I’m not normally a huge fan of reality TV but for some reason, Channel 9′s new season of The Block has me captivated. I can’t seem to peel my eyes away from this show and the fact that the houses that were to be renovated this season were based in South Melbourne definitely adds to the sense of familiarity.
Seeing the contestants running around like headless chooks around places like Chadstone and DFO South Wharf was pretty cool and all of the contestants on the show are so funny and lovely. My favourite couple on the show would have to be Dan and Dani. They’re both from Victoria and Dan’s extremely funny acting like a goose most of the time but hey, that’s what makes good TV isn’t it?
So a mate and I decided to check out the houses on the show at Dorcas Street and by now, the actual houses are already done up and looking awesome. The windows all had curtains so we couldn’t actually peer into the rooms but the house looked gorgeous from the outside. We took a couple of photos and will definitely be checking the houses out when open day comes along.
All I can say is just go and watch this movie. Pronto. I’m not an Hollywood action movie kinda guy, usually tagging along with mates (or chick) for the odd Too Fast Too Furious or Bourne Identity at the cinemas but my preferences are more along the lines of Twilight.
Maybe the fact that it’s a movie with comic book characters working as a team appealed to the geek in me. Sheldon Cooper would probably creamed his pants for this movie.
I’ve only caught the Iron Man and Captain America movies so it took me awhile to get my head around the fact what Thor and Loki were and where they’re from. Fortunately, the movie brought me up to speed pretty quickly, clearly with very defined plot points making sure I wasn’t lost in the mirage of characters in the film. I have a fairly short attention span so props to the film for keeping me engaged throughout.
The cast did a fairly well job of portraying the characters but casting Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk was a pretty unexpected surprise. He was definitely the last person I’d thought would be casted as Hulk. Mark’s not exactly the angriest person or actor around but I guess the film needed someone for the Jekyll and Hyde natural of Hulk and the clamness of Mark Ruffalo’s usual demure would fit that perfectly.
Other than that, it’s the usual seen before plot line of America’s in trouble again requiring a team of superheros gathering to save the day. Robert Downey Jr did a good job showing me that having coin is the greatest super power ever (Batman concurs) and every time I see Cobie Smulders all I can hear ringing in my ears is this.
Anyways to quickly wrap up, the movie’s pretty good, full of action and in fact it’s littered with comedy bits throughout the whole 2 hours and 15 minutes. The movie features Aussie actor Chris Hemsworth from Home and Away, Scarlett Johansson (for some reasons seems like extremely smitten by Jeremy Renner) and Chris Evans, who looks literally like a bloody tank. I have to say I was a bit disappointed that Samuel L Jackson didn’t utter the iconic phrase “m*therf**king snakes”.
I highly recommend it and am actually looking forward to Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 now.
If only Batman, Superman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Captain Planet are part of the Avengers. Now THAT would make my day.
Ignore this last bit of the post, I’ve got to attached this claim token (CE72SGXTQPBG) to verify my blog on Technorati.
I’ve always noticed that I’m a tad hairier than most of my Asian peers and I’m pretty sure it’s due to the fact that I am (maybe) part Portuguese. If you haven’t heard this already, my maternal grandmother is from Indonesia and the Dutch and Portuguese were there yonks ago so a little European blood might have slipped into the family bloodline somewhere.
Why Portuguese and not Dutch you ask?
Well, I play football pretty well and I have a striking resemblance to Cristiano Ronaldo (look below), so it makes perfect sense that I’m Mediterranean.
Now back to my hairy situation. In the last couple of weeks, I decided that I was going to grow a beard. No reason at all, just because I can and wanted to see the result of it because we all know that beard growing men like David Beckham, George Clooney, Zac Efron and Ashton Kutcher are ultimately sexier than boys like Justin Bieber.
And so I stopped shaving and this is what I look like right now.
I have to admit it’s not entirely how I envisioned myself to be with a beard but it’s getting there. The hairs on my cheeks seem rather patchy so fingers crossed that more will grow to even the area out.
I’ll probably post another beard-related post next week (if I haven’t shaved it off already) to see how the progress of my beard is going.
In the meantime, if you find my beard sexy and want to get in contact (single females preferred) and discuss about bodily hair related topics, you can get me on Twitter here.
PS: Even the Wikipedia link for Mediterranean race shows a man with a huge beard. I MUST be Portuguese!?
It almost seem like the Google Drive was no longer a secret a couple of days back with leaks of the service showing up on tech blogs and when Google finally unveils their cloud storage service, I was genuinely excited about it and was ready to dive in and see what it is all about.
I’m a huge Google Docs user, moving all my spreadsheet and document needs all onto Google Docs and this has practically made DropBox redundant for me so I’m really excited to see what value Google Drive can add to my documents workflow.
Unfortunately, when I tried to activate the Google Drive service, I was greeted with this disappointing message.
