Play Pong in Dreamweaver!

Want to play a quick game of Pong in Dreamweaver?

Jan Ove Waldner

Table Tennis has been a favorite sport of mine since school days. The best thing about Table Tennis is the nature of defense and offense and how easily great players switch from one mode to the other. One of the fantastic players of the game is the great Swede Jan Ove Waldner.

I loved that game, One Must Fall
What a perfect name for a game, to call

I played it I did, many days and nights
Merry went the hours and merrier were the fights

Few games since then got it all quite so right
I think of OMF now and a few words I write…

Quick Gun Murugun (Dr. Rajendra Prasad),  what do I say about this daring South Indian Cowbhai movie?

It has everything.. action.. camedy.. sangs..and lats and lats of balls.. sorry bullets I say!

After watching the Oscars in 2006, I was very curious about the movie Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), which had won three Oscars and was nominated for six Oscars. At that time I did check out who the director was and found out that it was Mexican director named Guillermo del Toro, who’s earlier Hollywood movie “Hellboy” I had seen.

Lately I got the opportunity of seeing Pan’s Labyrinth and was totally blown away. I would totally agree with one of the reviews in IMBD who said that’s its “Beautiful, violent, magical and Sad…” What stood out for me in addition to the cinematography and the art direction was the acting by Sergi López who played the villainous “Captain Vidal”.

The story is set in Spain during 1944 at the peak of the fascist regime of “Francisco Franco”.  The story is  about a girl who with her pregnant mother goes to live with her step father who is a captain of the Spanish army. The girl Ofelia meets a fairy who takes to an old faun who tells her that she is a princess and must complete three grueling tasks in order to prove her royalty. If she happens to fail then she would never see her real father who is the King.

In the movie the whole fantasy world can be interrupted as being created by girl who wants to escape the harsh realities of life. Well that’s left to the audience.

Guillermo del Toro is going to be  directing “The Hobbit” and I can’t think of a better person to fill Peter Jackson’s shoes.

Icons of Susan Kare

The Paint Bucket icon for the fill tool and the Lasso icon for the freehand selection tool are now part of everyday computing for millions of people worldwide. Their designer, Susan Kare , according to the Museum of  Modern Art, in New York, is “a pioneering and influential computer iconographer. Since 1983, Kare has designed thousands of icons for the world’s leading software companies. Utilizing a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style.”

A collection of font and typography related jokes

Cache (Hidden)

I have not seen anything like this movie before. It is an exercise in frustration. It is however an interesting, tense and positive kind of frustration. This type of orchestrated frustration is worth examining.

Dreamspaces

Dreamspaces was a brilliant BBC documentary series with high production quality and visually stunning stories. Sadly, the series was of only 12 episodes. It covers great buildings from New York, Helsinki, Puerto Rico, Chicago, Romania, Brazil, Israel and many more international destinations looking at various aspects of design and architecture and their relationship with contemporary living. It is part travel show and part architecture appreciation with emphasis on the appreciation.

Tales of X9

These dark days when nothing seems to be interesting on favorite cartoon channels like Cartoon Network and Nickolodeon, one wishes that the least they can do is rerun much beloved series like Samurai Jack. While we were talking about the uninteresting shows that are now part of the animation channels, what came to my mind was a few shining moments from the adventures of Jack.

This series quit while it was at its peak. It rose head and shoulders above other shows by achieving the right mix of art, story, animation, music, concepts, characters and dialog. Many episodes would make a lasting impact leaving us with memorable one liners. Like “Lulu, Sweet Thing”