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Superpowers, that’s what we all wish to have isn’t it? Flying, laser beams, super-strength, etc. It’d be cool to have one of those powers, and in the case of Painkiller Jane, a woman has the ability to regenerate.

Painkiller Jane is a TV series that recently started airing in the US on 13th April 2007, it is based on the graphic novel of the same title. The entire show revolves around Jane Vasco, who is forced into working for an unspecified government agency whose mission is to identify and neutralise “neuros” - human mutants with special powers. However, Jane has the amazing ability as well to regenerate from any wound, be it gun wounds, knife wounds, or anything else, she has the ability to fully recover from them. However, she still feels the pain the wound causes, hence the name of the show. (Though it is strange that she can still feel pain when she’s supposed to be the “pain-killer”)

Sounds exciting thus far doesn’t it? What could go wrong with a mutant tracking down other mutants? Well, everything else it turns out. The biggest problem with this TV series is that it looks like the set was put together by a bunch for teenagers for their school project. It looks EXACTLY like a home video, yes that’s how bad it is. You can actually tell it’s a set, too obvious for comfort. Then there are the special effects. This show obviously had a very low budget, since they couldn’t be bothered with proper special effects at times. Sure, her regeneration looks cool, but other than that, everything is bad. I mean even the gun shots look REALLY fake. Then there’s the inexplicable behaviours of the characters. In the pilot episode, the villain just stands there waiting to get shot by Jane who’s groaning in pain as she gets hit by a couple of obviously fake bullets. Most of the actors and actresses are able to act to a certain extent though I guess, though Jane’s groans of pain and facial expression when she’s in pain could do with some improvement. However, given the proper storyline and setting, I’m sure these actors would have been able to deliver. Unfortunately they got stuck with Painkiller Jane.

The general plot is nothing new, just one person with superpowers. Even Heroes, whose season finale recently broadcasted, had more than a dozen of superpowered characters, one of which can also regenerate just like Jane can. However, the special effects applied on her look a lot better than those used on Jane. Jane automatically heals from gun wounds, and the show doesn’t even bother to show the wounds close up as they heal. However, Claire on the other hand (Jane’s counterpart in Heroes) forces broken bones back into place, shoves protruding bones back into her body, closes herself up when she gets cut open on an autopsy table after she “dies”, etc. Essentially, Jane Vasco’s ability to heal isn’t anything new in the first place, and the show doesn’t even bother to glorify the powers of their only “good” human mutant.

All in all, I’m quite surprised that a show like this actually got approval for broadcasting. While the show hasn’t been around for very long, I can safely say that there isn’t going to be a season 2, and viewership rates are going to continue dropping. This is really a TV series that everyone should stay away from. If you want to see amazing superpowers, you should have watched Heroes when you had the chance…

In short:
Pros: 1 super-powered “cop”
Cons: Home video style, mediocre acting, bad special effects, lousy plot, etc. (The list just goes on)

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(5 votes, average: 3.2 out of 5)
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I came across this site when I had the urge to know more about investments out there after my course structure touched briefly on it. Investopedia.com is a site that offers uncountable tutorials and articles on different methods of investing, technical jargons on investments and so on.

It basically focuses on the condition of the US market, but that does not mean that it’s totally useless for Malaysians, since the articles and tutorials provided are of course mainly relevant to the Malaysian equity market, and even other market environments around the world.

If you can’t find a term or are still confused about a situation or term you came across in your trading experiences, the site offers a ‘Ask Us‘ function, in which your questions will be answered by their experts.

Apart from all those investment tips that you can get from Investopedia.com, what I like about the site is the Stock Simulator, which provides a training base for aspiring or experienced investors to test out their money making skills. The simulator offers a wide range of investment choices for members and with a huge sum of $100,000 virtual cash for your investment needs. Competiton with the other 2 million investors or friends and family members is then made possible with public and private groups for you to join. It varies from bullish and bearish stocks trading, options trading and shorted stock trading. It has all the charts, numbers and margins that typical investors might need.

