Don Khuth Chronicles

“The Lost Symbol” is the latest novel by Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code.” I pre-ordered this novel because I was a Dan Brown fan but as I found out, there wasn’t any need to pre-order it since there were plenty of copies of the novel to go around. This novel is a typical Dan Brown novel with the usual twist and turns. I’m not very good when it comes to reviewing novels because I’m afraid that I might spoil it, so I’ll keep it to a minimum.

The novel has it’s usual plot where Robert Langdon has to solve some sort mystery by deciphering cryptic code but this time around, it about symbols and ancient mysteries. Then again, it’s always been about symbols since that’s what Langdon is, a symbolist. In this novel, Langdon has to find an ancient secret that lies buried underground somewhere in Washington, D.C. The secret is in plain sight of everyone but nobody knows that it’s there because they have not reached that level of enlightenment.

Although it took me a few days to read much of the events in the novel took place within one day. There were a lot of things that I skipped since I didn’t feel like it was relevant to the story line. I mainly skipped the background on the villain of the novel. The villain, Mil’akh had a big part to play in the overall novel but I didn’t that he spent a summer in Greece. I was more focused on finding the secrets.

Throughout the novel, it seemed that Dan Brown alluded a lot to “Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” as if he was trying to advertise within the novel. In “Da Vinci Code” he alluded back to “Angels and Demons” which made me buy the book because I was curious about it. But in this novel, I noticed that he was alluding to his previous novels often at the beginning.

Nonetheless, most of the chapters were page turners and some of them ended with a very suspenseful cliffhanger that made me want to continue reading. Towards the middle of the book, there were times where I tried to connect the dots to see where the story was goings. There were times when the plot was pretty obvious but there was one part that took me for a surprise.

I find it a bit hard to write a review on this book because there wasn’t anything new in the book. Langdon is still Langdon, doing what he does best. The plot was a typical Dan Brown plot. Heck, the beginning of the novel was almost identical to Da Vince Code.

Brown’s previous novel gathered its followings but I’m not sure if “Lost Symbol” will do the same. Don’t get me wrong, Dan Brown can sure tell a story but this time around, it took too long to get to the point. I’m sure that he can do better because his other novels were captivating. Towards the end of this novel, he tried to tie it all together but by then I had already given up.

Transformers 2 blew my mind! I don’t care what the critics say, or what the reviewers thing of it, the movie was so bad ass that it was super totally freaking’ awesome! Say what you want about Michael Bay’s directing style but the man knows how to blow things up. I haven’t read any reviews but from what I hear, people are saying that it received bad review. To anyone who gave Transformers 2 a bad review, I say to them, “Kekekekuke!”

If you’re afraid of spoilers, I would suggest that you don’t read this because I can’t guarantee that I won’t slip up. If you haven’t seen the movie before reading this, I would suggest you run out and watch it. And when I say run, you run!

The movie opened Tuesday but there was no way that I would have made it to that show since I had an exam the next day. But at the same time, it was hard to studying knowing that the new movie was out and I was stuck at home studying for an exam. It’s hard to concentrate when your mind is elsewhere.

This movie was just insanely jammed pack with non-stop action. I can’t remember much of the dialog that went on but I remember the action sequence. When the DVD comes out, I can see myself watching this over and over and over again. I don’t think I can ever get sick and tired of giant robots walking around and transforming into vehicles.

If you’re not too familiar with the history of Transformers, the sequel doesn’t spend too much time explaining each individual characters. There were a lot of Autobot and Decepticons running around but very little time to introduce them. I knew a free from them from the series but since a lot of them have changed their vehicle mode form, it’s hard to tell who’s who. Heck, I’m so used to see Devastator in a certain form that I didn’t even recognized him in the trailers. When I saw the Contructicons in the movie combine to become Devastator, that’s when I realized that it was him. And Devastator has some huge balls in this movie. I couldn’t stop laughing at it.

Speaking of which, I think the robots had more human like traits this time around. When Sam was leaving for college, Bumblebee was crying windshield washer fluid. When each robot was being destroyed, they leaked fluid. They even went as far as given them breath. When Megatron was speaking, you can see his breath because it was so cold.

