“One of the greatest achievements in cinematic history”, “Not just another Pixar masterpiece….A modern day SCI-FI masterpiece!”, “Who says popular films can’t be art? “WALL·E” is magical” …

These are just a few of the hundreds of comments on IMDB for Disney/Pixar’s latest animated film - WALL·E.

You should see WALL·E if:

• You consider yourself a geek
• You use Mac
• You are on a date
• You like other Pixar films like Ratatouille, Finding Nemo
• You can only see one film this year

This is my first post from iPhone using the native WordPress app. On the left is a photo I took with my iPhone last Friday at 6 Elgin Street, SOHO. For those looking for a quality coffee shop without the hustle and bustle of the big name chain stores, you would love Coffee Assembly at corkloft here. Yes, that’s the entrance - such a hidden gem! It took me almost an hour to find it.

It’s very kind of my few friends who recently alerted me of a potential security problem of my blog, it seems that my site is listed as suspicious.

Fixing my site using Google Webmaster Tools

Based on my experience with a few other WordPress sites, I’m pretty sure that it is caused by some security holes in my old copy of WordPress (2.2). Finally I made up my mind to upgrade it today. The upgrade process was pretty painless as advertised, except that I lost all my categories. Luckily a simple google search found the fix in no time.

Now I’ve requested a review from Google, hopefully my site would be declared “clean” again.

Two weeks after iPhone Party Hong Kong (which drained most of my energy) and using my first iPhone (16GB White, HK$498 unlimited data plan), I’ve finally got the time to write my little review here.

As a Mac fanatic, I bet you wouldn’t expect me to say a lot of bad things about it. To me, mobile phone is a very personal thing, much more personal than a “personal computer”, so this review is also a personal one. I judged the iPhone based on my own needs. What is a “pro” to me maybe a “con” to others.

Pros:

• Contrary to what most people think, I think it is reasonably priced. To me, HK$300 of the HK$498 is for the voice+unlimited data plan and the remaining HK$200 is for the iPhone cost, which works out to be HK$4,800 after 24 months - and I can’t find any decent smartphone of its level at that price (say, HTC Diamond is priced at HK$5,600).
• Surfing the web using Safari and getting constant access to all my email accounts via IMAP is a joy. I still miss the push email in Blackberry but it’d be hard to beat Gmail’s search and spam filtering. I’m glad that my company’s email switched to Gmail Apps (free) last month. iPhone + Gmail = Winner.
• Absolutely love the SMS conversation threads. I can’t recall how much time I wasted on browsing the “Sent” folder on my previous phones for previous messages. Would be perfect if I could backup those conversations by desktop sync. There’re some messages I’d love to keep. (Update: I found this free app called Syphone that backup SMS)
• iPhone’s touch-based keyboard is ideal for female or anyone with smaller fingers. I could type as fast as on a physical QWERT keyboard, and the auto-correction intelligence is quickly building up my own library of frequently-typed words. I do wish it can let me customize the keyboard and shortcuts in future, after all it’s virtual, why not?

Cons:

• Battery life. Given iPhone’s big, gorgeous screen and 3G speed, I don’t think anyone else than Apple has done a better job in optimizing the battery life. It’s not really a problem for casual users or people with a second charger at office. But if you’re constantly using it (who wouldn’t with a unlimited data plan?) for email/web and wandering in the streets without a charging spot like I do, you’d better make sure you get all your important phone calls before 4 p.m.
• Chinese input. The character recognition support looks cool at first, but it’s just too slow and unreliable for practical use. How hard it is to put common input methods like Cangjie (倉頡) and Jianyi (簡易) on it? Even better, put the 5-stroke input (T9 五筆輸入) we use on most Nokia/SE phones on it.
• To-do list. Where is my to-do list from iCal? Still can’t seem to find it on iPhone. This is a really basic feature.
• Copy-and-paste. A missing feature that has been pointed out by many before. Rumours said that Apple is working on it, I hope so!

