Yesterday, I had a long and frank discussion with mum. overall, I thought it went well. I told her a few things that have been on my mind, and what i thought of a few things she had done, that i am not happy about.

There were tears, hers, and words that hurt, but it had to be done.

The thing with my mum is that you just have to be brutally honest with her, half pretentious, overly considerate answers just wouldn’t do. I am glad that I now got everything out of my chest, and my relationship with mum has somewhat matured with a little bit more openness and understanding.

I know most of the time, many of us lie with our families, but in this case, honesty seems to be my best policy.

~pali

I got invited to the facebook couple of weeks ago by my mate Calvin.

Since then I have been inviting anyone I know to this. The concept behind facebook is totally revolutionary. It’s ‘wall’ idea is very much like a blog, except all your friends can all ‘write’ on your wall. On top of that, friends can all send messages to each other just like any typical social networking application.

If by now you are not impressed, I totally understand. Because so far what I have said has all been done before. There is blogspot from google that you can use to create blog sites, there is meebo that lets you connect just about any messaging account from AOL to MSN to yahoo chat. There is flickr for you to share pictures and comment on each other creations…

Facebook is not only all of three above combined, but more… it is a complete platform of which new applications can be written to, and its users can then leverage from. For example, I just added the pet application, and shared my new pet panda minmin to all my friends. And I could always use the food fight app to throw the odd spagehtti to one of my friend. The possibilities are simply endless. On top of that you can update your status to the second as to what you are up to etc, and all your friends will be able to see them instantly. This is very much like twitter in that respect.

Facebook has truly ushered everyone into the fore-front of social networking on the internet. And I think it’s going to stay here for a very very long time…

~pali

After watching the 6 packs, ahem, I mean the 300, it is only fair to re-visualise the real spartan.

watch the famous 5 spartans as they bravely guarded the city gate.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8wpa2Qplm8M

~pali

i woke up this morning by the sun that is big and strong,
the light so bright, it shoots through your eyelids,
so you can’t help but sqint your eyes and have a silly smile on your face.

there are children playing, some are on the swings, and some are running,
there are birds flying low here and there, narrowly missing the water.

there is love everywhere you see,
and everywhere else that you can not.

~pali

Here is something interesting stuff on how twitter is able to scale…

http://www.slideshare.net/Blaine/scaling-twitter

Great read for any serious developers for the web.

~pali

Phyllis and I went Southland and saw Shrek 3. It was a bit of a disappointment. It seemed that it has lost the originality of the previous 2 installments. The prodominant teen theme really doesn’t sit well with a fairytale setting.

Alas, Shrek is shrek, and looking around the cinema, I noticed that there are more adults in there than kids anyway. So I guess the market research guys did get it right in pitching those films more towards the mature end of the scale rather then the immature end.

Let’s Hollywood gets out of this fixations more making sequels and prequels etc, cause I think they are really running out ideas. Maybe it’s time to make more films like Office Space and Idiocracy from Mike Judge or American Beauty, or Little Miss Sunshine.

It’s just too cold, sometimes I think we as a race is doomed due to our very intelligence. The dampness of my bedroom is due to the cold weather, but does that make me feel lazy and depressed? Maybe that has something to do with my view on Shrek 3 and somehow made me enjoy Idiocracy just that little bit more…

~pali

Been into the films lately, finally got hold of a copy of Devil’s backbone by Guillermo del Toro. Similar to his recent work, Pan’s Labyrinth, there is a child hero figure in the story and a villain adult. If you haven’t seen either of the film, I highly recommend it!

Also been listening to sound tracks from Silent Hill by Akira Yamaoka. For those of you not in the know, Silent Hill is a series of video games launched on the PlayStation platform. It’s complexity both in plot as well as character design have lifted games well above the traditional genre that people often associate with. In fact the games are designed more like a complete immersion of the gamer into a guide tour of Silent Hill, a remote town in the US, where all the characters fatally tie their path to.

Akira Yamaoka, a talented musician and video game composer have scored all of the 4 Silent Hill games as well as the film adaptation that followed.
Here is a wikipedia link about him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Yamaoka

~pali