Godzilla AKA Gojira returns!

Hi there,

I was fortunate enough to be able to catch Godzilla relatively early on in its Malaysian release. 

I chose to experience Godzilla at (GSC) Golden Screen Cinema's (and Malaysia's) one and only Dolby Atmos theatre which is actually Hall 3 in Golden Screen Cinema 1 Utama. 

I paid for the ticket online and simply printed out the selfprint ticket which would allow me through the turnstile. 

QR code at the ready

Below is how the turnstile scans the QR code and subsequently opens up the gates to your chosen (and paid for) cinema experience.

Make sure the QR code is within that scanning window (obscured by the paper) and you're good to go!

 My chosen seat this time around was seat H14. I was fortunate that I arrived just in time before any commercial/trailer had begun (how early is that?!) and there weren't many people. It being the first show on a Thursday probably had something to do with it. :P

I managed to take a photo of the viewpoint from my seat. Here it is:

Methinks this view is pretty decent. What do you think?

The minutes ticked by. It was only then that I realised that I hadn't been early, the show itself was delayed. Oh dear. A fellow audience member (seated a row above me) chatted with his friend. He said there were delays previously, up to half an hour, but I wasn't sure whether he meant this particular Atmos theatre (Hall 3) or just a delay in general in GSC's cinema services. Why wasn't I sure? Because he spoke in a language that I have yet to understand; Cantonese with some English thrown in. Seeing as the movie was not going to start soon, I took out my phone, and started to take some notes regarding my 2nd Atmos experience, just in case I forgot anything later. 

Moments after that, I heard our fellow from a row above change his topic to smartphones. He talked about phones with pretty good specs, like a 5" screen, 13MP camera, but don't expect the build quality of a smartphone that costs thousands of Ringgit. I assumed he was talking about some new, cheaper smartphone emerging in the Malaysian market; perhaps any one of these: 

• Xiaomi's Mi 3 which would be available for purchase from May 20th 2014 at RM889
• Oneplus' One of which I have no details on its Malaysian availability or pricing, sorry!

 It's nice to know that the phone in my hand could generate a conversation elsewhere! Anyway, their conversation, in turn, led me to try benchmarking the data connection in Hall 3 of GSC. Why not? I noticed that the data connection seemed speedy enough. So i ran a Speedtest and the result is below:

It's OK-ish..nothing to shout about I guess

It's decent..in terms of download performance. The ping and upload needs work though. I recall, at least, that a ping > 500ms is synonymous with an unplayable online gaming experience. Am I right? :D

Back to the movie experience! I timed 1208hrs as the time when the first trailer popped up on screen. So we were 8 minutes late already. Which trailer was it? Why, none other than ...

Yup, guess I've got to book my calendar for this too. After 20 minutes of advertisements and a "The Purge" trailer, the famous THX demonstration played. So, this is a THX cinema? Cool. It was followed by 2 (count 'em!) Dolby Atmos demos. I wondered why there were 2. Perhaps they came up with a new one. I liked the newer one better, that's for sure. It seemed to really leverage the 64 speakers in the Hall.

I remember the movie proper started to 'roll' (perhaps once upon a time it rolled, because movies were a series of pictures in a 'can' displayed at a certain speed) at 1228hrs. 

I liked the movie and its presentation. I would say 2D is definitely the way to watch this movie. I've no idea whether 3D has any momentum left in it nowadays. I want to ask GSC/TGV in Malaysia; how are 3D ticket sales going? Are they still selling well? If it's not selling well, what happens to the 3D theatres? Will they be selling off the 3D specs? Are people even buying 3D television sets?

You see, I watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 3D and throughout the movie, I wished I could just watch it in 2D, and that's never a nice feeling to have hang over you whilst watching a movie! As I said in a previous post, I praised Gravity for being an excellent 3D movie. A 3D showcase, if you will. Other than that, I've not been impressed with any 3D movie lately..

Let me share with you one highlight from watching Godzilla. As the character played by Ken Watanabe was introducing Godzilla to the audience, he said on-screen "We call him.." and someone from the audience sportingly and spontaneously cried out "Gojira!" That moment certainly made me laugh! Thanks for livening up the theatre man!

Side by side comparison between maxis 4G and celcom 4G

Dear Readers,

I was fortunate to have bumped into a friend who indulged in my curiosity. I wanted to see how Maxis 4G and Celcom 4G performed in the same place, at the same time. But not on identical devices I'm afraid.

The time: 26th Feb 2014
The place: The Curve

First, here's Celcom 4G results on a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (SM-N9005):

 

Next, we compare that with the Maxis 4G results on a 2013 spec HTC One:

Now, it's by no means representative of the overall performance of each carrier, but at least we have a marker to start with.

 Let me know what all of you think in the comments section :-)

Internet Access at 47300

Hello again,

On a roll here. I didn't recently upgrade to UniFi VIP 10 but I just decided to share the speed test result (obtained from www.speedtest.net ) with all of you:

I would say that the speedtest result is pretty decent, wouldn't you? Kudos to UniFi

That's the reason why I have a hard time giving up UniFi in favour of Maxis' offering. Unless some Maxis users can share their speedtest results and their overall experience with me? Thanks in advance.

My Unifi installation experience

Finally, after Unifi promised me that my area would be covered by Unifi by the end of 2010, they came to install the service. Yes folks, it was a long wait. But let's see, sometimes things are worth waiting for, no?

Below was my chronicle of the installation 'milestones' on Evernote. Do check out Evernote for your note-keeping, checklist making, idea-jotting purposes. Since I don't really have that much time; as you can see, the last time I posted on this blog was in Dec 2010, I am just basically copy pasting from my Evernote, starting below:


The Unifi guys arrived around 1008hrs but it was raining. They discussed how they would proceed with the installation but due to the rain, they said they are unable to proceed as yet. So they opted to wait out the rain in their van. I offered that they could wait it out in the house but they declined. They are both Muslims so I am unable to offer them any food/drink either way.

1022hrs : still waiting but don't hear the rain so much from within the house so maybe they can proceed soon :P

1032hrs: Wow, they started to take down their ladder from the van, looks like they will proceed. Nice~ :D

1042hrs: began routing the black cable (that will go from the point outside the house to along the exterior of the house)

1210hrs: Everything is installed with minimum fuss. But just getting it to work now. They said something about there might be a "mismatch", so waiting to see how they deal with it. :P

1230hrs: The problem was solved by 'cleaning' the fibre optic cable that connects to the modem. They told me to test the internet and it resulted in a very respectable 5.02Mb/s download and 4.89Mb/s upload speed! w00t! Great news indeed. Then I had to test the IPTV and the video did seem to be a bit jerky, though, predictably, he said it would clear up. I've got all the channels on HyppTv on offer for free for 1 month. Will see what I do with this particular service later on.

The phone worked well enough too.

They left shortly after. So all in all, it only took 2 hours' work! Fantastic :D

Proof of the bandwidth obtained, as reported by speedtest:

One of my good friends suggested I do some real world tests like multiplayer gaming and torrenting to justify switching to Unifi. Certainly exciting and useful if we have such data to refer to. Will keep you all posted, thank you for reading!