the Da Vinci Code : part 2

The book is classified as FICTION, not THEOLOGY!

I also do not understand the fire the book and (subsequently) the movie has received from an angered Christian community.
Even as man of faith, I have found the book as a great piece of entertainment... as it was meant to be.
There is a great deal of fuss kicked up over what I see as 'much ado about nothing'.
The Christian community should really back off.
Society really should govern themselves and not be preached/dictated too.

I have always thought the greatest gift afforded by the Christian God was the sense of being able to distinguish right from wrong.

an erect penis is totally without morals

a flaccid one is not all that ethical either...

bus uncle... damn BIE~

you should watch this shit...

omg man !!!
hong kong people are really mou liew

* rolls eyes*

the Da Vinci Code

All in all, I found this to be a lacklustre film.
The locations and scenery was great and all... it all being Paris, churches and grand architecture.
But, the movie lacked the pacing of the book.
There was no thrill or any sense of suspense as Langdon and Sophie ran all over the UK trying to crack the code.

It was a sad, sad day for me...

I found that the casting was very weak, with many of the big ticket stars turning in poor performances.
The title character of Langdon was given to Tom Hanks.
Don't get me wrong, Hanks is a fine actor.
I enjoyed his previous works like Forest Gump, Catch Me If You Can,The Terminal nd Castaway.
His portfolio of works is really impressive and I have great respect for the man.
But, his portrayal of Langdon was sadly lacking...
This was largely attributed to the time alotted to Hanks and the rather weak character developement in the script.
Perhaps if the movie was longer or was edited a little better...

In a brief discussion with Flick, she said that Audrey Tatou's Sophie Neveau was a too sweetly sick for her.
It seems that Tatou's Sophie was too much 'lil' Miss Perfectand Pretty' for her.
I will have to agree with Flick that Tatou really looked cute in this movie.
But, I found that Tatou was a good fit in her role... very technical actor, makes for a believable character.

The part of Leigh Teabing was a superb performance turned in by the great Ian McKellen.
I have found this man to have played a very annoying Magneto in the recent X-Men franchise.
I am a great fan of the X-Men comic runs and Erik Magnus Lensherr was never as one-dimensional as the character in the movie adaptation.
He was the sole reason I found the movie entertaining.
He captured the boyish enthusiam of Teabing really well, tempered by the character's inherent weakness of being lame (polio).
On a sidenote, McKellan was also the great Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy...

For me, Silas as portrayed by Paul Bettany was the strongest character in the film.
Bettany very graphically portrayed Silas as a faithful servant of Opus Dei.
This role of his was clearly a shock with his previous roles in movies like Firewall, Wimbledon and the tongue~in~cheek A Knight's Tale.

Mediocre at best...

new beginnings...

first day

at a new job

was so nervous little had I slept the previous night

I can redefine myself...
I am a Business Support Consultant at a local ISP

work hard, work smarter...

life has been better to me this year.
I am eating better, acheiving some of my goals... becoming a better man.



Oh! To walk tall on broken pavements towards a silver road...

ENDLESS STORY

by REIRA starring Yuna Ito













ROMANJI

If you haven’t changed your mind
Soba ni ite hoshii yo Tonight

Tsuyogaru koto ni tsukareta no
Osana sugita no Everytime I think about you baby
Ima nara ieru I miss you
It’s so hard to say I’m sorry

Tatoeba dare ka no tame ja naku anata no tame ni
Utaitai kono uta wo
Owara nai story tsuduku kono kagayaki ni
Always tsutaetai zutto eien ni

Memories of our time together
Kesa nai de kono mama don’t go away

Atatakaku toke dashite tashikameru no
Yasashisa no shizuku kono mune ni hirogatteku
Setsu nai hodo ni I’m missing you
Kasaneta te hanasa naide

Tatoeba kanau nara mou ichido anata no tame ni
Utai tai kono uta wo
Owara nai story taemanai itoshisa de
tell me why oshiete yo zutto eien ni

Tatoeba dare ka no tame ja naku anata no tame ni
Utaitai kono uta wo
Owara nai story tsuduku kono kagayaki ni
Always tsutaetai zutto eien ni

Tatoeba kanau nara mou ichido anata no tame ni
Utai tai kono uta wo
Owara nai story taemanai itoshisa de
tell me why oshiete yo zutto eien ni



ENGLISH

If you haven’t changed your mind
Then I want you by my side Tonight

I’m so tired of always having to bluff
Everytime I think about you baby, I feel so young
If I could just tell you I miss you
It’s so hard to say I’m sorry

You see, I want to sing this song, not for just anyone
but just for you
An ENDLESS STORY that keeps on shining
Always, I wanna show you, forever and ever

Memories of our time together
this way, they don’t go away

Once I knew that the warmth between us had disappeared,
gentle tears started to spread over my chest
This is not where it ends, I’m missing you
please don’t let go of my hand

You see, I wish I could sing this song, just for you
just one more time
An ENDLESS STORY of undying love
tell me why, please tell me, forever and ever

You see, I want to sing this song, not for just anyone
but just for you
An ENDLESS STORY that keeps on shining
Always, I wanna show you, forever and ever

You see, I wish I could sing this song, just for you
just one more time
An ENDLESS STORY of undying love
tell me why, please tell me, forever and ever

here is something inspiring from Steve Jobs, entrepreneur

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

This is the location where you can get the original copy of 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says





'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says


I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.