Nevertheless, there were enough reports around the interwebs and the common consensus was that Google Drive was not a service that was born to compete against the likes of Dropbox, Skydrive or iCloud but it’s an evolution of Google Docs.
For the ones that have Google Drive activated or installed on their machines, it replaces the Google Docs and any documents placed into the desktop Google Drive folder syncs online onto the web and all users will get 5gb of space for free.
But what really struck me was the pricing structures Google had in place for the if you need additional storage space for the new service and it seems that they have increased prices significantly and this was a snapshot of the new pricing tier on Google’s support page for pricing for Drive. The grandfathered pricing is on the left and new pricing on the right.
I’m currently on the grandfathered 20gb $5/year plan and was in the midst of backing up my digital photos on Picasa when the announcement for Google Drive dropped. The bad news is I’ve got a whole lot more photos to go through for backups and if I were to increase the size of my plan, I’ll be moved onto the new monthly pricing structure and cost of a 200gb plan would be $70 more on the new pricing structure.
I guess I’ll just have to go back to using Flickr Pro for my photography back ups.
Google Drive is currently available for Mac OS X, Windows and Android and the iOS version is reportedly 98% ready and will be available soon. I’ll be waiting with baited breath just to be able to have it available for me to use at all.
It’s ANZAC Day today so I got the day off work and it just so happens that it coincided with the first 2nd leg semi-final of the Champions League match between Barcelona and Chelsea. I wasn’t really looking forward to this match to tell the truth (My blood bleeds Red Devils) but I was sure glad I did.
Barcelona was peppering the Chelsea goal the moment the match started and after going down one nil in the first leg at Stamford Bridge, it was obvious Pep Guardiola wanted to get the goals early with a fairly offensive formation.
Things were going swell for Barcelona when they scored in the 35th minute from a Busquets tap in. They got the goal they so desperately wanted and it seems things are finally going Barcelona’s way after their last two defeats to Chelsea and Real Madrid.
Chelsea was trying to cling on to dear life after losing Cahill to an injury early on but things got worse when captain Terry was shown a red card for an inconspicuous knee jab into Alexis Sanchez’s back.
One nil down and one man down, Barcelona wasted no time in taking advantage. Two mins after Terry was sent off, Messi sent Iniesta clear with a deft through ball and Iniesta wasted no time slotting the ball home to bring Barcelona into a two nil lead (2-1 on aggregate).
Chelsea looked clueless after losing their captain and seemed like they need to move into damage control to avoid any embarrassment. But in a weird twist of fate, Lampard managed to put Ramires through on goal and he delicately chipped the ball over Valdes to bring the score to 2-1 with an advantage to Chelsea on the away goals rule.
By now, all the hard work the Barcelona players have produced were undone and the silence in the Camp Nou was deafening.
The second half pretty much started like the first half and Barcelona was award a penalty two minutes in after Drogba tripped Fabregas in the box but Messi – who has been blamed in the media for his lack of form recently – smashed his kick against the crossbar.
Barcelona continued to pile on the pressure with all ten Chelsea players defending, the Barcelona players are finding it hard to penetrate the organized Chelsea defence even with their slick passing.
Chelsea would have gone through to the finals if the score stood at 2-1 but substitute Torres – who came on for the tireless Drogba – managed to latch onto a clearance unmarked and rounded Valdes to score.
By now it was game set and match. Chelsea was definitely through to the finals and Barcelona, who seemed invincible in recent years, succumbed to an organized Chelsea side.
I was also looking at tweets that were being fired up on Twitter and was actually quite surprised to find out that @BradBlanks, the Hollywood reporter for @HamishandAndy was actually watching the match in New York as well and he was tweet replying me and followed me on Twitter after the match!
But the funniest tweet has to definitely go to @RobbieSavage8 with him having a go at “fat” Ronaldo’s diet/weight when he saw a tweet from @Persie_Official.
And to round this post off, I’ll leave you with Gary Neville’s orgasmic celebrations after Torres scores the last goal for Chelsea. Oh what a morning it has been. God I love football.
Yes I know, we’ve all heard this one before – I’m starting another blog. After the train wreck that were my previous attempts at blogging, I’m starting this one, afresh, a clean slate and hoping would last more than a couple of weeks.
I’ve been sorting my digital photos over the past weekend and looking at my old photos made me realized that photos I took (or of myself) are the only medium that would prove that I ever existed. It brought back so many memories, both good and bad.
This prompted me to ask myself, if photos could invoke those emotions in me, why am I not recording my life in words? I’ve always fancied myself as a writer. I’ll leave Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for bite size tidbits of my life and this blog would be a would be an avenue for thoughts and musings about the internet, technology, photography, football, family and whatever pops into my head.
It doesn’t matter if no one reads this because I’m doing it more for myself than anyone else.
