Idiots.

If you are one of the people who rated Wall-E as a 1-out-of-5-stars movie, then you are one sad and pathetic soul. I had the chance to watch Wall-E today, and at the same time tried out a first impression in watching at Platinum XXI. Not bad, by the way. In terms of graphic quality, Wall-E is exactly what you can expect from a world-class animation studio that has never seized to amaze me with their creations. Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Cars, Ratatouille, they are all superb animated movies in both story and craftsmanship.

As for Wall-E, it is much more special than that. Not only that it is a very enjoyable movie, it performs as a good educative movie as well, both for children, and adults, even though as I read somewhere, the producers didn’t actually intend to make this movie other than a love story. From what I’ve seen today, Wall-E gave us at least several moral lessons for us to think about.

• At least 700 years in the future, as Pixar predicted, Earth is totally covered with trash and junk. Even the orbit is covered with space trash. And we humans are definitely the ones to blame. And we Indonesians definitely fail on this one.
• In that future, people have become dependent to technology that they don’t even bother to move their ass around on their own. Every single human being in the Axiom is obese.
• When EVE and Wall-E aided the Axiom’s captain to turn against Auto’s mutiny, this shows that even robots have soul and to aid humans and to stick to their good directives.
• Wall-E and EVE showed us what it is like to have a life full of compassion and loyalty with each other. I don’t see if that’s something in common now.

Pixar has managed to develop robot characters that can only communicate verbally at a certain limit, but have deep character and emotion on screen. Who can resist the sweet and innocent Wall-E? He’s gone great lengths to stand on what he believes in. Even his pet cockroach didn’t move waiting for Wall-E’s return to Earth. Bottom line, I give this movie 11 out of 10 stars. It is outstandingly superb.

By the way, for you art history geeks, stay put for the ending credits. It’s a summary of art movements since cave wall paintings in an implicit animation. Very good stuff.

So the upgrade actually went very well and smooth for my iPhone. It takes no more than 15-20 minutes for the initial custom firmware creation and restoration, and it takes another one hour or two to get all the settings back to my iPhone as I see fit, and testing the whole thing to make sure that it works as it should. Disabling the keyboard’s auto-correction was also easy enough and quite non-destructive.

One of the most interesting appeal that made me eager to do the upgrade is the now-native applications available in AppStore. And those are really really great. Most of the essential things that I need, such as Twitterrific, WordPress, NetNewsWire, Palringo, or Facebook, come as free applications. And the only thing I actually bought so far is Things, which hopefully in the future, connects and syncs with the desktop version that I use daily. I also found BookReader (in Cydia), which is a barebone version of Books.app, and completely supports HTML files that I used for the Alkitab. Although it is extremely bare bone, I think it would do justice for now, and I will have the instructions updated on that one.

So, bottom line, if there are still applications that you really do need and irreplaceable, I suggest that you keep refraining yourself from upgrading to 2.0. But as for me and a day with the iPhone 2.0, I must admit that I’m excited on what lies ahead.

I was probably overly excited this morning as my RSS news reader pointed out a new feed from the iPhone Dev Team’s blog. The next generation Pwnage Tool is out, and we can both jailbreak and unlock the first generation iPhone running on the 2.0 firmware. I then immediately download the tool and left it to church.

Earlier tonight, I decided to give a try to upgrade my iPhone to 2.0. After downloading all the necessary firmware and bootloader files, there’s a catch. First of all, Installer support is not there yet, so we can only install apps outside Apple’s AppStore from the Cydia Installer. It’s basically the same thing, but there’s a second catch: Not all of the third party apps work with the new 2.0 firmware. While we could probably live off for the next few weeks with the barebone 2.0 firmware and several apps from the AppStore, one thing I probably can’t live without is the keyboard tweak that disables the annoying auto-correct feature. Apparently, the old patch does not work with 2.0. Oh well, that means, a few weeks of wait is probably worth it, at least until all of the old apps are updated for 2.0, and until most of the bugs are ironed out.

To PLN’s management, take a look at this. That is an article about a Danish island, called Samsø that runs entirely, yes, ENTIRELY on renewable energy. So is it possible that in a macro scale, a country runs on renewable energy? Unless we don’t want to, yes, it’s absolutely possible, and the people living in Samsø actually REALLY CARE about their future. We just need no corruption and 100% responsibility and commitment. Is this something we can have? No. Why? Because we are simply to dumb to realize that ELECTRICITY CAN BE GENERATED WITH OTHER THAN FOSSIL FUEL and most of the ones involved in making decisions are busy making themselves rich.

Crazy? If you live in Europe, maybe. But if you live in Indonesia, it’s just something that happens daily.

First of all, in a small scale, I pay for the electricity that I use, and oh do believe that I use electricity with great concern. I turn off things that I don’t use, unplugged things that I don’t use for months, upgraded the office monitors to LCDs, and the list goes on. And when I do use a lot of power out of the meter, I am perfectly aware of the costs that I have to bear each month. So, in a sense, I do pay for what I use, so I could care less if PLN is unable to provide that to my house’s power grid.

