The Nokia Lumia 800 and Windows Phone Mango 7.5 make a formidable combination. Beautiful build quality, gorgeous display, immediate responsiveness and an extremely elegant operating system (clearly better in many respects than iOS5). I bought the phone 5 days ago to replace my painfully slow iPhone 3G. Despite this praise however, the phone is going back today, replaced by my shiny new iPhone 4S – “what?!” I hear you say – well read on …
April 16, 2011
Synchronizing Outlook Calendar to Google Calendar
I recently decided to publish (merge) my Outlook Calendar (Exchange) to my Google Calendar as a discrete calendar – that is, as a fifth calendar on top of my existing four calendars) – doing so would allow me to see my combined commitments at a glance. Since my iPhone gets its calendars from Google Calendar, they would all be [thus] available in-turn on my phone … I thought I’d share some notes and experiences.
February 12, 2011
Southerly Buster
Apparently it is tradition when Native Australians (Aborigines) greet each other to ask not where they work and what they do, but “what is your river?” and “what is your wind?”. As a Sydney-sider, the latter question is easy to answer – The Southerly Buster. The Southerly, as is it also known, is not unique [...]
January 7, 2011
Animal Kingdom (2010)
“Well rounded” doesn’t even start to describe this movie. Jackie Weaver’s much-celebrated role as the matriarch of large family of criminally-inclined ‘boys’ is not the award winning role that the movie’s PR company has decided to promote, but her role is pivotal and mesmerizing. Ben Mendelsen, Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton and newcomer James Frecheville excel themselves in their roles and a dysfunctional and yet highly effective armed robbery team (of sorts). “Team” kind of overstates the organic nature of their level of organisation, as you’ll see.
4½ / 5 stars
January 7, 2011
Blue Valentine
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams do a stellar job. See it with someone you love.
4½/5 stars
January 7, 2011
Winter’s Bone
Cold (literally), suspensful, gritty and harsh. A story told with such a sense of honesty and sympathetic and balanced pace that you wonder where the hour and a half went.
4½/5 stars
January 7, 2011
Tron:Legacy
Great to watch, but certainly not a good ‘date night’ for you and your brain. Whilst there’s a fairly heavy expectation placed upon the watcher to know something about the original story, it was probably fairly thin in the first place, so this installation feels [curiously and perhaps aptly] just like another frame of a meaningless, albeit visually stimulating and interactive, console game.
3/5 stars
January 7, 2011
Due Date
Downey Jr puts in a solid performance (not exemplary though) and Galifianakis puts in his usual curious and comfortably ‘wrong’ repartee. Whilst the movie is well paced and general curious (though not hilarious), the director or writer seems confused about what he wants it to be – a comedy, a drama or a romp – complete Ultimately it’s fairly well balanced mix of the three.
3 / 5 stars
November 10, 2010
Pat Tillman: He’s not with God ..
I don’t know Pat Tillman (nor his story), but I was impressed with the kahunas demonstrated by his brother (Richard) on a recent episode of Real Time (with Bill Maher). So much so that I thought it worth repeating. Maher set up the clip… “But, you know, they had Maria Shriver and John McCain… Speaking [...]
May 21, 2010
Corporate-but-Casual: Mixed Messaging
I’m liking this new direction that some corporates are taking with dumbed down messages that take the formality (or the perhaps better the “technicalities”) out of domestic software error notices. Firefox “Well, this is embarrassing” Restore Page The first time I saw this is, I was mightily impressed by their .. humanity (I guess). Photo [...]
January 16, 2012
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