on discussing OS's for nearly infinite lengths of time.

So, switching gears only slightly I want to talk about The Ultimate Pilgrimage™. For a Mac fanatic, you might say that going to Macworld or perhaps the WWDC might be a pilgrimage of sorts but, in my opinion, the very heart of Appledom on Earth - the Caras Galathon of the Macphiles - must indeed be 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino. I had visited this place last year when I went down to Sunnyvale but had only seen it from the outside. Let's just say that although there is no dearth of Apple logos in different colours there, the buildings themselves are quite unspectacular. Unfortunately, last year I did not have the chance to actually go in. This time around though, I was welcomed into Apple Headquarters with a open arms and an iMac. That's because I went as part of a group of Apple Dorm Reps. Why Apple would organize a lovely tour of the Apple Campus for Dorm Reps is obvious – we are the direct representative of Apple to the people living on campus and they want to appease us because we do free advertising for them and free advertising, just like spreading religion, needs a lot of motivation. This works for me because I'm already a Mac fan and a bit of royalty treatment never hurt anyone.

These are a few pictures of the little "Apple Gallery" they have outside the actual Executive Briefing Conference Room, where we were entertained. The whole intent and purpose of this little gallery outside the Briefing room is purely to show off Apple's best products and impress visitors. And mind you, it totally succeeds at doing that. As you can see from the photo above, there are iMacs set in the wall. There are ten of these in total and they are doing nothing but playing some random Apple videos such as commercials and other promotional stuff. That's about $15000 right there doing nothing productive. On the whole, counting the stuff that you can see in the picture as well as other things that you can't see, I should say there was about $60000 worth of computing equipment in that gallery looking pretty and doing nothing. This includes the G5 hooked up to two 30" screens at 2560x1600 - that's 8,192,000 pixels or about five times bigger than what I consider to be my huge 20" iMac!

Anyway, you get some basic idea of the grandioseness of the place. A month before this trip, we had been asked about what kind of things we would like to hear about when we went to Apple Campus. I, of course, wanted to meet some Mac OS X engineers and many others probably wanted to hear about the iPod. I was quite impressed by the fact that the person they asked to give us a presentation about the iPod was actually the Product Manager for the iPod and it was just spiritually cool to be in the same room with the person who really knows when/if the widescreen iPod is coming out.

After the iPod presentation we were taken to lunch at Caffé Macs (sic). Usually they have these coupons with a specific dollar amount mentioned on them, but for us they had coupons with no dollar amount written on them, which basically meant Khana Unlimited. This Apple eatery was extremely cool. First they had stations for burritos, calzones, pizzas, Italian ice creams, salads, smoothies, sushi, drinks, desserts – you name it! I personally went with a strawberry-flavoured smoothie and a pizza that was prepared and baked right in front of me straight from the dough with my choice of ingredients, all within 2 minutes (onions, jalapeños, sundried tomatoes, bell peppers and tomato sauce, in case you were interested). I must also say that I expected Caffé Macs to be this quiet little place with Apple employees pleasantly chit-chatting, but I was really surprised to see that it was a huge place with hundreds of people munching away at this amazing food. We were also dined in royal manner, by the way – in the Piano Bar, which was reserved for our little gathering and was bright, white and elegant in typical Apple fashion. I didn't take pictures of the insides of Caffé Macs, the Piano Bar or the Executive Briefing Conference Room either because my hands weren't free or because it might have been a mite rude.

After lunch, we headed back to the conference room and took part in the Mac OS X thing which was good but not as good as the iPod thing. I couldn't stay for rest of the presentations because I had class in the afternoon but on our way out, I stopped in at the Apple Campus Store. The Apple Wireless Keyboard caught my attention and I debated to and fro whether to buy it or not. In the end, I decided to get it because we had been given coupons that entitled us to the Apple Employee Discount just for that day and I thought that if I were to buy it, now would be the best time to save 25% on it. It's a good keyboard. I'm typing on it right now and I like it.


That's that. It was an amazing trip and the day couldn't have been better! I'll probably post the remaining pictures from this trip somewhere sometime and update this entry with the link.

Labels: English