It has all the goods, however it still has a few shortcomings that I’m not quite satisfied with. In the simulator, stock feeds provided are actually 20 minutes later than the actuals one and due to this, trading might be delayed and the stock you are eyeing might be going ‘the other way’ right after you made up your mind. Since getting actual stock feeds in simulators are near impossibe on the Net (I can’t find any), Investopedia.com is still the best choice.

Other than that, the site frequently experiences server problems during the period of time when US market closes (US market trades from 9am-5pm, which is 9pm-5am in Malaysia). For those who are in other time zones that can’t actually monitor their stocks during the 9pm-5am, they can buy or sell their stocks first when the market is closed and when it reopens, the transactions will be carried out after the market opens.

Well, a last advice for all those who want to excel in the simulator, they can use Google Finance as a more accurate guidance and for those who are speculating the trends, the graphs are more accurate as well.

Till my next review, happy investing and I hope more and more “Warren Buffet”s will appear…

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(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)
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Motorola ROKR E6 / E690 is a touchscreen PDA phone that strikes a balance between mobile entertainment and business functionality, and being only 14.5mm in thickness and boasting a 2.4″ TFT TouchWindow screen, MOTOROKR E6 knows that out of all the PDAs available he’s the one turning heads.

Motorola has decided to use the Linux-based operating system on Motorola ROKR E6, meaning that you don’t get to see that poor and inferior Motorola’s own User Interface anymore. Splendid. However, there are very few and limited Linux-compatible applications on the market, unless you create your own applications. Business types will be excited with Microsoft office applications available on the almighty E6, allowing you to handle most office document formats like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and PDF files. The phone also comes with email, handwriting recognition and business card scanning functions. However, the handwriting recognition feature takes some time to get used to, unlike the ones used by Pocket PCs.

On the multimedia side of things, the new Motorola ROKR E6 has a great list of multimedia features, there’s a 2.0 megapixel camera, MP3 player with dedicated music keys, FM Radio and SD/MMC card memory slot. What struck me the most is the high-resolution 2.0 megapixel camera with macro view, 8x zoom and Flash can take great pictures and it can also be used as a webcam for the PC or laptop. The picture quality looks just like it’s taken on a 3.2 megapixel camera phone like N93i. With support for major compressed audio formats like MP3, WMA and WAV, the phone enables users to enjoy their music through a 3.5mm headphone jack, or the alternative wireless Bluetooth stereo headphones will do the job. Built-in FM radio is a plus for DJ lovers. The sound quality is fairly good. Storage wise, E6 comes with 8MB of internal memory, but for heavy users, SD or MMC memory cards of up to 2GB are supported.

Unfortunately, the thin and slick MOTOROKR E6 is not a perfect PDA phone. E6 seems to forget its basic function - making a call. You need to press multiple buttons to make a call, so heavy users should really think twice when considering the phone. Besides that, the Stylus requires extra effort to be pulled out and the preloaded DRM results in a slow response to Stylus inputs. And, for those who depend a lot on the Alarm, you will need to be extra careful when the alarm goes off, you’ll need to touch correctly either on Dismiss or Snooze, otherwise you will have hard time finding buttons to stop the alarm if you touch somewhere else on the screen. *Tips* If you can’t stop the alarm, just turn off the phone and turn it on again. =)

All in all, Motorola ROKR E6 is a uniquely designed touchscreen entertainment PDA phone with decent performance. Although the phone is neither 3G nor Wi-Fi capable, it is by far the best of its kind and undisputedly an entry level to PDA phones.

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(23 votes, average: 4.04 out of 5)
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Let’s face it, Photoshop is still a mystery for many of us, and others can’t even understand how to draw properly in MSPaint. Thus, making beautiful graphics for a website can be a painstaking ordeal for many people. However, thanks to sites like PinkandBlueDesign.com, everyone can now own professional looking websites.