Before going to watch the movie, I read up on a few rumours that were running out. The one that caught my attention was the idea that Optimus will be combining with Jetfire. Optimus is my favourite character and I have a few of his figurines but the ones that I love are the ones where he combines with another Autobot. I was really interested in seeing how they were going to animated the combination sequence. But let me tell you, I was on the edge of my seat in awe when I saw it. Optimus Prime couldn’t look any more awesome than that. The movie could have ended like that and I would have gone home happy.

If you’re like me and love action movies because of the action, you won’t be disappointed. Maybe there were some plot holes in the movie but I didn’t remember much of it. I think Jenn had a lot of questions because the movie didn’t explain everything. The special effects were crazy awesome. I think they went all out on this one. The movie appears to be aimed more towards the older crowd this time. Heck, Optimus called one of the Decepticons a bitch after he destroyed him. Even the humour was more mature. It’s not something that every kid will laugh at. I’m sure that they’ll be in awe with the transformation sequence but they’ll stay quiet during the jokes.

After playing around with the Eee PC for a while, I’ve decided that Xandros was not enough to do everything so I installed Ubuntu Eee. This distro gave me a bit more flexibility and control but not everything worked out of the box. I assumed that since the distro was made for the Asus Eee PC, everything should have been working as soon as the installation completed but unfortunately, that was the case.

The one thing that I was hoping to work right away was the wireless card. I think that the main reason to get an Eee PC was for their mobility, it would help if the wireless card worked. The network card worked without any problems but the wireless did not. It wasn’t hard to install the drivers and get it up and running.

The layout is slightly different from Xandros where it had tabs, Ubuntu had a similar thing going only it was vertical. All of the shortcuts were placed in the middle of two columns and they were sorted according. There were many differences software wise since it came bundled with pretty much the same thing. So basically, I don’t have much else to add to my previous review about the Eee PC. All I can say so far is that everything operating system that I’ve installed onto the netbook has last about a week so far. So here are some pretty little screenshots of what Ubuntu Eee looks like. I’m sure that you can find these online somewhere but while you’re here, you might as well look at these.

I finally got a chance to watch good classical movie called

It’s a Wonderful Life

. I’ve heard a lot about it here and there but I have never seen it before. Oddly enough there were a few scenes in the movie that were pretty famous but I had no idea that it was from this particular movie. It took me the whole day to watch it but I managed to finish it.

The movie is about the life of a man named George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart). George is the type of guy who everyone would want to know. He is always thinking about everyone else first and himself last. He had dreams of leaving down, exploring the world and building things but unfortunate events occur and it stops him from chasing his dreams. “I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Colosseum. Then, I’m comin’ back here to go to college and see what they know. And then I’m gonna build things. I’m gonna build airfields, I’m gonna build skyscrapers a hundred stories high, I’m gonna build bridges a mile long…” George is a very ambitious guy so who knows what it would have been like if he did follow his dreams. Or do we?

At the beginning of the movie we hear a few people praying to God asking him to help George. Apparently, George was in a lot of trouble and needed some serious help. So God sends the angel Clarence to help him. Clarence doesn’t have his wings yet but God promised him that he will get them if he helps out George. Before Clarence goes to Earth, the angel Joseph tells him all about George’s life. From there, we watch as George grows up and events unfolds that stops him from chasing his dreams.

George’s problems were so bad that he wanted to kill himself but Clarence managed to save him. The two start talking and Clarence reveals that he is an angel but George doesn’t believe him. George tells Clarence about the type of trouble he is in and wished that he was never born. Clarence advised against making a wish like that but George believed that people would be better off without him. In order to help George, Clarence granted George the wish so he can see how other people turned out without his involvement. After seeing how people were without him, George realized that he played an important role in everyone’s life. The whole town was a better place to live in because of him. People’s lives were better because he was there to help them out.

I’m sure that there are lots of people who goes through some sort hard time here and there and they get to a point where they just want to give up. Once you’re in the slumps, it’s hard to get out when you’re all alone. If you have the help of some good friends then it wouldn’t be so bad because you have company. Friends are usually there to help you out when you’re in time of needs but sometimes your pride won’t let you ask for help. I was once on of those people. When I needed help with anything, I wouldn’t go asking for it. I’m not sure if it was my pride that stop me or the fact that I thought people were too busy to lend me a hand. But now I see that my friends are there to give me a helping hand and all that I have to do is ask.

