Jakob Montrasio

Last sunday was the 'premiere': I had my very first driving lesson in Shanghai's Xuhui district, near Caobao road line one subway station. The license costs me about 4000 kuai and it will take 'at least' 3 months to get it, as the teacher said. No driving this christmas, too bad! Anyways, I had my Nokia N93i with me and decided spontaneously to document this driving…

This is a graphical view on the contents of the ZHU AND GOU DVD that I am currently producing. Regular users of the software will immediately recognize that I am using Apple's DVD Studio Pro to create my wedding movie DVD. Anyway, all the content is created and encoded, the only thing that we are still working on are the subtitles. There will be german, english…

I've been searching a lot around the net lately for a decent shopping system that is PHP/MySQL driven, and the best thing I found was osCommerce - so far. I noticed today that there is a new shopping CMS being developed at Intersprire which is called StoreSuite. The biggest problem is that it isn't finished yet. But from what I can read on their blog, it's…

You've created the Google Sitemaps file with one of the many available Wordpress plugins? You added it to your Google Webmaster Tools account? You added it to your robots.txt file? Good. I did that, too. But all that work, just for Google? Of course, Google is the mighty giant and most important, but now that you have gone through all the hardships creating it, why not…

After buying the Nintendo Wii the weekend before last, we headed back to the store on friday evening where we bought it, near line 2 station Dongchang road. We wanted a second Wii controller all week badly to play Wii Sports: Tennis and other games against each other, and the game store lady told us she would have new ones in last week. And she did!…

I wanted a Xbox 360. But then I saw that the prices for HDTV's didn't drop that much and that we probably weren't going to buy one anytime soon. No HDTV, no Xbox 360 necessary. I don't wanna play Halo 3 on a 21 inch screen TV. Who would? So I thought, this might be a good time to buy something to get rid of all…

I just had left my home to walk to Longyang road to grab a subway to go downtown for lunch with a friend, when a insane rainstorm started. In the last days it had rained here every once in a while, mostly for about 5 minutes. So I thought 'let's wait', which was a big mistake. 3 minutes later I was completely wet, from up to…

Lust, Caution is the new movie from Ang Lee. Most of the story seems to take place in 'occupied Shanghai', so I am guessing in the late 1930's? The story is about a 'ordinary' girl who has to make a dude fall in love with her, then kill him. That bitch! Just kidding, the story seems way more deep than my words could ever describe it... But that's what you would expect from a director who can turn cowboys gay, isn't it? Anyways, there are only very few shots of old Shanghai in the movie, it must be more difficult with each day and every new skyscraper to 'turn back time'. Most of the shots are pretty dark, which is clever, so the removing of the skyscraper-lights gets kinda easy... I know video editing, just believe me. Still, there are some day shots like in the image above. So check out the trailer if you're into Shanghai's history look. The trailer is, of course, available at apple.com in 25 different HD resolutions. Check it out.