Category: Personal

The weather in Lebanon has been great so far. Its been raining and cloudy and freezing ass cold, today its a lot colder then yesterday. I went and got my rental car, a black Peugot 307. Its pretty cool, in Kuwait my sister has one but it looks ugly, here it looks great. Lebanon does this to cars, it makes them all look great. In Kuwait even if you have a porsche it looks normal, here a Porsche sparkles and shines. Its weird, there are a ton of cars I would love to own here like a VW Golf or a Ford Explorer which I wouldn’t want to own in Kuwait. Oh and guess what.. I haven’t seen a single Mitsubishi Pajero nor a Toyota Prado since I arrived! There is also no sand or dust! I love it here so far.

The picture above is the view from the balcony where I am staying.

I arrived to Lebanon today noon. The flight was amazing, very comfortable, few people on board, great service and best of all I sat in row 4. More details on my Jazeera experience later. I am now trying to find a car to rent, so far I think I am going to get a black Peugot 307 for like $40 a day. The weather is great here, its cold, raining and dark. Nat wants me to get off the web now and not post while I am on vacation but that will not happen. Tonight we are going out to drink and party. I already started drinking during lunch but I was just warming up for tonight.

Note: I am on dialup someone shoot me!

I got a new Eastpak backpack called the Little Beaver. Its from the Breakaway series made specially for traveling. Its made for people who go on short business trips because there is room to put clothes in it. I currently don’t have any clothes in my backpack but I do have the following:

– iPod Video
– Sony PSP
– Shure E2 earphones
– Sennheiser PX100 headphones
– Parker black pen
– Nikon D70
– Holga
– 4 rolls of film
– My eastpak camera bag (yes bag in a bag)
– Power adapters and cables for the ipod and psp
– passports, cash and other documents
– Wired Issue 13.12

For pictures of the bag [click here]
The bag cost me KD32 and I purchased it from Eastpak in Salmiya opposite Marina Mall.
With all the stuff above there is still a ton of room left!

My flight is early tomorrow morning and I haven’t packed yet. I don’t know what I am waiting for, probably the last minute. I didn’t even prepare my “what I need to take” list. I am just sitting here in front of the TV watching an old rerun of American Hotrods (Bluebear still on the show) waiting for Nataly to come home so I can start watching Lost. I am up to episode 18 and things are starting to pick up.

Today is my last day at work before I go on my ten day vacation. Its tradition for me that on the last day at work I start locking up my stuff on the computer. I spend a lot of time on my mac at work and so accumulate a lot of items like bookmarks, files, typefaces etc.. that I don’t want to share with people at the office. The way I lock up my stuff is I create a new account which the computer will log into automatically on boot and then I set the permissions on the folders I don’t want anyone else viewing to “No Access” except for myself. Its not a full proof plan since its easy to reset the password on the Mac but its good enough for my needs. To be safe I also delete all my key chains and clear everything in Firefox.

Here is the latest picture of our puppy Geo which was sent to us by the breeder in Belgium. He is finally starting to look like a dog.

I took the old film I found to get it developed today. Turned out it was empty.

I can’t get the song Hung Up by Madonna out of my head. When I wake up in the morning the song is usually stuck in my head, I am always singing it when I am not paying attention and I am always listening to it on my iPod.

ps: I just realized the only lyrics I know from the song is the one line “Time goes by, so slowly time goes by..” I think I will learn more of the lyrics at least..

update: just got the lyrics click on more to read them

I am traveling on Monday via Jazeera Airways to Beirut. I booked the tickets back in October before Jazeera started its first flight so no one knew how they would turn out to be. So far I have heard a lot of positive reviews on Jazeera. I heard the service is friendly, the planes are very clean, the seats are all leather and the in flight food being great. I also heard one negative review which I believe is just a rumor or urban legend. I heard that a lot of people are getting to the airport and finding their seats canceled. I doubt that is true and the person who told me this never flied with Jazeera. Anyway I will write up a short review once I get to Lebanon and post it online.

I finally figured out what I want for Christmas. It was really hard to find something I wanted but after weeks of searching I found something, the GP2X.