“Remember, no man is a failure who has friends. -Clarence”

I watched “The Day the Earth Stood Still” the other day and found it to be pretty good. The story line wasn’t all that great but some of the things in the movie were fairly interesting. There were a few things in the movie that didn’t quite make sense but I ignored that. There were even parts in the movie where I was getting mad at the decisions of some of the character as if they made those decisions because it’s a movie. Basically, it was a good movie otherwise I wouldn’t take the time to review it.

The movie starts out in a suspenseful kind of way and keeps you tuned in. It starts in the year 1928 (I think) on the snowy mountains of India where Keanu Reeves’ character finds a glowing orb. He chips away at the ice that’s surrounding it and suddenly he passes out. When he regains consciousness, he finds a hole in this mittens and a scar on the back of his hand. Then it fast forwards to present day and NASA notices a object that has been orbiting the solar system for a while and all of a sudden its trajectory changes and it’s heading towards the earth. The government rounds up a bunch of scientist and takes them to an airbase where they get prepared for the collision. The object appears to be traveling at a very high speed and at that speed they wouldn’t be anything left but an impact creator. Fortunately, the object somehow slows down and lands in the middle of Central Park (and oddly enough, there are a lot of people in Central Park in the middle of the night). Out comes an alien who goes to greet Jennifer Connelly’s character and out of nowhere, someone shoots it and it starts to die. The robot whose job is to defend the alien comes out starts emitting a high pitch sounds and electromagnetic pulses which causes the people to fall to the ground and all of the machinery turns off.

From that point on, it’s just a bunch of chase scenes between the main characters and the army. There wasn’t much of a dialog in the movie but there was one conversation between Keanu Reeves’ and John Cleese’s character where they discuss the people of the earth. The earth was dying because the humans were killing it. The alien race wanted to save the earth so they planned on annihilate the human race in order to save the earth. One of the most memorable lines from the movie was by John Cleese. “You say we are on the brink of destruction and you’re right. But it’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.” How true is this quote? We are living in a time where it seems like we’re close to the brink of destruction but what is being done about it? There are wars going on all over the world over what? Land? Oil? Money? What exactly has to happen to the world for people to change?

The threat of global warming has been on the air waves for a while now but it doesn’t seem like anyone is doing anything. Some people are trying to be more environmentally friends but is it going to help? Unless it’s a global change, it won’t be as effective. I remember when gas prices were sky high so people stopped buying those gas guzzlers. Even the manufacturers stop making them. But as soon as the price went back down, they were right back at it.

Anyway, back on track. The movie wasn’t all that great. You sit there watching it but the movie doesn’t take you in. The earth is invaded by a bunch of alien spheres but you don’t get that sense of panic. You see people running but you don’t really hear them screaming. People running around without screaming isn’t scary. I remember seeing a black and white movie where people were running and a lot of people were screaming. That image stuck in my head as an all out panic. Even in those old Godzilla movies where the Japanese are running around screaming and pointing. In this movie, the spheres are landing and people are out there recording it and posting it on YouTube. They don’t convey a sense of fear or anything. It’s like, “Oh cool! Spheres! Glowing spheres. I’m going to recording this and post it on YouTube.” But then again, what’s scary about of glowing spheres?

The movie wasn’t all that good but it did convey a message. Violence is not the answer but humanity will never learn that. Aliens in most movies like to attack the U.S. for god knows what reason. Maybe they see the U.S as more of a threat than every other country on this planet. And in the movies, the U.S. likes to fight back because they don’t like to be pushed around. So what do they do? They wage war against the aliens for invading their turf. Typical of a U.S. versus alien type of movie. Now, I haven’t seen the original but I’ve heard that it’s better than the remake so you might be better off watching the original movie.

Randy Pausch is probably an inspiration to millions of people. He’s very influential and his video has almost 7,000,000 views on YouTube. I’m sure that there are countless duplicates of that view and they probably been view just as much so you can see how much of his word is being spread around the world. After watching the video and finding out that they had a book, I decide to buy it and see what he had to say. Most of the things that he mentioned in the book were the same things that he mentioned in his lecture but as you read through it, there are other things that he covers.

