DVDeals 9/21 - 9/27

Circuit City Deals
- Family Guy Seasons 3-5 for $19.99 each
- Tin Man for $14.99
- What Women Want for $6.99
- Tiffany's for $6.99
- Fantastic 4 (w/ digital copy) for $9.99
- X3 (w/ digital copy) for $9.99
- i, Robot (w/ digital copy) for $9.99
- Die Hard (w/ digital copy) for $9.99

Best Buy Deals
- Moulin Rouge for $6.99
- Independence Day (w/ digital copy) for $14.99

Ihawan

Emily & Charlotte got a bunch of our friends together for my Birthday. Some of us were coming from Manhattan and other from Flushing, so we had to pick a nice central location. Ihawan in Woodside was perfect since all major trains could get there easily. It also had a very homey atmosphere and wasn't too loud. I wanted to make sure we were in a place where everyone could easily talk to anyone else at the table. Of equal importance, the food was great.


Be sure to click on the slideshow to access the Picasa Web album for more details and hi-res photos.

Renee's Kitchenette & Grill (Buffet)

Home of Pampanga's Best Cuisine

Location: 69-14 Roosevelt Ave., Woodside, NY 11377
Cuisine: Filipino
Hours: MON, WED, THU (10:30am-8:30pm); FRI, SAT, SUN (8:30am-8:30pm); TUE (closed)
Phone: (718) 476-9002, (718) 947-0472
Prices: about $12/person
Credit Cards: ???

Food: 5
Service: 7
Value: 7
Environment: 6

Frequency: Unique

One of the highlights of a busy Sunday was Susan's Birthday lunch @ Renee's. It was fun to catchup with friends and family again. The group roughly consisted of teh same people at last month's housewarming.


As I mentioned in my Ihawan review, there aren't many Filipino restaurants around that are better than home-cooked food. Renee's is just another one to add to the list. The food was OK at the buffet, but not great (see Picasa album for details). It's probably fair to re-evaluate this place in the future though. Their sit-down menu actually looks impressive. Note that average rating I gave it was strictly on the buffet.

The service was pretty good overall. The staff was a little on the slow side, but the place was packed and they were still very accommodating. The space was clean for a buffet with interesting decorations. It was a little overcrowded though... hard to walk through to get to the buffet table.

Happy Moon Festival

Related: About.com, Wikipedia

Mrs. Cobra the Terminator

Original Dates: ~1983-1987?

Many TV shows based around a school usually have an episode with a substitute teacher. There are 2 directions producers can push the storyline. There could be a very nice sub where the class ends up happy to get a break from their teacher. On the other side of the coin, an evil sub can make things worse for the students. In the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles pilot, an evil cyborg was disguised as the substitute teacher and shot up the classroom trying to kill John Connor. Watching that episode sparked a flashback to elementary school where my friends and I had the unfortunate experience of our own evil sub. Her name was Mrs. Cobler, but she was known as "Mrs. Cobra" or "Cobra Commander" to all of the kids. Mrs. Cobra was always mean and obviously hated kids. Everyone got in trouble by her... I mean everyone at one point or another... even Mike N.! Mike was the perfect student, both academically and morally. Physically, she was tall and elongated with a slight arch in her upper back... very much resembling a humanoid cobra! There was likely a metal endoskeleton & red eyes underneath as well. We suffered her presence through almost the entire 6 years of elementary school and were never happy when our teachers were sick.

Gnothi Seauton

"I cannot imagine the Apocalypse. No matter what Kyle Reese told me or others who have come back... I cannot imagine 3 billion dead. I can imagine planes hitting buildings and I can imagine fire. If I would've witnessed it, if I would've been here, I'm sure I would've thought the end was near. I'm sure I would've thought... we have failed."

Sarah Connor
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Episode 102

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Season 1

Story: 8
Action: 7
Acting: 7
FX: 8
Durability: 8
Special Features: 7

I bet it was a challenge getting the pilot approved for this series. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles sounded like it was going to be a failure to begin with because it was taking one of the most sacred sci-fi sagas and not including any of the original cast members. Now Stargate also did this years ago, but they had a top name in Richard Dean Anderson to carry the weight. This series did not. However, it all turned out well. Season 2 begins tomorrow night and I'm reviewing the DVD set of season 1 that I gladly spent $20 on.

