Interloper View

Terminator Genisys and Jurassic World are two highly anticipated movies shown in 2015. Even though both are reboot and try to reclaim the success of their origin, only one was successful. This is my analysis of both movies and the reason why one was successful and the other was not. Terminator Genisys The movie attempts to use Arnold Schwarzenegger to draw the crowd in the movie that made him famous. Unfortunately, many of Arnold fans are action movie fans. The story is too confusing and puts off the very same fans drawn to the first movie. The story was predictable so part of the excitement found in the first movie is lost. After four movies and a television series, the story is stale. Also there is a lot more competing stories of android/cyborgs drawing attention of the fans - (example Robocop, Vision in Avengers). I tried to get my children interested in this show did not succeed. The title and the thriller was not compelling enough to get them interested. There lies the main prob...

The banks are cutting back on the benefits of credit cards in Malaysia. These are the ones I know: OCBC Titanium card started with 5% for groceries, food and petrol but reduced it to 1% without limit. However, this year they changed the cash back to 0.1% for all purchases except for online purchases which still gets 1 %. UOB One card followed with by taking off the cap of the maximum cash back available for each month but reduced the cash back for week days to 2% (plus 1% UOBCash for BHPetrol).  Cash back were removed for spending at pharmacies. Breakdown of new cash rebates are as follow: Category Weekday Weekend Cap Note Petrol 2% 5% RM500.00 Additional 2% if pump at BHPetrol with cap of RM 400/- Cinema (GSC only) 2% 5% Groceries 1% 2% RM1,000.00 Aeon Big, Tesco, Cold Storage, Jaya Grocer and Giant Telecommunication 1% 2% RM300.00 Maxis, Digi and Celcom Others 0.20% 0.20% I was not able to confirm is there is reduction in UOB$ earned for BHPetrol on weekdays, it...

I recently bought a Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay (which I will refer as the unit)  to allow me to back up my personal photos and videos. The unit looks like a cable tv decoder but much heavier since it contains two hard disk. What I liked  I like the fact it comes with RAID 1 (mirrored) configured. One of the fear I have is losing all my precious collection should the hard disk crash. The unit also allows me to replace the hard disk. I assume that this will allow me to upgrade to a higher capacity when it becomes more common. Hopefully the unit will support the higher capacity then - seen cases where the firmware may not support the higher capacity. The Seagate Media software supports Android and allows me to back up the photos and videos I take on my phone directly to the Personal Cloud when I connect to a wi-fi anywhere in the world. However, I am disappointed that it does not backup the mp3 files from my phone. The unit also allows me to start and stop serv...

I would like to recognize two exemplary customers service I received this week.    First was the salesperson from Yes in Queensbay Mall. I was considering to subscribe to the new FIZ unlimited broadband service from Yes. Even though my house is within the coverage service, I wanted verification on the stability and the speed before committing to the two year contract. I called their careline and was recommended to visit their outlet in Queensbay in order to get one of their technicians to my house to check on the service stability. However, during my visit, I was told that they are short handed and suggested I take back one of their units (after placing a RM400 deposit with them).   Luckily for me, one of the salesman - Razak volunteered to come with me to my house to perform the check after I told him that I will sign up for the plan immediately if the service stability is proven. He spent close to two hours at my house checking on the signal quality and perfo...

Note 3 is already more than a year old and is superseded by Note 4. However, I have had it for slightly over 6 months.  I decided to treat myself with the S View cover mainly because it allows me to take pictures without unlocking my phone. I missed a few photo opportunities while struggling to unlock my phone. Sadly, I was not aware of the many issues plaguing this product. The following are the ones I am aware of. Repeating Calendar Events Calendar events keeps repeating themselves even after we dismissed them. Initially I thought it was because I did not dismiss the event correctly. However, I found the following thread discussing the issue. The problem is the S-Planner for Note 3 which comes with KitKat is not compatible with S-View cover. A temporary fix is to install the S-planner for S5. The apk is available from XDA Developer . Note that you will need to reinstall the apk each time you reboot the phone. This problem does not affect everyone. Some of my friends ar...

I recently noticed that my android phone was incurring data charges (while I was not on data plan). Initially, I thought it might be due to a virus, rogue app or some setting I may have accidentally activated. In order to trace the issue, I started removing apps from my phone, but the data charges kept happening. On the first day the charge was RM5 but subsequently it ranged between 2 cents to 20 cents. In order to stop the hemorrhage, I activate a one month plan. The one month plan was RM 30 for 30 days, but the unknown data usage had already cost me RM 15 without any benefit to me. I also tried resetting the phone to factory mode, but found that the phone automatically restored some of the applications that were still installed - great feature, but not when I am troubleshooting this data leech on my phone. Resetting the phone helped in resetting the data counter and allowed me to see the amount of data consumed. It was the background data were incurring the cost of my mo...

Recently we had the opportunity to visit the mini comic fiesta held at Penang Times Square.  My son noticed the banner promoting the event and wanted to learn more about it. The event lasted for two days. We had to pay an entry fee of ten ringgit per person for a one day entry pass. We arrived at Penang Times Square around noon and decided to have lunch before going into the exhibition. At the food court there were quite a few people dressed up in comic characters. A few of them carried props of giant guns and swords. Some of the costumes look extremely uncomfortable, but was interesting to look at. When we finally entered the hall, there were a lot more people dressed as comic characters. The place was filled with anime related merchandise. There were also a few stores promoting online games. My son bought buttons and a t-shirt. My daughter felt bored and told me that she came along for lunch and was not really interested.  My son commented that this was called a comic ...