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Canon PowerShot S3 IS is a new Canon superzoom camera and an upgraded version of its popular predecessor S2 IS. This SLR look-alike camera is complete with a 6.0 Megapixel CCD sensor, 12x optical zoom lens, image stabiliser and all the photographic features a digital camera hobbyist or even a professional photographer would want.

Like most SLR cameras, Canon PowerShot S3 IS looks very professional in an attractive dark grey color. The camera weighs only 410 grams and it is not much larger than an everyday compact although it is not the smallest around. You can wear the camera in its case across your body very comfortably. The well-positioned controls are big and chunky making it easy to reach, especially the flash setting/microphone button on the top.

However, I’m a little dispappointed with the battery life. The PowerShot S3 IS runs on four AA batteries, allowing you to take up to only 110 shots before they need replacing. I got it a set of good quality rechargeable batteries though, so that it will last longer and take far more shots - I don’t wanna miss that once-in-a-lifetime shot. The supplied 16MB SD card is standard but it’s only enough for about 10 photos or less, so you are going to need a high capacity card to go with the camera, 2GB of memory would be ideal.

The camera works well outdoors, indoors and in lowlight. I was especially impressed with the camera’s picture quality and the level of detail produced is impressive although there is some purple fringing. The camera has an astonishing 12x optical zoom lens that produces good quality images by repositioning the lenses. The lens extends and retracts quietly. Images taken with the zoom are of a very high standard but it struggles to focus and look blurred at full zoom, thus, it is definitely not a paparazzi camera. Like most superzoom cameras, PowerShot S3 IS also has an image stabiliser that helps to compensate for any camera shake and ensures a sharp picture.

Apart from that, the camera also has 11 different scene modes to allow you take shots in most conditions. Personally, I enjoy using the sports mode which allows you to shot continuous images. I was able to take five shots in 7.26 seconds. You can also shoot movies using the movie mode at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 and it allows you to take up to 60 minutes or 1GB of footage.

One of my favorite features of the camera is the twisting LCD screen. It can be folded back against the camera when not in use to protect it. For self-portrait enthusiasts, you can also turn the screen right round to take self-portraits.

All in all, Canon PowerShot S3 IS is a value-for-money superzoom camera packed with features and the picture quality is top drawer. I simply can’t come up with anything to put me off this camera. I expected a lot from a top brand such as Canon and PowerShot S3 IS delivers it. The camera didn’t take me long to work out what’s where and made me feel like an expert. It is stylish, comfortable to handle and easy to use; likely to appeal to anyone who wants a good shot.

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Sony Ericsson W880i is the slimmest Walkman phone ever at just 9.4mm thick - the depth of a CD case - and yet it promises to outperform previous Walkman phones. It’s that thin and light you don’t even know it’s in your pocket. Besides its thin form factor, the brushed metal face resists fingerprints, and its soft-touch rubbery backing also provides firm grip - it feels excellent to hold. The Sony Ericsson W880i comes in a beautifully designed casing with a choice of two colors - black or silver.

Sony Ericsson has crammed the W850i’s highlights into its thin frame. The industrial steel-clad W880i has an ultra-crisp 1.8in QVGA screen, a 2MP camera, a 1GB M2 memory stick, and it’ll do 3G browsing and email. The menu interface is intuitively animated and colorful; every feature on the phone shows thoughtfulness in their design.

Thank God, Sony Ericsson W880i uses a 5-way scroll key rather than the irritating joystick used on some of its other phones. The keypad is designed exactly like three big i’s, if you notice. Text addicts may complain about the small and fiddly keypad, but I decided to overlook it. As a matter of fact, the keys, although small to grapple with for fast texting, are very well spaced out and are very responsive; they are easy to operate after a couple of days. The keypad takes a bit of getting used to but it’s still a class act. Perhaps it’s time to grow your nails out?

Besides the primary 2MP camera behind the LCD display, Sony Ericsson W880i also comes with a second lens just beside the earpiece for video calls. My biggest gripe with the W880i is probably its camera. It’s indeed an extremely good camera but it misses a flash and an autofocus. Again, I decided to overlook it as the emphasis in W880i is on music. I can always opt for a digital camera if I want to take a high quality camera, furthermore, who takes pictures at night in a dark environment with their phone anyway?

