Category: Entertainment

Movie and songs of the week

It’s hard to resist another run of the Notting Hill in cable TV. I have watched it countless time because of two things – the travel book store (you know, it’s my dream) and the wicked soundtrack. There are two songs in the movie I like very much – Ain’t no sunshine and She … Somehow in the movie there are two versions of Ain’t no sunshine – one by Lighthouse Family and the other one by the original singer – Bill Withers. Here is the amazing multi-seasons one shot with Ain’t no sunshine …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuQDAbfha3k

And here is the trailer of the movie with She by Elvis Costello:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-dhrpHvQAI

As usual, I can’t help to search around and you will find the videos from Bill Withers, Lighthouse family and the original singer of She – Charles Aznavour 30 years ago. Enjoy !!

Bill Withers – Ain’t no sunshine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlAgwd5JGPo

Lighthouse family – Ain’t no sunshine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlcFsskjs5k

She – Charles Aznavour, 30 something years ago

Voices

Months ago I blogged about a voice that’s so moving from Taiwan, and today I found another voice with similar charisma. her name is Joanna Wang, also from Taiwan and again, hearing is believing.

Let’s start from here
Lose the past
Change our minds
We don’t need a finish line
Let’s take this chance
Don’t think too deep
All those promises we couldn’t seem to keep
I don’t care where we go
Let’s start from here

Sometimes, I wonder why the “Superstars” in our city can waste their precious time in TV shows, movie making, naughty picture taking etc. etc. but not some material time in singing – i.e. their career.

YouTube on Dopod

I always thought (stupid me) it is difficult to play YouTube videos on my smartphone as I don’t want to download the Flash plug in (like TinyTube or TCPMP plug-in) to play the non-standard flv format. Furthermore, I don’t want to manually download / transfer the videos to the smartphone to play – just too cumbersome !!

Not until today I know YouTube actually released the mobile version last June … Stupid me again !! Just surf to m.youtube.com from your IE mobile will do !! Some screen shots:

Search your favorite video:

search-screen.jpg

Find the right video you want:

result-page.jpg

Stream it thru the Windows Media Player in full screen mode:

without-you.jpg

One warning though, one must remember that streaming video costs a lot of money if you don’t have unlimited data plan for your phone or an unlimited Wi-Fi connection.

My iPod story

For years, my friends tell me how great the iPod is and as a music lover, I always wonder why I didn’t get an iPod for my musics. So I decided to buy one as my X’mas gift last year. Before the actual purchase I did a very scientific evaluation. I entered the storage size, weight, volume (!) and price of the iPod Nano, Touch and 80G / 160G Classics into a spreadsheet along with same figures of my Archos and Dopod (my trusty digital wallet and smartphone).

Then I calculated the weight per song, volume per song and cost per song (to store in iPod), and I also performed sensitivity analysis to tell what device is the best buy if I have 2,000, 4,000, 10,000, or 20,000 songs to store to it.

The result of this geeky sophisticated analysis was I needed a black iPod Classic 80G. Why the analysis could tell what color I needed ? I don’t have a clue … 😎

But then the trouble beings … first I have trouble to make the iPod recognize the song details if those are not in English … I have to retype hundreds of songs’ title, album and artist information. In a word, painful.

The second issue is without an iTunes store in my country, I have no easy way to get the cover art to the iTunes and iPod. After lots of searching, evaluation I eventually installed a Yahoo Widget – iTunes Companion that will automatically download the album art from Amazon.

The most recent trouble is after just 3 weeks of usage, my iPod can no longer play songs smoothly – it will play one song, and refuse to play the next even I press the next button. Again, I searched numerous forums to find the ins and outs of it. Finally, I found a way to reset the iPod and solved the problem (for now):

  1. Toggle the Hold switch on and off
  2. Press and hold the Menu and Center (Select) buttons simultaneously until the Apple logo appears (about 6 to 10 seconds).
  3. You will see the Apple Logo appear and your iPod will come to life with a lit screen. If this does not happen please within 2 mintues please repeat steps 1 and 2.

A looooong story, but if you are considering to buy an iPod … re-read this post. 😎

TV Time

Oh I watched a very good TV show earlier today, the casts in the show all possess extraorindary abilities. For examples, one of them could fly, one could read other people’s mind, and yet another one could travel thru time … Just in case you want to know the name of the show …

No the show was not the Heros from NBC, and the casts were not Nathan, Matt or Hiro.

Instead, believe it or not, it’s actually a movie from year 1991 – The God of Gamblers (Back to Shanghai). And the lead actor is in fact Stephen Chow.

Go figure …