The Last Lecture is a legacy that Randy Pausch is leaving to his wife and children. The book seems like it’s an inspiration book that will help you achieve your childhood dream but there’s more to it than that. Throughout the whole book, he talks about his wife and children and how he loves them and how sorry he is that he will not be around to take care of them. But he has faith that they will be able to support each other.

Every chapter in the book has a little tip on how to live your life to the fullest. You life for today and not for tomorrow because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Randy didn’t know exactly when he was going to go. He knew that his time on earth was limited and he had to make the most of it. “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we can play the hand.” There are some things in this world that we cannot control so we just have to work around it.

Some of the things mentioned in the book are closely related to things that I agree with. There’s a chapter in the book that talks about whiners and complainers. “Too many people go through life complaining about their problems. I’ve always believed that if you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you’d be surprised by how well things can work out.” Most people these days will complain and complain and not do anything about it. I try to cut back on the complaining because I know that there’s not much I can do about it. I’m not going to complain about gas because, I’ll just start walking. I think that people complain because they’re hoping that the other person will agree with them which will make them feel good about it because someone else agrees. There are better uses of your time than complaining about a little issue.

Randy has very little time left with his family but he was able to do so much. He was able to thank all the people that made an impact on his life. He was able to take care of his family and make sure that they make the transition smoothly. He even put together this book for his children so they have something to remember him by. His daughter is too young to remember anything but I think that she’ll know him pretty well after reading this book. It was full of stories from everything important detail of his life. I’ve never met him but it seems like I have.

I think it’s a human characteristic to want to be remembered for something. We all want to leave our footstep in history so that other knows that we mattered in a way. When you’re young, all you want to do is play but as you get older, you start to realize that there’s more to life than just playing. There’s a whole bunch of other things that start to matter. How do you want your family to remember you as? How do you want history to remember you as? Unless you do something that captures the attention of a lot of people, history won’t even know who you are.

When I was younger, I wanted to travel through outer space. I watched a lot of sci-fi television shows so pictured that the future would be cool. In Back to the Future, they travel to the year 2015 and they had flying cars, hover boards and holograms that jumps out at you. That’s what I pictured the year 2000 as. Instead, we get whole Y2K and the end of the world stuff. I wanted to be able to hope onto a space ship and travel to the other side of the galaxy. I wanted to watch as a star is born. I wanted to go through a wormhole and come out on the other end. I wanted to be this guy that does all this futuristic stuff so that history would know me as a daring space traveler. But since our technology isn’t that advanced yet, I can’t do any of that stuff.

This book is filled with a lot of advices to live by. He covers just about everything that matters in life. A coworker always reminds me, “Don’t sweat the petty stuff. Don’t pet the sweaty stuff.” You have a lot of other things to worry about so if it’s not worth your time, don’t even both with it. “If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, the dreams will come to you.“

I’ve just finished reading my first book of the season. It’s called “Final Theory” by Mark Alpert. I haven’t read anything worthwhile lately but this book and fired up my reading engine back up and now I can get started on read more books. I must say that this book was an interested read and it was hard to put it down every night. I tried to read a chapter a day but each chapter was fairly long. I only bought this book a couple of weeks ago so for me to finish it that quickly, it had to be good.

The premise of the book is based on the idea that Einstein had solved the Theory of Everything. It’s a unified theory of theoretical physics that incorporate relativity and quantum mechanics that attempts to explain and links together all known physical phenomena. Einstein came up with the popular Theory of Relativity which was used to create the atomic bomb. If he has known that the formula could be used to create something so destructive, the probably wouldn’t have published the theory so what if he came up with another theory but saw that it has even more of a destructive power. Wouldn’t he try to hide the theory to prevent more destruction?

From the start of the novel, there’s some action going on. A hit man was hired to get the formula from three of Albert Einstein’s assistants. It was believed that the knowledge was passed on to the three assistants and each held a different piece of the puzzle. The hit man did whatever it took to get the information out of them before killing them. He was close to get an answer from his first victim, a professor but the police arrived. That didn’t stop him though because he was following the victim every step of the way.

The professor was close to dying because he had sustained a lot of damage to his body but he managed to pass on a clue, a set of random numbers to his assistant, David Swift. David’s task was to figure out what the clue meant and find the location of the final theory but he had the FBI and the hit man on his tail the whole time. The FBI wanted that information because they were working for the government and the killer wanted the information for his client.

