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Chaos erupted this morning at the Richmond International Raceway as thousands of people stampeded through the gates in a rush to buy iBook laptop computers for $50 each.

Several people were injured as others trampled them outside a warehouse where the 4-year-old Apple laptops were being sold. None of the injuries appeared to be serious.

Thousands of Henrico County residents waited in a long line as dawn broke; many had come prepared with books, snacks, umbrellas and chairs. The first car arrived at 1:30 a.m. By 6:30 vehicles were backed up on Laburnum Avenue about a half mile to Carolina Avenue.

Even before the gates opened, the atmosphere turned surly, with people yelling at police officers who were trying to keep the crowd civil.

The gates opened at 6:54 a.m., and the stampede — literally — was on.

[Link 1] [Link 2]

1. A rat can last longer without water than a camel.

2. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.

3. The dot over the letter “i” is called a tittle.

4. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.

5. A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.

6. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

7. Bats always turn left when exiting a cave!

8. During the chariot scene in “Ben Hur,” a small red car can be seen in the distance (and Heston’s wearing a watch).

9. On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily!

10. Sherlock Holmes NEVER said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

I am back to work today. Turns out I had food poisoning and thats why I was sick. Only thing I had eaten though on Friday was Fried Calamari and Fish Promodoro from Johnny Carinos and it was amazing. So its hard to imagine food so good put me in a 12 hour puke fest. Anything I drank or ate I puked from Friday evening to Saturday afternoon. Finally Saturday evening I decided to go eat something I knew my body could handle naturally, McDonalds. I went and had a Quarter Pounder Combo with an extra Cheese Burger sandwich and it was really good. Yesterday I also noticed I had red dots on my face around my eyes area, as if I got an allergie from the fish or something, today they are practically all gone so thats good. Now I am back in the office and I am feeling completely normal, I don’t think anyone in the office will believe I was sick yesterday, I think they will all think I just took an extra day off from work since I was enjoying my long weekend. Anyway thanks for the get well soon comments below, now I got to catch up on 3 days of Internet.

Q8car.com has redesigned their website. It now works better on Macs plus they added a Classic Cars section which is pretty cool. The only problem I faced was trying to find the search button, it isn’t highlighted enough. Turns out after you select your car specs click on “Cars Search” link. Thats the search button.. [Link]

An interesting article on how Start.com is a waste of a great domain name. [Link]

While flipping through my old sites I found a colophone dated sometime in the late 90’s. Only thing I still have from all this is the Iomega Zip Drive:

My PC
Intel Pentium III 500MHZ
192MB SDRAM
TEAC 32X CD-Rom
Quantum Fireball 17.0GB Hard Disk
Quantum Fireball 6.4GB Hard Disk
Western Digital 6.4GB Hard Disk
100MB/PS Network card
Adaptec 1450H SCSI card
Creative Labs Sound Blaster 32AWE
Creative Labs Riva TNT2 ULTRA with 32MB RAM
US Robotics 56K internal modem

Output Devices
Hewlet Packard 5L Laser Jet
Hewlet Packard Deskjet 1100C
Epson 600 Colored Printer
Iomega 100 External Zip Drive
Kodak PCD Writer 225
Chuntex Electronics 17inch Monitor

Input Devices
Hewlet Packard ScanJet 6100C
Wacom ArtPADII

Software used:
Windows 98
Adobe Photoshop 5.5
Adobe Illustrator 8
Macromedia Dreamweaver
Notepad
Internet Explorer 5
Netscape Navigator 4.7

Web Space made availabe by:
The unex-t network.

Favorite music listened too during making of page:
Paul Oakenfold, Cygnus_X, Paul Van Dyk, Massive Attack, Dj Misjah, Dj Tim, Liquid Child, Keoki, Carl Cox and Clint Mansell.

Places I went to chill out during the making of page:
Dunkin Donuts, Armand Van Helden concert, McDonalds, One with the mountain, Tam Tam beach.

Favorite movies ever:
Brazil, Ronin, PI, Blade, The Lost Highway, Fearing and Loathing in Las Vegas, CRASH, 2001: Space Odyssey, Monthy Pyton and the Holy Grail, and The Prophecy I & II.

I finally decided it was time to upgrade my aging PowerMac. My Mac at home currently is a Digital Audio Graphite PowerMac with a G4 733mhz processor, 1GB of RAM, 260GB of Hard Disk space, Geforce2 MX and a 8x CD writer. Its a pretty ancient machine but its stable and it has a nice personality. I was stuck between what new Mac to get, I though about getting the soulless PowerMac G5, I have one at work, a Dual 2GHZ G5 and it reminds me of hospitals… it basically lacks character and gives a very sterile feel. Also I would rather wait and get the intel versions that will come out next year. I thought about getting the sleek 20inch iMac but they are very limited when it comes to upgrading. I thought about the 12inch PowerBooks but I dislike them a lot. I have played around and used both my brothers and Nat’s powerbooks and they seem fragile and look PC-ish. The 15inch and 17inch Powerbooks I believe are too big to carry around often and I really also didn’t want my primary Mac to be a laptop.