The built-in speaker is very tinny, but plug in the good quality headphones included and you wouldn’t really notice the difference from a normal mp3 player. Like W850i, the W880i also comes with the TrackID feature that will provide the user with the name of the song, artist and album from a few seconds recording. It’s expected that the Sony Ericsson W880i doesn’t come with an FM radio, who needs an FM radio while you don’t even have time for the 1,000 tracks stored on the supplied 1GB memory card anyway? Yet it may be a disappointment for DRM lovers, as the W880i doesn’t support DRM tracks.

Overall, Sony Ericsson W880i is a stylish music phone that has everything in a combo device, backed by its easy-to-use Walkman 2.0 software, it is destined to be the best iPod Nano alternative around.

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While browsing through the shelves of the library, I came across this book with an eye-catching orange coloured cover: Freakonomics - A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything. At first glance, I initially thought it was just another book about the speculation of economic trends but one thing that eventually attracted me to flip open the book was its front cover, featuring a lime with an apple skin.

The bulk of the content is on how Steven Levitt, a John Bates Clark medal holder (awarded every two years to the best American economists under forty), views certain issues differently as compared to other leading economists. What do you think is the reason behind the drop in crime rates in the USA in the 1980s? Steven Levitt attributes it to the legalisation of abortion, which is the first question that he answers in the book, this therefore creates a certain level of suspense in order to cause readers to continue reading. His opinion is clearly explained, with data to back it up. However, when he aired his opinions to the mass media, he was criticised for his view.

You should not give this book a miss even if you are not an expert with statistics. This book is full of actual incidents, while Levitt gives his own opinion as to why they occurred. Thankfully, the statistics used in this book about economics can be understood, as Levitt and his co-writer have tried to avoid using economic theories and delving deeply into microeconomics because it would be too confusing for most readers with no knowledge of economics at all.

Once you have finished reading this book, you might find the economics is not that hard after all, as Levitt manages to highlight many different aspects of economics and simplifies them till the point where it almost seems like common sense. This book will really enlighten you about certain aspects of economics.

After you have read this book, you’ll think things that comes to you twice, not wanting to follow the “conventional wisdom” as others or professional data and research that comes out from either some experts or the government. Everything will deserve a second look at that time. More research might come out from you and you might take any views into your consideration and argue with your peers sensibly over an issue.

How a name relates to a family’s economic status? Ever wondered why a crack dealer (drugs dealer) wanted to sell cracks and involved in gang violence, risking their lives even the return is low? Is allowing your kids going to a house with a pool or to a home with guns is more dangerous? Which parenting books by all the parenting experts out there is correct? How a sumo wrestler and school teacher cheats? If you have trouble finding this out or maybe the answer you are having now may just be conventional wisdom then check out Freakonomics for some surprising answers!

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First things first, some credentials. I’m not an IT guru. I’m a computer user, not a computer geek. I’ve been using Windows for going on ten years now, and while I’ve been aware that Macs existed, I’ve never really contemplated switching, until now.

What caused the switch wasn’t anything traumatic with my computer; it wasn’t any kind of Steve Jobs reality distortion field, or mind control rays from Apple. It was that I’d looked at what I actually do on a notebook computer, as opposed to all the things I could theoretically do, and I could do them all on a Mac, and the MacBook Pro was a pretty sweet piece of hardware.

First, let’s be honest. None of us are going to be upgrading parts of our laptops. The appeal of a PC is that you can upgrade incrementally; my main desktop machine (now relegated as a gaming platform, rather than a serious workstation) has had parts upgraded on it since I first built it in the late ’90s. I think the floppy drive cable might be the only thing left of the original machine, maybe some screws. You’re not going to do that with a laptop. A laptop, you’ll use for three years, never open the chassis once, and count yourself lucky if you can give it as a hand me down to some cousin before they go off to school.

I just got myself a MacBook Pro 2.2 GHz model with a 17″ screen - I’d been wanting a 17″ screen laptop for a while. I do a lot of writing and remote work with page layout software, so the wide screen is great for having InDesign open and a word processing app or a spreadsheet. The other reason for getting the MacBook pro was that Adobe had just launched their latest versions of the Creative Suite software, all recompiled to work on the Intel processors; since I was going to upgrade anyway, well…

Now, there are lots of gewgaws on the MacBook Pro. The ambient light sensor is pretty sweet. There’s a light sensor (a couple of them, actually) that will automatically adjust the backlighting on your MacBook’s screen to maximize contrast, while minimizing the amount of battery power used. Similarly, there’s a backlight for the keyboard, which I found really annoying at first, but it kind of grows on you.

