Wavelet Blog

The Hurt Locker was the biggest winner of this year’s Oscar. My predication was wrong. The Hurt Locker did earn much attention and the review swing to it as well lately in the award season. I’m not fully convinced. Given that I watched the movie on the plane to China, I didn’t miss the inherent intensity. However, it is so focused on one man’s heroic actions without trying to investigate the complexity around it. It’s a small movie with a narrow intention. I bet the success is a surprise to its own film maker.

Avatar is not really much better. It has almost nothing left other than the stunning visual effects. I have to say, this is a weak year for the Best Pictures.

Photoshop turns 20 as of today. The measurement of its success, similar to ‘google’, which is not achieved by many other more popular products, is that ‘photoshop’ has become a verb, although often time with a negative meaning.

Learn to make Korean dishes because we were so out of ideas of what to bring to Chinese New Year party in a friend’s house. These dishes are quite easy to make. The most challenging part is to slice all the vegetables thinly. The key to the taste is the onion and sesame.

Assorted Vegetables (Namool)

Noodles with Mixed Vegetables (Chapchae)

Avatar not only won the best picture of the Golden Globes, it has surpassed Titanic and is setting the new world-wide box-office record every day. Looks like it will conquer the Oscar as well. James Cameron will stand on the top of the world again.

It’s a spectacular movie to watch when you put the 3-D glasses on. It is first movie that truly delivers the photo-real computer graphic. The world of Pandora is stunning scene by scene. The interaction between the characters and the environments are so believable, and you don’t realized the their world only exists in the computer. Besides the technical supreme, the film is brilliantly directed. It’s tight, balanced and fills the two and half hours with ceaseless actions.

However, it is also lucky for Cameron that there is no other movie this year can really challenge him. Putting Avatar in recent 10-year’s competition, its advantage would be pretty much diminished. (although I never thought Crash as a good movie, the nominations of 2005 was not bad). In terms of novelty and creativity, The Matrix challenges the audience visually at the same level and physiologically more. You can also see many similarities of other movies in Avatar. For example, both Titanic and Avatar can be divided into the first half of perfect and romantic theme, and the second half of conflicting and action theme. The turning points are exactly same, the two main characters make love. More creative people even merged Avatar trailer into Pocahontas. Comparing them side by side, it is really a piece of work.

I can’t help sharing this. The Poor kangaroo is certainly caught by surprise.

Zenfolio’s latest mega update sets it apart from its competitors. Zenfolio has been good at well-organized configuration pages, but some complained that it is not that customizable compared with Smugmug, especially at advanced account level. With this update, the theme customization feature is hugely improved . The best thing is that you can inherit an existing theme and start tweaking the look-and-feel for all components and save it as your own theme. It is a great feature by itself, and Zenfolio’s engineers made it so easy to use, so beautify to look at and it is available even for basic account level.

Another big improvement is that user’s home page can be customized with new layouts and new slideshow. It gives users great flexibility to create elegant, professional and gorgeously looking site. I am really thinking of upgrading to Premium level.

Please also read my earlier review and visit my gallery site.

It’s our last day in Sydney. At the morning, I had a walk in the Royal Botanic Garden in the area we didn’t visited last time. The garden is very big with a lot of exotic plants, and it’s free. I was frightened when I stepped into one corner of the garden. Hundreds of Flying Foxes hanging on the tree. They are the largest bats in the world. Although they are necessary for spreading seeds for plants, many palm trees have been destroyed by these over-populated bats. The Garden is planing to use noise disturbance to drive them away.

Half of the garden was blocked to prepare for the New Year Eve event. At 10AM, a lot of people have already waiting there in order to get the best spots. Too bad the following video is not shot by us, but the video is a good way to conclude my travel log of Sydney trip.

We take the Essential Tour to get into the Opera House. Besides showing music halls and different function rooms, the tour also focuses on the story of the designer, Jorn Utzon, his creation, resignation and re-engagement.

Left: Concert Hall Back
Right: The Utzon Room

2-hour train took us to the rural side of Sydney. Blue Mountains is one of the nearest national parks to Sydney. The best-known landmark of the region is the Three Sisters. Compared to the national parks in North America, Blue Mountains is less impressive in terms of majesty. It is a good recreation area for families.

Top Left: The Three Sisters
Bottom Left: Leura Train Station
Right: Demon’s Leap

The sky finally cleared up. We got chance to take some photos we must take, around Farm Cove and using the Opera House as the background.

After taking pictures of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, we walked through the Royal Botanic Garden.

We walked to the city center to have a lunch at a Japanese noodle house and shopped around Queen Victoria Building.

Bondi Beach is a popular beach in Sydney suburb. A lot of people were surfing, playing soccer or simply getting tanned.

We took bus to the Darling Harbour and visited Sydney Aquarium. If you have visited some newly built aquariums, such as the one in California Academy of Sciences, Sydney Aquarium is not worth seeing.

Darling Harbour

Monorail took us to the city center. The Galeries Victoria has a wonderful bookstore, Kinokuniya, and some asian restaurants and stores.

The most tasty dinner we had in Sydney.

Hyde Park was named after its London equivalent. Right next to the city center, the park is a quite and ideal place to have a after dinner stroll.

Overlook the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House across Farm Cove.