The thing that made me want to keep reading was the final theory. I was eager to figure out what it was too. Every step of the way, the characters get closer and closer to the theory but they keep running into obstacles. Sometimes their time was dead on and other times they were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. But as you read on, you start to see other puzzles come together so everything was brilliantly planned out. There were a lot of twists and turns and by the time I finished the book, I was very satisfied. Nothing was left unexplained.

There were a few things in the book that I found to be odd. The hit man was able to keep up with Swift every step of the way. It was like he knew exactly where to look or who to talk to in order to get an answer. I mean, yes he had some help from the inside but other time he was making decisions based on hunches.

The character development of the novel was excellent. I felt like I knew exactly what every character’s purpose was. The science behind the plot was pretty believable. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that everything in the novel was true. There were a lot of surprises in the book which made me pause for a few minutes to think it over and when I was done thinking, I was wowed. This book was definitely a great read and I’d recommend it to anyone.

The latest version of the Mozilla Firefox browser was released a few days back and I downloaded because I made a pledge to download it. Mozilla was looking to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the most downloaded software or something and I think it achieved it. I didn’t know exactly what to expect with Firefox 3 but I wanted to download it because the previous version was eating up a lot of RAM.

The first thing that I noticed about the new browser was the graphical user interface (GUI). They had redesigned it slightly and organized things a little better. I’m not sure if one of my themes was still activated but it looked like the Aero Glass theme of Internet Explorer 7 just less congested.

When I started to surf around, I noticed a drop down menu show up with a list of addresses that matches what I was typing. This is available in most browsers but the fact that I can see the favicon for these addresses looked cooler. In a way, this should help you ensure that you’re going to the correct site.

The bookmark hasn’t changed me from the previous version. They’ve added a folder for most visited sites, recently bookmarked, recent tags and unsorted bookmarks. And I’m not sure if it was available in the previous version but you can perform real time searches of your bookmark. I don’t bookmark too many sites so I never had to use that option before. I’m only using it now because I’m testing out the new version.

Firefox 3 has some nicely added security features like the Site Identification button. If a site is going to be sending information regarding your identity, the button will change from gray to blue or green. This will ensure that you’re browsing safely and that you’re information is secure.

The gray icon indicates that the site doesn’t send any identity information and that the connection between the browser and the server is unencrypted. Most website will contain a gray button because most sites don’t involve the exchange of sensitive information back and forth. You can probably tell whether a site is a spoof site or not by look at the address bar. If it has a gray site identification icon and there’s no padlock in the address bar, you should take caution.

The blue icon indicates that the site’s domain has been verified and the connection between the browser and the server is encrypted. What this means is that the people who are running the site have bought a certificate proving that they own the domain and it is not being spoofed. My bank’s site has a certificate and an encrypted connection so a blue icon is displayed. When I click on the icon, it tells me that the www.royalbank.ca site has been certified by RSA Data Security Inc. Also, this assures me that the connection is encrypted so no one can eavesdrop on the connection and my information.

The green icon indicates that the site provides fully verified identity information about its owner and that the connection is encrypted. These sites gain an “Extended Validation certificate” by going through a more rigorous identity verification process to validate that the owner is who they claim to be. While the blue icon indicates that a site’s domain is not being spoofed, it does not verify that they own the domain. The green icon indicates that the domain is valid and that the owners of the domain are who they are.

Click on the “More information…” will obviously display more information about the site. You can view the certificate, the number of times that you’ve visited the site and whether you have any saved password stored for this site.

The site idenification icon does go red to warn you of suspicious sites but I wasn’t expecting to see it on this site. Every now and then, I’ll browse to the sites on my blogroll to see what’s up on their end. I didn’t expect Kelly Penguin Girl’s website to be a suspicious one but apparently Google seems to think so. I’ve never had any problems with it and even now I still don’t. Every time I’ve visited the site, I never received any notification to download anything so it’s probably some sort of glitch. I told Kelly about it but she told me not to worry about it. So it’s back to regular surfing for me.

Yes, I know that I visited my site a lot today but that was because I had to preview my post. It probably counted all those times that I hit the refresh button but nonetheless, it’s some nice useless information to see. So, if you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3 yet, I’d recommend that you do. It’ll make your web surfing easier and safer than using Internet Explorer. It’s got everything you need to make your browsing experience a satisfying one.