Category: Personal

Last month I purchased an old 300mhz Apple clamshell iBook. It had 32MB of RAM and was running OS 9.2 slowly. So I ordered a Kingston 256MB RAM stick for my iBook and it arrived earlier in the week. The first thing I did once I installed it was to replace OS 9.2 with Linux. The reason simply was I needed to be able to browse on the iBook and Firefox wasn’t available for OS 9.2 and I had heard OS X would run very slow on my Mac. So Linux was my only option and after over 1 hour of installing the OS I tried it out and was very disappointed. Although it was very responsive and it did have Firefox, I wasn’t very comfortable using it and I decided to give OS X a shot. If OS X turned out to be very slow then I would come back to Linux as my last option.

I formated the drives and proceeded to install Panther (OS 10.3) onto my ibook. Installation was brisk and in less then 30 minutes it was done installing and rebooting. When the OS launched again I played around with it a bit and I was shocked. Panther was pretty responsive and very very usable. It was not slow, there was no lag and I wasn’t even bothered by the 800×600 screen resolution. I was simply amazed at how well everything was running. I quickly copied Firefox and Adium from my main mac at home and proceeded to set things up importing my bookmarks and setting up my system preferences, everything ran extremely smooth and I even managed to install OS 9.2 in case I ever needed it.

After a week of using my iBook it has finally become my main Internet browsing portal. I am getting online from my living room while watching TV and I am really enjoying it. Sure I could be surfing from the living room with Nat’s powerbook but its not mine and even when I setup my own account on her powerbook it still always felt as if I was using HER powerbook. My previous Internet portal in the living room was my Audrey and I think I will have to find another place for it (maybe the bathroom) since because of my iBook I am no longer using it. This iBook is mine and I feel right at home with it… until the next generation of iBooks get released. So far its great and I even am posting from it right now. So in conclusion a Mac capable of running OSX smoothly cost me KD25 ($85) for the iBook and KD12 ($40) for the RAM. Unbelievable fucking cheap!

I finally got my Holga camera yesterday and it feels as cheap as I was expecting it to be. For a $20 medium format camera I wasn’t expecting it to be anything more. My Holga is a 120N which is the latest version of the Holga and has a number of features and improvements over the older 120S . Bulb mode and two aperture settings, sunny and cloudy (f11 and f8) are the most important new features for me. The packaging it arrived in was equally as cheap which was very fitting. The whole camera feels like a Burger King kids meal giveaway. Once I got the camera I went and purchased black & white medium format film. It cost me 750fils (like $2.5) and I can take 12 shots with it if I shoot my pictures in 6x6cm format or 16 shots if I shoot at 6×4.5cm. I chose black & white randomly just to see how the outcome would be. I started taking pictures today and once I have them developed I will post the pictures here. For now you can check out pictures of the camera below.

Holga Front Shot
Holga Back Shot
Holga Box
Holga with iPod Video

When I pre-ordered my iPod Video I also looked around for a case for my iPod. From the start I decided I wasn’t going to get a case where I would have to keep my iPod in it the whole time. I wanted to enjoy the sleek iPod in my hands and not via some case. I also didn’t want to get an iSkin since although it would allow me to keep the iPod scratch free it completely destroys the iPods sleek look and feel. I also had one for my original iPod and I hated it. In the end I decided I would get an iPod sleeve. The sleeve would protect my iPod while I carried it in my bag or pocket but when I wanted to use it I could take out the iPod from it. I searched around for various sleeves and in the end if settled for the foofpod.

The foofshop has a whole lot of different materials for the sleeves but in the end I decided to go with the Red Fire Engine (vibrant corduroy). Since my iPod was going to be black I figured red would look good with it and I was right, it does. I got the foof before my iPod so when my iPod arrived I quickly shoved it into the foof and it was a perfect fit. My iPod felt really safe and at home in the foof. The foof also quickly grabbed the attention of my employees at work since it really doesn’t look like your average everyday case. Overall I am very satisfied and it only cost me around $15 for something that was handmade all the way in Australia, pretty cool.

Click here for more pictures of my iPod with my foof
Click here for the foofshop

Choosing the right headphone is very difficult. I have never used the iPod ear buds because they suck really bad, instead I have used my iPods with the following: Technics DJ1200, Bang & Olufsen A8’s and the Shure E2’s. The Technics made my ears sweat and they hurt after long use. The B&O A8’s sounded terrible with a complete lack of low frequency response (ie no bass). The Shure E2’s are the best earphones I have owned so far. They are canal phones which basically means you stick them deep inside your ear. They provided excellent sound quality and provide amazing isolation from the outside world. If you have them on with music playing at a decent volume you won’t be able to hear anything around you. I once made Nat scream at the top of her lungs right in my face with my E2’s on and I didn’t hear her at all. The downside though is they take like a minute to put on and in a working environment with lots of interruptions, they weren’t practical at all.

So since I ordered my new iPod Video, I wanted to order new headphones. I did allot of research and I finally brought down my options to two headphones, The Grado SR60’s and the Sennheiser PX100. Both are open air speakers which means my neighbors would hear what I was listening to but that wasn’t a concern. What I was looking for was good sound, portability, comfort and practicality. The Grado SR60’s are one of the best quality headphones you could buy and for their price ($69) they are a steal. Many audiophiles compare their quality to much more expensive headphones costing hundreds of dollars more. The Grado’s are handmade in Brooklyn and they have a retro look which you will either love or hate. I was about to get them when I realized they didn’t fit the specs I wanted. They were not comfortable, they were not portable and because they came with a really long cable they weren’t very practical. So my only option was the PX100.

I just got my PX100 over an hour ago and here is my first impression. The headphone case is amazing, the PX100 fold down to a very compact size and which you can then shove into this cool plastic case it came with. Sound wise they sound really good at the moment with very decent bass and very clear highs and mids. According to forums the sound will also get better once I break the headphones in over the weekend with a continuous 48 hours of non stop music playing through them (to help speed up the break-in period). The cable length is perfect and so far the headphones are very comfortable, so comfortable that I can’t actually feel them on my head! The downside of the PX100 so far is that it looks pretty cheap, but that’s expected since it cost me only $49. So far I really like them, once I get my iPod on Saturday and I finish breaking in the headphones I will post another better review so check back.

Update: I have had my PX100 on for 3 hours now and I had totally forgot they were on until I just tried to scratch my head. My neighbor can hear the music I am listening to but I made a deal with her, she now can play music through her computer speakers if she wants to while I am listening to my headphones, that way I don’t bother her.

There is a bakala I visit frequently since its located under my office. His pricing is weird though and I don’t know what to do about it. I usually take a large bottle of water and a bar of Twix. The problem is he sometimes charges me 300fils for the 2 items which is the regular price, but sometimes he also charges me 250fils which is a discounted price. Today though when I got the stuff he wanted to charge me 350fils until I asked him if they had increased the prices and then he was like oh yeah sorry here is your 50fils back. Its really weird, its never consistent.

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