Category: Personal

I have been wanting to shoot with medium format film for like forever but I was never able to because the camera I wanted was too expensive. I wanted the Hasselblad 503CW which costs around KD1000 in Kuwait (like $3000) which is too much to pay for something I might end up not using that much. Even a second hand older Hasselblad 501 cost hundreds of dollars on eBay. So I put my dream of shooting 6×6 pictures aside until I found out about the Holga. The Holga I believe is the cheapest medium format camera you can buy, It is very cheaply built and takes 6×4.5cm or 6x6cm shots. The lens is made from cheap plastic the same way the whole camera body is also made of cheap plastic. There are also not allot of options on the camera either, it has a fixed shutter speed and a fixed aperture, the only thing you can control is the focus and even that has only 4 options. So how much does this camera cost? Believe it or not only $19 without flash and $29 with flash. Thats like super cheap. Now the coolest part of the Holga camera is the pictures. Because of the way the camera is cheaply built the effects you get on the pictures are amazing, they look like pictures that were shot by your parents back when Madonna was still a virgin and Michael Jackson still black. I already ordered mine from Amazon without flash of course since I don’t think I have ever used flash. Once I get it I will take a couple of pictures and post them on this site. Until then here are two galleries of pictures taken by the Holga camera.

Gallery 1 (Colored Shots)
Gallery 2 (Black & White Shots)

Click here to check out the Holga on Amazon

I watched the horror movie Shutter the other day. It was my first Thai movie I had ever watched and it left me impressed. I don’t know why I keep watching these horror flicks, they freak the hell out of me, seriously.

Shutter is about this guy and girl who run over a girl one night while they were driving back home and then they leave her to die in the middle of the road. The guy and girl are both photographers and so the girl starts haunting them in their pictures. They start finding weird shadows and ghost like forms in all the pictures they take which start to freak them out. If that wasn’t enough they start seeing the dead girl in real life. It was a really freaky movie with allot of creative moments which I had never seen before in any other horror movie.

This movie also convinced me to make my own horror movie except mine will be realistic. In my movie when you see a dead girl come out of your sink in your photography dark room, you run away and you never step foot into that dark room again! Seriously I can barely watch scenes like this while the people in the movie seem to find it freaky for 5 minutes and then act like it never happened. There was one really cool scene in the movie where the guy would be sleeping and then wakes up to find someone at the end of the bed is slowly pulling away the cover, he looks down and sees the dead girl! I told Nat that was pretty cool and I might try it on her one day, she told me if I did it would also be the last day I see her! No sense of humor at all..

I don’t know how easy it is to find this movie in Kuwait and its also not available on Amazon but you could download it the way I did via torrentspy. Its a great horror flick with a really cool ending, something thats just really fucking freaky and just goes to show how creative this horror really is.

I started work again today. The time off was really good but for some reason it also feels good and relaxing being back at work.

Owner Of A Lonely Heart – Yes
Run To You – Bryan Adams
Voyage voyage – Desireless
Self Control – Laura Branigan
Thriller – Michael Jackson
Bette Davis Eyes – Kim Carnes
Maria Magdalena – Sandra
Touch Me – Samantha Fox
In The Heat Of The Night – Sandra
Missing You – John Waite
Stranglers – Golden Brown
Broken Wings – Mr. Mister
Rock You Like A Hurricane – Scorpions
Who Are You – The Who

Two years ago I purchased two PowerMacs and two 21inch Sony Monitors from my previous agency. I gave the newer Quicksilver PowerMac to my brother and I kept the older Graphite PowerMac for myself. When it came to the monitors, I gave the older Sony G500 to my brother and kept the newer G520 for myself. Come back to the present day, my Sony monitor is fucked. There are a couple of white horizontal lines that show up on dark areas of an image which makes things really annoying, plus there was a sharpness issue, I couldn’t read small type on websites anymore and especially if they were grey. When my brother moved to Lebanon for university he kept his Sony monitor at my parents place, so I decided to go get it and try it on my Mac to see if it was any better. Wow what a difference, after installing my brothers monitor I realized how fucked mine was. The colors are more vibrant now, the text is wayyy sharper and when there is a dark image on the screen I don’t see any horizontal lines! I can’t believe I spent all this time working with such a messed up screen. I feel like my Mac is reborn again, cool shit.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
A beautiful story that was somehow ruined by Tim Burton. The movie was dark and not as colorful as it should have been. There should have been more exploration in the factory. Too much time wasted on getting to know Charlies family. Even more time was wasted on Wonka’s flashbacks to his past and him making good with his father. Movie ruined even more with the Tim Burton signature direction.

Wedding Crashers
Funniest movie since Old School. Vince Vaughn is fucking hilarious and I think he is a better match with Jennifer Aniston then Brad Pitt was. Owen Wilson, Christopher Walken and Will Ferell also were great. The story was original and it was really fun to watch. The coolest thing is the movie is 2 hours long!