The 2 things that made this series successful were the story and special fx. The plot of each episode had to be carefully thought out because of the time altering aspects of the story arc. And it also acknowledged the 3 movies. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles took place between T2 and T3. It starts in 1999, but Sarah & John time travel to 2007 with the help of a new Terminator named Cameron to try to stop Skynet from being built. Some of the characters from the movies made appearances in the series including Dr. Silberman, Kyle Reese, Enrique and the Dyson family. There were also a lot of new characters added... Charlie Dixon (Sarah's new fiancee), James Ellison (FBI agent investigating the strange evidence of robots from the future) and Derek Reese (Kyle's older brother). While the main characters of the series were figuring out how Skynet was started, Terminators were also beginning to mobilize and prepare for Judgement Day.

The special effects were the best I've seen for a non-cable TV channel. The endoskeletons didn't lose that much detail. That was very important because it's the most memorable image from the movies. They also showed enough footage of the Terminators to keep me interested. They could've easily cut corners and made cheap replicas of the robots, but in the end the fx team did a great job working off of the movie imagery.

The most important character was of course the title one, Sarah Connor. Lena Headey's interpretation wasn't exactly the same as the original, Linda Hamilton. I felt that was OK because each Terminator story had Sarah go through huge life-changing experiences. In Terminator, she was a sweet diner waitress... a normal everyday person. In T2, she was obsessed with training her son John to be the leader of mankind and was also locked up in a mental hospital for years. In T2, Hamilton played a tough Terminator-like soldier. Headey in the series still had the toughness, but was more rational. This change in behavior could be explained by the events at the end of T2. She was reunited with her son and saw the importance of life. She gained sight of what they were fighting for again. As for the other characters, there was a lot of leeway. John Connor was a kid in T2, so getting a new actor was no big deal to play him as an older teen. Thomas Dekker did a great job with this role, combining characteristics of a budding leader and an everyday teen. He also looks somewhere between the T2 and T3 John. Summer Glau played the good Terminator and there was a lot of contrast in her character. On the outside, she looks like a sweet girl, but the way she acted stone cold was almost creepy... a "scary robot."

The timing of this TV series is great because it'll set things up for Terminator Salvation in Summer 2009.

You can catch season 2 Monday nights @ 8pm on Fox.

Related: IMDB, Official Site on Fox, Sarahconnorchronicles.org (fan site)

DVDeals 9/7 - 9/13

DVD Tuesday
The long awaited partnership of Jet Li and Jackie Chan will come out this Tuesday... Forbidden Kingdom. The regular edition is cheapest at Circuit City... $14.99. The 2-disc special edition is $22.99 everywhere, so it'll end up slightly cheaper if you buy from Amazon or Buy.com assuming you have Prime membership or purchase other things to qualify for free shipping.

Circuit City Deals
- Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon for $6.99
- Ong Bak for $6.99
- A Knight's Tale or $6.99
- XXX for $6.99
- Desperado for $6.99
- Mask of Zorro for $6.99

Best Buy Deals
- Seven Swords for $4.99
- Hero for $4.99
- Ghost Rider for $7.50

Google Chrome BETA

Google released Chrome, their new browser today. So I wanted to post my take on it. As usual, they did a lot of research and testing before its release. They must've studied user behaviors in depth because I felt right at home with it even though it has a different look and feel than my default browser, Firefox. I'm not sure if this browser if for everyone though. A power user who knows his/her shortcuts would have an easier time with it because there aren't a lot of menus to navigate with. They concentrated on making a lot of space for the web page itself, only displaying information when needed.

Pros
The look and feel is original and visually appealing. Space for web pages has been maximized and it breaks away from the standard Windows interface. Because of the simplified look, many interface elements perform more than one task. The address bar is also a search bar. The backend is treated as a mini operating system almost, doing an efficient job of dividing processes. If one tab crashes, it doesn't shutdown the entire browser. Tabs can be dragged in and out of windows. Developers need not worry too much about developing for another browser. It uses the same rendering engine as Safari. All of my pages look fine on it and I haven't run across any sites that didn't work yet.

Cons
It still lacks a lot when compared to Firefox, but Google Chrome is still in beta. It can't be customized to the level that Firefox can... no themes or plugins. Nearly all of the "pros" I mentioned can be achieved in Firefox with plugins. Google boasted about performance, but this browser renders images noticeably slower.

Conclusion
Google Chrome is a nice alternative browser and it's better than Internet Explorer, but it has a long way to go before getting me to change my default from Firefox.

Related: About, Comic Book, Download, Video

Happy Labor Day