The GP2X is a portable gaming device based on the Linux OS. No games are made for it specifically like the PSP and Gameboy but there are tons of emulators and home brew games that would run on it since its Linux based. The GP2X also plays movies but unlike the iPod Video and PSP the GP2X isn’t picky with video formats and can handle most of them including MPEG, MPEG4, DivX 3.11,4x,5x, XVID and WMV. The device uses SD memory which means I can cheaply get a 2GB card and shove tons of stuff on it.

The device uses 2 regular AA batteries which when watching movies can last up to 6 hours which is 3 times more then the PSP and double that of the iPod video. Whats cool is I can buy a bunch of rechargeable AA’s and when the battery dies just swap them with new ones.

I found the GP2X online for like $179 so its also not expensive. So, I made up my mind, I want a GP2X for Christmas.

[GP2X on Wikipedia]
[GP2X Emulation]
[GP2X Dev Wiki]

Around 2 or 3 years ago I got a really old medium format camera as a birthday gift. I don’t think the camera works or if it does I haven’t figured out how but today I found the camera in my closet and when I was fiddling with it I noticed a hidden compartment. When I opened it up there was a role of exposed film just lying there. I don’t know who its for but I am guessing it belongs to the person who owned the camera previously. I am not an expert in cameras but I think the camera is over 50 years old at least… I think, so if there are any pictures on the film they should be interesting. Tomorrow I am going to take it to have it developed, hopefully I will have something interesting to share with everyone.

I am staying late at work today trying to finish up a campaign thats due to be presented tomorrow. I hate staying late when I am not prepared for it but today I came in and I had my mind set on staying late and its really cool. No one is in the office so I have the window behind me open and my music blasting out loud. I am really taking my time and enjoying what I am working on because I no longer trying to finish up before the end of the day, I now have the whole night to work on this. No one is here to interrupt me, no one is here to tell me to lower my music and no one is fighting. Its so peaceful.

Yesterday we decided to return our hamster his old name Zero after taking it away from him last week. Choosing a name for our dog is really a difficult thing, you don’t want something thats common, you don’t want something you can’t pronounce, you want something with a reason behind it and you want something that works on dogs. Yesterday we finally decided on the name “Geo”. It was the only name both me and Nat agreed upon. We arrived at the name after I suggested we call the dog after the legendary video game console the NeoGeo. Nat then suggest we call it just Geo since she thinks it sounds Italian like Aqua di Geo for example. So I like it because its from a Japanese video game console while she likes it because it sounds Italian, two completely different views on the name but both of us like it. Here are some other names that we couldn’t agree upon:

Dyski (from Grendizer)
Bauer (as in Jack Bauer from the show 24)
Jack (again as in Jack Bauer from 24)
Magnum (from the 80’s show Magnum PI)
Zero (Smashing Pumpkins song)
Magnus (as in Magnus Samuelsson, the world´s strongest man)

According to the breeder we should get the dog around February 4th. We will be paying for the dog in 3 payments, we paid the first payment yesterday, second will be end of the month and the third at the end of January just before they ship the dog. Hopefully we won’t change our mind on the dog again because we need to email the breeder today with the name. I am still hesitant a bit between Geo and Magnum as names but I will be asking around the office and get various peoples reaction on the two before I email the breeder. If anyone has any comments on Geo and Magnum that would be great. The picture above is the latest picture we got from the breeder.

Update: There is one more name which I suggest to Nat yesterday but she didn’t like but a lot of people at the office seem to like, Kouji which is also from Grendizer.

Just got back from the movies. King Kong was 3 fucking hours long!! Peter Jackson must wake up and realize not every movie can be made into a grand adventure like Lord of the Rings. I swear if it was up to him I am sure he would have turned King Kong into a trilogy. The first 1 and half hour of the movie was extremely slow, like super slow and then the ending of the movie kept on dragging on. By the 2 and a half hour mark I was ready kill King Kong myself. This movie could have easily been made into a regular sized 90 minute flick.

On the bright side the effects were the best so far. You will spend the whole movie thinking King Kong is real. His facial expressions, his fur, his movements, there is no way you could tell its a 3D rendering. Also for people who hate insects I warn you there is one scene in the movie that will gross you out, but again the insect graphics were super.

Overall though I would not recommend anyone watching this movie unless they enjoy long, boring and predictable 3 hour films.

I am going down to Beirut next week for a 10 day vacation. I don’t know if I will have Internet access there so I might not be posting anything till I come back.