With the new Intel optimized software, performance is pretty solid. The graphics card is underclocked for heat management (and since MacBooks are passively cooled, that’s kind of important - more on that later), but since there aren’t many games for OS X, that’s not a major issue. (Besides, if I’m going to play a game, I want a bigger monitor, a real mouse and more keyboard space.)

The connection ports are OK. While some people bitch about the lack of a PC card slot, I haven’t used a PC card in a laptop since Clinton was President. I do wish there were more USB ports; I’ve taken to carrying a USB hub in my laptop bag. The Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity are excellent, and Apple has put in some really nice touches - if you plug it into an external monitor, it just works. (In fact, most everything I tried with the MacBook Pro just worked. No configuration, no hassle, no fuss. On the other hand, there wasn’t as much variety of stuff to hook up, but the stuff that was available was very high quality.)

The biggest gripe I have with the MacBook Pro is two fold - the first is that passive cooling. You will roast your legs if you actually use it on your lap. It’s just damned hot on the undercarriage. The second, oddly enough, was OS X, particularly the Dock. The Dock is like the Windows Task Bar, if the Windows Task Bar had been designed by a hyperactive five year old living on pixie sticks. It leaps at you with big flashy animations, which make it hard to actually tell what’s going on; it vanishes on you. Most of the other user interface differences tend to be “different for the sake of being different” in my opinion, though I was pleasantly surprised to be able to ‘right click’ with the touch pad.

Although I already have a Dell Inspiron 640m as reviewed here, overall, I like my MacBook Pro too; it’s a good piece of machinery, but it’s not a cult object of reverence.

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When the first Shrek film arrived a few years ago, it took a half dozen of my friends informing me that it was more than simple children’s fare to get me into the theater. It was a hard sell, but when I got in there, I was pleasantly surprised by the adult natured humor and clever play on the classic fairy tale formula. It was a fun experience and the second film actually managed to improve it, turning the angry ogre and obnoxious donkey into household blanket and lunchbox fodder.

So, when Dreamworks rolled out their third entry in the Shrek series, the eponymously named Shrek The Third, I was excited for yet one more run through Far Far Away and its many genre entrapped residences, flush with pop culture references, slyly disguised adult humor, and a slapstick approach to even the most simple of character interactions.

Unfortunately, I was let down almost immediately. Without giving away too much of the plot of the story (of which there is very little), Shrek and Fiona are staying in Far Far Away because the frog king is ill and Shrek has been called upon to stand in as the King’s son-in-law for a bit. Apparently, Far Far Away is a wee bit sexist as well. Anyways, Shrek doesn’t enjoy this new responsibility and along with the possible arrival of a bouncing baby ogre, and the whiny Justin Timerlake voiced antics of Arty, the young and oft-hated future King Arthur, the journey begins.

First off, the familiar aspects of the film series are almost completely gone. Sure, the characters are all there, and they’re going through the motions. But, with every declaration of “I’m an ogre donkey” Shrek seems to be just a bit too snarky, tossing a smile to the crowd saying, “I’ll make good in the end.” There’s no crass, obnoxious Shrek anymore who just wants to be left alone. This is a boring, family man with a gruff exterior that is no longer funny alongside Donkey’s grown up attitudes, his own children in tow.

The jokes are all stale, with dozens upon dozens of characters thrown out in rapid succession, each one showing off their own basic stereotypes, whether in gender, origin story, or pop culture cliché. Essentially, Shrek The Third doesn’t try a single thing new. What has happened instead is that the series that took such joy in utilizing all of the stereotypes from children’s movies and making fun of those conventions has fallen into the trap of utilizing those very conventions. It’s a problem that unfortunately plagues many children’s films, but is infinitely more disappointing for a film series that at one time did it right.

When mass production and marketing took control of the children’s film market, quality immediately fell. Shrek was a good example of how some directors and writers were unhappy with this freefall in quality. Six years later unfortunately, those very same writers and directors have gone down the path of least resistance and offered up canned cliché schlock that children will eat up because it has pretty colors.

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