Me and You and Everyone We Know
Really good movie. All the characters were really interesting. Most memorable quote.. “You poop into my butt hole and I poop into your butt hole… back and forth… forever.” Nat didn’t like the movie, said it was pointless, she didn’t like The Station Agent either though.. ))<>((

I am too busy today.

I have time off from Thursday 3rd of November till Sunday 6th of November due to Eid Al-Fitr. Our office in Saudi Arabia though will be out from tomorrow Wednesday 2nd till the 8th!!

I watched a movie yesterday called Simple Lies. From the minute it started I hated the movie. The first scene involved 2 guys and a girl near a cliff during sunset dancing as if they were listening to rave. For me thats trying too hard to be cool. The whole movie was like that, trying too hard to be cool or trying too hard to be weird or even trying too hard to be cult. The acting was bad, the lines were terrible, the story uninteresting and the ending was stupid. I do not recommend this movie. Simple Lies is Simply Crap.

1. Sony PSP
2. Apple iPod (60GB, video, black)
3. Sling Media Slingbox
4. Sony Ericsson W800i
5. Toshiba Qosmio G25-AV513
6. Archos Gmini 402 (20GB)
7. Nokia N90
8. PalmOne Treo 650
9. Motorola Razr V3
10. Logitech Harmony 880

This top 10 list is crap and was taken from Cnet. I don’t understand them, the Top 10 list includes four phones! Who must have all these 4 phones?? They should decide on 1 phone and have that on the must-have list. Anyway, here is my Top 10 must-have list:

1- Tivo (Philips Series 1)
2- Sony PSP
3- Apple iPod (60GB, video, black)
4- Sony Ericsson K750i
5- Nikon D2x
6- Apple PowerMac Quad 2.5GHZ G5
7- Audemars Piguet Juan Pablo Montoya Chronograph
8- Lamborghini Murcielago
9- Barco Computer Display
10- Shure E4 Earphones

When I first saw the trailer for Dark Water a few months back I joked around saying it looked like a movie about bad plumbing. Well yesterday I watched the movie and believe it or not it IS a movie about bad plumbing! It was a terrible movie on many levels including the fact that it stared Jennifer Connelly who I can’t stand anymore after watching her “ass to ass” in Requiem for a Dream. The movie was very slow with very little happening and the ending was very disappointing. Half way through the movie I got bored and started to play Colin McRae on my PSP.. it was that bad. Even Nataly who loves scary movies found this one lame. The movie is bad and a waste of time, don’t watch it.

I watched a few movies this weekend, this is what I thought of them:

Constantine
Production quality was amazing. Story was boring. I still prefer The Prophecy over it.

Elf
Will Ferrel is very funny but I should have watched this during Christmas. The movie was cute, Nataly didn’t like it, thought it was to kiddish.

Creep
This movie started off great, really freaky and scary. Then 30 minutes before the end it turns into a crappy B movie. I don’t know how they managed to fuck up the movie like that, its very sad. The story took a weird turn and became very stupid.. really pissed me off.

Heights
A very nice movie, no action, no comedy, just a straight forward drama based in New York. The movie ended nicely also.

Kill Bill 2
After watching Kill Bill 2 I don’t understand why they divided the movie into two parts. Part two was pretty uneventful and I am sure they could have easily merged the two movies without losing any key parts. In any case, part 2 was boring, 2 fight scenes against 2 people with maybe 1 liter of blood and thats all.

Mysterious Skin
For some reason I thought this movie was going to be about aliens. It did start off like that but then somehow it turned into a very gay movie. By that I mean it literarily, the movie contained a lot of homosexuality and by the end of the movie you realize you just watched a lot of guy on guy blow jobs. The movie was good though, just be prepared for the gay stuff.

Hot Shots
I remember this movie being really funny when I first watched it in the early 90’s. Its either not as funny now or maybe I lost my sense of humor.

Starting today I am on a new healthy diet.

– No McDonalds
– No Hardees, KFC, Texas Chicken, Burger King etc..
– No Softdrinks even the diet ones
– Subway is allowed (although after my last visit I won’t be going back)
– Gulf Royal Chinese is allowed but not 2 days in a row
– Will start eating more fruits. (I like melon, grapes (with no seeds), bananas and apples)
– Will start drinking chocolate milk every morning
– Anything from Kababji, Sajj House, Mughal Mahal, Great Steak & Potato is allowed
– No chocolate bars for breakfast or when bored at work. Chocolate bars will now be replaced with a handful of natural nuts (not fried)

I was going to try and be a vegeterian but I would end up starving to death since I don’t eat vegetables.

Update: Day 1 and I already broke rule #3, I had a pepsi for lunch. But I decided anyway that a bit of Pepsi is ok, it helps me digest…

The Fog, Elf, RX (Simple Lies), Yes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Constantine, Creep, Dark Water, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Heights, Layer Cake, Me & You and Everyone We Know, Mysterious Skin, Saving Face, Shutter and Straight Into Darkness.

This is going to be one busy weekend.

I hate people in the office who listen to crappy music loud

I hate people in the office who spend all their time downloading movies and MP3’s and hogging up all the bandwidth