Pink and Blue Design is a site that has been around since 2005, and sells Web templates and logos, according to the site, they “make the internet a prettier place”, which is quite true. They have an amazingly huge (and when I say huge, I really mean HUGE) collection of web templates, logo templates, flash templates and even flash intros, all of which are extremely attractive and look very professional. Prices for these templates range from roughly 50 to 70 USD, and they are definitely worth your money. Also, artists are able to sell any templates they have made to pink and blue designs, receiving money in return. Thus, as one is able to both buy and sell templates at pink and blue design, it really is a one stop shop for both designers and clients.

This site is also one of the first few sites out there that are selling Web 2.0 style templates. For those of you that don’t know, it essentially means that all the templates look hip and modern, instead of looking as if it were designed 10 years ago. This means no boring old single colour background with words on it, rather all the templates you’ll find here will fit right into the Web 2.0 look.

Pink and Blue Design has hired dozens of artists, which has resulted in a plethora of different styles of templates. Some are bright and light-hearted, others are darker and look more serious. If you prefer the style of a specific author, you can easily browse through all of his or her work. The templates are also organised under different categories, allowing one to quickly find his or her desired style. There’s absolutely no doubt that it will be easy for everyone to find their favourite template on this site.

However, pinkandblue design’s services don’t just stop at selling web templates, it operates a highly skilled web design and search engine optimisation service, and offers a variety of hosting solutions to transform your website into an online application with maximum functionality. All that, coupled with the fact that they offer live customer support 24/7, only makes this site look all the more attractive.

There are many sites out there that still look as if they were designed more than 10 years ago when the internet first started out, and many of them probably were created more than 10 years ago and were never updated again. However, for owners of new sites that require a fresh and attractive front, PinkandBlueDesign.com is definitely a site you should check out.

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(3 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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I’m sure everyone would love to work from home, unfortunately few of us actually get that opportunity to do so. However, thanks to Click99.net, now anyone who can write and knows how to surf the web can earn money from the comforts of their own home.

Click99.net is a relatively new service that allows anyone to work from home, basically all you have to do is write a review about a specific topic as requested by an advertiser, post it on your blog, and then get paid. It’s that simple. The amount of money you earn is stated within the job offer itself and varies from one offer to another. The best thing that struck me is Click99 will pay you in Euro or Pound Sterling. Payment is sent out by Paypal or check on a monthly basis and you are required to have a minimum of 30 Euros before they issue payment. Of course not every single person can start writing and earning money right away, blogs have to be approved by Click99 before a blogger is allowed to write for it. However, once that’s done with, earning money is a breeze as long as your post is approved by the advertiser themselves.

The great thing about this is that both advertisers and bloggers reap benefits. Advertisers benefit from the global, online community whereby people work together from home, therefore they have an extremely large pool of bloggers to choose from. Bloggers meanwhile are able to gain profit simply by writing the requested review.

Of course there are many other similar services out there that pay people to write reviews on their blogs, but Click99 trumps a lot of them because of one major feature: it is a 2-way service. What do I mean by this? Well for other services, the only way bloggers can get jobs is when they are approached by advertisers to write a review, there’s no way for them to go out there, apply for a job and get accepted immediately like Click99 do. Some of them even require bloggers to place a bid on a job and wait for approval, and most of the time bloggers get rejection. That means that at times, a blogger might have to keep on waiting until somebody comes knocking on their door before they can start earning money. However at Click99, jobs are posted on the website itself, and any blogger can scroll through the jobs available, choose a job that they’d like to do, write the review, and then get paid. This is so much easier as bloggers can actively seek out new jobs instead of having to wait for and email that might never come.

Sure, the overall concept of Click99.net is nothing new, but the fact that bloggers need not wait to get jobs should be a great incentive for many bloggers to register with Click99 instead of with other similar services. For bloggers who want to earn money from writing, this is definitely a site you all should check out.

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(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
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