Ankantoiel's Diary

No responses yet – published on May, 27 2009 at 16:47 under Holiday.

From June, 10 – 13, Alex and I will make a trip to Rome. I guess we will leave Innsbruck in the early Wednesday morning so that we approach Rome in the late afternoon. There we have booked a room in the Pisana Palace hotel a bit outsite of Rome. The ratings for that hotel were OK, not excellent, but good enough for the price of 217€ for three nights in a double room with breakfast. As the hotel is located a bit outside of Rome, I have reservations concerning the timetable of the public transportations, and it is of course Italy, so I fear there may be some problems. But I guess, one can only do the same as all Italian folks and be more patient: Piano, piano!

For the trip I have decided to buy a digital camera. In the last years I have always used the old Canon PowerShot Asomething that Marina and I have bought some 5 years ago for our Finland trip. The camera is still working but has sometimes problems to focus and so on. After getting some opinions and the decision to spent more then 150€ – first I just want to buy a camera for 100 to 150€ – I have bought the Canon Digital IXUS 860 IS.

Currently it’s about 37% off on Amazon.de and so I took the change to get a better Point-and-Shoot camera than I intended to buy. Additionally I have bought a nice leather case to protect it and 4GB SDHC memory. Hopefully the pics will be really better compared with the old Canon. Guess I have to test that in and around Innsbruck.

2 responses so far – published on May, 10 2009 at 17:27 under Hobby, Holiday.

This week we, meaning me and Alex, finally got enough free time and therefore watched two new movies, “Star Trek” and “Duplicity“, in theaters.

Duplicity

Duplicity is the new movie of Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. This is a fast agents-movie with funny debates between both leading characters, but also the co-actors can convince. At no point it is really clear who is playing against whom. The movie tells the story of two top-agents that fall in love with each other and plan to earn 40 Mio. $ for their retirement. A feud between to world-leading companies is the playing-ground for this movie, and some parts of the movie may remember of a big game – very similar to the Ocean’s trilogy.

Star Trek

I was really looking forward to this movie as I was always I big fan – I wouldn’t say Trekkie – of Gene Roddenberry’s TV series Star Trek. Kirk and his crew were my first contact (do you see the wordplay? ) with SciFi, and the following series “Next Generation” and “Deep Space 9” were as loved as the prequel. Only “Voyager” could never convince me.
Now the new Star Trek movie was more than I ever expected. It was not a “classic” Star Trek film. You did not need to know much about the Star Trek-univers. But it was an impressive SciFi movie with great special effects, and with especially deep and understandable characters. Kirk, Spock, Bones (the lovely Karl Urban known as Éomer in Lord of the Rings), Uhura and all the other old characters had a good cast – more often actors known from series than from Hollywood blockbusters – and all in all I was impressed. At no time the movie seemed verbose. It is also to mention that Leonard Nimoy as the “future Spock” had a key role in this movie.

Have fun with the Star Trek widget that allows you to download wallpapers, trailers, buddy icons, etc and a good article about this new movie.