Image: Charging Kudu by Bill Melvin

Shucks.

I wish I had some time management skills or something. There’s a course about it in Basic Business Skills class I had in my foundation year and I aced it. I think somewhere between foundation and final year, all them learnings must have leaked out of my head while I was asleep.

Bah, I was looking forward to the movie Jumper coming out in theaters on last Thursday. Wouldn’t it be cool to travel as fast as the speed of thought? Your Ferrari is nothing to my smokescreen.

It’ll cut down on a lot of traveling time too. No more queues, no more petrol money. Hey, I could sleep-in on Saturday and still be in time for class. I’ll just have to remember to change out of my pajamas first (don’t think Lec-Xercise would appreciate baggy pants with tiny printed blue flowers).

If you’re wondering what the heck the movie Jumper have anything to do with this week’s image critique... it doesn’t. I’m just filling up blabbing space.

It’s just that Jumper is a noun from a verb becoming an adjective, I found one image from CGSociety.org that fascinates me as a ‘jumper’.

Definitely something for the desktop - that is, if your computer is fast enough.

This is an artwork of a charging kudu by Bill Melvin, an award-inflated artist with his website at http://billmelvinart.com. He made it as part of a mini art contest in the CGS forums, and then later decided that it would look great in a stormy African setting.

I got to say that this is a really cool rendition of a beast in running flight. I liked how he drew the accurate proportions of the deer to the real thing. However, I did not like the expression on the deer is too flat (one would have thought he would be panting, then it’ll look more real).

Oooh, yeah. Speaking of jumping and running, it’s my hour with Lec-Xercise now. Must learn VR theory. I wonder if Jumper did any VR scenes or they just used a dummy and burned it in speedy ash?

Boxing Day-Trippin’

Boxing Day also known world-wide and in Penang as ‘the day you give gifts to non-family members because you forgot to buy them gifts on Christmas’. Riding the flow of holiday spirit (and super-malls traffic) is Mak, suddenly out of the blue asking me and my brother, *Genius, if we’d like to watch the National Treasure: Book of Secrets movie.

Woah.
Mak? A movie?

Mak hadn’t been to a movie since... since... uh, that Jackie Chan’s big flop-office, Around the World in 80 Days. Since then, she’s been studiously sticking to StarMovies Astro channel and the Old-Ladies High Teas. Ooo, especially the latter.

Believe me, when a group of old ladies get together and drink tea, they turn pretty ‘high’. Maybe the tea got some weed that affects only menopausal women.

Back to the maternal unit field trip, the Just-Us-Three turned out pretty swell. The movie was great, reminded me of a half-finished Seven Wonders of the Modern World tour (White House, Mount Rushmore, Paris, England’s Buckingham Palace... dang Da Vinci Code for starting this tourism disease...).

Though Nicholas Cage isn’t getting any more handsome than the time his head was on fire, his on-screen woman had been reduced to status of ‘hot kisser’ (just not with him) and his failure to commit to relationship is apparently a genetic disorder (witness Mom n’ Pop’s 32-year-old ego battle).

And the nerd character is still a nerd, which just goes to show the mantra of all action movies must follow:
1. A hero.
2. A bad guy.
3. A high-tech computer nerd (stereotyped as a young, socially-awkward kid because there is no such thing as a senior-citizen or high society computer nerd) in which nobody respects and no girl will ever date and will likely die a virgin even though they are the back-bone of the team.
4. A really, really, REALLY cool vehicle that gets banged-up in one spectacular way or another.

C’mon, look back on it. The Italian Job, The Core, Ocean’s Trilogy movie, even Transformers... Well, I’m not giving a review here so my opinion doesn’t count.

There was nasi ayam for lunch. We ate that instead of generic fast-food because Mak needs to neutralize all that soda, popcorn and Twisties in her system.

Then later that day Mak has to go for her yearly medical check-up while I get to sit in the SahabatPPUM’s office and play MP3s on the office’s no-internet-connection PC. Their Windows Media Player’s playlist have an overload of Sudirman songs, god only knows why hospital aid volunteers are listening to a dead man...


Enter SahabatPPUM’s office. It’s only about as boring as its front door.


Heeeeey, it’s that souvenir my school gave to SahabatPPUM, ages and ages ago.

I’m working on their website but the secretary aka info-man in charge hadn’t been giving me the pictures and data goods recently. Hell, on the stuff I got, it looks like I’ll have to install Adobe Pagemaker to read *.pmd files.

Seeing that I can't open the files and thus copy the bulletins, which my SPPUM site an empty website, thus making my work look stupid. I may not care much what my Supervisor grades my project but this system is going to be public property, dammit. I can stand being a nerd but rather not an idiot nerd if you get my drift.

If you haven’t got my drift, it’s a commission to, oh gee, maybe secretly turn into a high-tech computer nerd in which nobody respects and no guy will ever date and will likely die a virgin even though they are the back-bone of the team.

Bring on the New Year for 2008.