Second, where the heck is the industry on building power plants? How come from the day I stepped on the elementary grade, the number of power plants available in Indonesia is nowhere near plenty. Answer? Let’s just say, we don’t have to ask where the money went to.

Third, if the government is really that concern about the energy crisis, they should take approximate steps to develop greener energy. Take wind power for example, we have plenty of wind down here. If the government put some effort to install residential-grade turbines on every few blocks or so in the city, I’m sure some of that power consumption need could be taken care of. But no, we’re not going there, are we?

Fourth, is of course back to the fuel drama. We have lots of alternative energy sources out there, and yet, some power plants still rely on oil to run. This is just plain stupid.

FIfth, the idea of building a nuclear power plant. Well this just sucks monkey balls. If our country can’t even take care of simple matters such as garbage or traffic, I don’t see why we SHOULD build a nuclear power plant. I can envision the comeback of Chernobyl, or the second coming of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without the bombs, of course. We won’t need them as it would probably explode on its own. Even developed countries are now moving away from nuclear power plants.

So, until the government and every bit of Indonesians that have no conscious of what lies 30 years ahead can pull their minds together, I’m as sure as hell that the blackouts are going to be more often. I’m going to invest on a generator. Something that is perhaps more reliable than our trusty ol’ power company.

Right from the beginning, I already have my doubts since the Indonesian version’s cover is nowhere near good. It looks like something that came out from a first-year student’s PC, who just learned how to do magazine covers in Photoshop. Designs can be simple, but this is plain wrong. A magazine cover is where people should be able to read the inside’s main articles spot on. Not like this. Look how dull it is compared side-by-side with the US version.

And what’s with the bevels? I feel like I’m back in the 90s with Photoshop 5.

The next big mistake is the lack of baseline grid in the magazine. What kind of a good editorial designer is one, when he/she doesn’t know anything about baseline grid. Why do I make this into such a big deal?

Because in the US version, the baseline grid exists. And that what makes the whole magazine layout and grid coherent. This is why more than half of Indonesian magazines or translated magazines are crappy. Indonesian designers don’t know shit on how to treat typefaces and body texts properly.

The next would be the main article. The US version on the left, and the Indonesian version on the right. Look how dull the green is. And I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think we needed the copy’s typeface to be enlarged. Why? Because it’s good as it is and Megindo (the magazine’s publisher) just keeps messing things up.

Here’s another main article called “Weighing the MacBook Air”, laid out perfectly in the US version, with good typography.

And here’s the Indonesian version of the article, laid out badly, with crappy typography treatment. Why can’t they just do what the US version did? Is it that hard just to copy the same set of style? Look at the ferocious margins and paddings on this one, and all of those unnecessary hyphenations. Crappy. Just crappy.

Here’s the “Backlit Keyboard” picture in the US version.

And this is the Indonesian version. Now wait a second… “Logic Board”? Oh yes, they mistakenly put the wrong caption there, because, in the US version, the logic board picture is supposed to be this:

From what we see above, this is only a handful of mistakes that the Indonesian Macworld has managed to show me. There are still numerous errors, such as low-resolution photos, crappy printouts, inconsistent layouts, dull colors, and crappy translations. Oh yes, I never did liked the idea of having “proper Indonesian” translations on magazines, simply because the often turned out to be “norak”, since the writing style was not intended to be rewritten in Indonesian.

In the end, why do we even bother having a translated Macworld anyway, if this is what we’re gonna get. With all those ridiculous mistakes on details and design, with regards that this is supposed to be a complement to a set of Apple’s premium products, I can roughly consider Macworld Indonesia as one of the results of Indonesian editorial designers’ ignorance. I think I’ll stick with subscribing to the US version. At $3,75 for each edition (if you subscribe directly), it’s only Rp. 5000 more expensive than this badly translated version. It’s at least ten times better, and at least, it saves me from having sudden heart attacks.

Congratulations, Megindo, on turning one of the best Mac magazines into something that is not even worth reading. I sarcastically can’t wait to see what they would do to their website. Oh, I know! How about Flash intros?

I don’t usually buy business magazines, unless I was featured there or if something caught my eye. Such as a large Apple logo on the cover. But there’s more to it than just Apple as a cover feature. It’s the redesign of BusinessWeek. It’s been a while since they have their magazine and website redesigned, but I never really pay attention to it. I like the way they maintain the superbly readable body text with a nice leading and all, but the main punch for me is that they managed to switch from a classic to a modern look, and they did it. The layout is consistent and by far it bests most of Indonesian’s typical business magazine (I don’t have to name them here, as most real designers know that most of them are designed poorly, and they obviously look crappy).

But in all good things, there’s always a flaw:

Yes, that one came from Amazon’s Search Inside!™ feature. The least they can do is buy the book and scan off the cover, or they could simply Google the image. I found a few even bigger than the image they’re using. But I wouldn’t take this as BusinessWeek’s entire mistake. This is Indonesia, even franchises can afford to suck.

Wow, it only took two days for the workshop to get my bumper fixed. And along with that, no more stupid grill chromes.