These are just some of the things I like to highlight, as I believe there’re more than enough lengthy reviews for anyone to find online. Again, I don’t think iPhone is a phone for the mass. It’s a revolutionary phone for a niche market. If you are not the type of people who care about syncing your phone contacts to desktop, it’s probably not for you.

As with every type of design, one could only appreciates it after knowing the limits it has to be created within. iPhone 3G may have made some compromises, but I really think it’s the best in its class.

SMS received at 11:46 p.m. tonight:

你好：

閣下之前已登記之iPhone已安排 15 -18 號到指定門市中環分店購買，如有疑問可致電 63360XXX 林小姐查詢或預約地址：中環德輔道中 127 號地下（近恒生銀行）

You see … organizing the biggest iPhone Party in town doesn’t mean I could get it first!

What has been keeping me busy in the past two weeks? Other than the usual stuffs at work, I’ve been spending a lot of time in organizing (possibly) the biggest Mac event in town - iPhone Party Hong Kong. As the host of HKU Mac User Group since 2002, I’ve not been very active in organizing any events for our members. After all, I’ve left HKU for 4 years and the growing market share of Mac also means that the University has significantly improved their support.

Exactly one month ago, I finally met up with Derek Ngai, the President of the biggest local Mac User Group - MACitizen. Aside from all the geek talk, we casually brought up the idea of organizing some user group gatherings together, and wondered if the arrival of iPhone 3G to Hong Kong would be a good excuse to make that happen.

This is how the idea of a co-organized Mac gathering was born. With our “niche” membership base, we never thought that this would turn into such a mass event.

Since the launch of the official website on July 5, we have received more than 650 sign-up (and growing)! The response has been overwhelming, without any media coverage or proper “PR” work done. Our facebook event has also attracted 110 sign-up, and many corporations have expressed huge interest in sponsorship - including the exclusive iPhone 3G carrier Three HK!

[Photo above] Today, we’ve done our first “publicity” task: recording a podcast for the “Apple Age” program at CMM.hk - the biggest Podcast Network in Hong Kong. We talked about the iPhone Party, the local Mac/iPhone development scene, the HKU Mac User Group and our personal history of using (and switch to) Mac.

It was a pleasure to finally meet Paul Lin, host of CMM.hk, a fellow Machead. I figure there would be more opportunities to work together in the future.

Thanks to Bill, Napoleon, Clement, and the folks at aNobii, 9gag, Zendesk and EditGrid for their tremendous support.

No matter how this turns out to be, I’m very grateful for all these people and in particular my team at BeansBox for making this possible.

You probably already knew that Hong Kong has the cheapest iPhone 3G Plan in the World, so am I getting one finally? Oh hell yes.

七一回歸日無端端星期二有一日假放。星期日晚睇完歐洲國家杯決賽（德國抵輸！），尋晚睇溫布頓又睇到今朝五點，可以休息一日調整番「時差」都幾好！今日難得咁好天就搭船入去大嶼山梅窩行下，下午四點到，太陽不太猛，躺在沙灘上享受陣陣海風，感覺一流！就這樣消磨到傍晚，成個人re-charged晒，同行的朋友一致認同：咁至係放假！

可能我地都比較另類，不熱衷行街 shopping，更不想賴在家睡覺／打機／睇碟 … 香港雖然係石屎森林，但去郊區只不過大半個鐘車（船）程，比係銅鑼灣等位食壽司不知快幾多！講開 shopping，我真不明白點解咁多人當係一種「放假活動」。我理解好多人平日放工很晚，要等 weekend 才有幾會買野，但係… 個個 weekend 都去 shopping, 有無咁多野買呀？

去碼頭時路經 IFC Mall, 見到時裝店裡人頭湧湧，好似要搶咁，試衫要排隊、俾錢更要排隊，相信都不會有很「殷勤」的服務。一星期五日都要留係室內上班，點解唔趁放假出外逛逛，活動一下？怕熱？

人棄我取，你們迫商場，我就去郊外啦！