So, in the end I decided to stick with my current PowerMac except upgrade the hell out of it. I just ordered a Dual G4 1.6ghz chip upgrade from GigaDesigns. I will be upgrading the crappy 8x CD writer to a Pioneer 8x DVD writer (finally will be able to read DVDs on my mac!). I will upgrade the VGA card to an ATI with dual monitor support so I can hookup my extra Sony 17inch monitor to my 21inch Sony monitor I am currently using. I will also get another 160GB hard drive (this brings the total of 4 internal IDE drives, 2 running at ATA66 and 2 at ATA133) since with my recent movie downloads I started running of space. To top things off I will also order a beautiful 12inch Snow White iBook. I had a G3 700mhz iBook a few years ago but it died a tragic death.

This way I will have a total of two Macs. The PowerMac will serve as my primary computer where I will do all my design work on. The iBook will be my secondary computer where I will do all my web browsing on, most probably from the living room. Will take before and after pictures of my PowerMac and posted them here when I am done.

Oh my God I can’t believe how ugly Windows Vista is. I just found a page via SubZeroBlue that has screenshots of the new Windows Vista and I really have to say its even worse then I imagined. Some people have said that Vista borrowed some of the Mac’s interface but I don’t see it, can someone tell me what Microsoft borrowed because if there is anything this ugly on my Mac I can’t find it. Check out the screenshots yourself. [Link]

Nat and I are planning on going to New York for our vacation so I was checking up on hotels so I can reserve us a room but they are just too expensive. $200 a night for a 2 and half star hotel room, I would rather spend that on shopping. So, I have found a better solution, rent an apartment. I was checking Craigs List and there are some really good deals there from people who want to temporarily rent out their apartments. For example one guy was renting out his huge 3 bedroom apartment in a charming old building for only $500 a week. Thats way cheaper then a hotel and you get a lot more. I checked out the pictures of the place and it looks amazing.. just like New York apartments in the movies! [Link]

I had some time to kill last night so me and Nat decided to pass by The Video Club in Salmiya. I used to go there a lot when I was in highschool and buy atleast 1 music tape a week. It used to be the best music shop, they used to get all the cool alternative bands and all the tapes were original. So I passed by yesterday to show Nataly my old favorite music shop but the place at the moment is just a sad story, I don’t know how they fucked up (don’t blame Virgin). On the bright side for us consumers, they have a huge selection of KD1 CDs. I found Pearl Jam’s No Code album (one of my favs) for only KD1 and I found a large collection of Sound Garden’s Down in the upside album also for KD1. Ofcourse there is a lot of crap like Captain Hollywood or Mr President but thats to be expected. I wasn’t able to browse through all the CDs since I didn’t have that much time to kill but I probably will pass by tonight to continue the search.

So I was walking around Muthana Complex during lunch hour thinking about how its such a great place to chill out and relax when I decided to sit down up on the mezzanine floor on one of the benches and play some Lumines on my PSP.

Two minutes into the game and a security guard comes up to me and tells me I can’t sit there. I was like what the fuck are you talking about? He was like the mall is closed you can’t sit here. I was like the mall is open, the doors are open and I just came in earlier had lunch and now I want to chill for 10 minutes before I get back to work. He told me the shops are closed and I can’t sit here but if I want I can sit on another bench on the ground floor. I was like you can’t tell me I can’t sit here but I can sit there, thats bullshit, I am not moving. So he goes and calls the head of the security. The head of security comes and gives me the same bullshit story, but he was polite and explained to me that although its a dumb rule the managers deduct KD5 off them every time there is a problem. I felt sorry for the guy and decided to leave and come back to work.

We walked together down to the ground floor and on the way I asked him why they closed the escalators during lunch hour. I told him its a pain walking up the escalators from Burger King after lunch and many people are always complaining. He then told me that I could actually turn on the escalators with any key and proceeded to show me how. He then started telling me about himself a bit and how he used to work at an offshore oil rig before and how he had to leave because he became too old. He was a nice guy, and now I know how to turn on the escalators so thats going to be fun.

I still have my original diskette of Netscape Navigator 1.0b. I run it every now and then just for the fun of it on one of the PCs around the house. It loads up really quickly but thats about the only advantage. It renders websites terribly and thats if it is able to open them. But, its nice nostalgia and brings back memories of the good old days when the web was a much quieter place. If you are into old browsers there is a site I used to frequent that has an archive of all the web browsers including some rare ones. Was I the only one who never got what Netomat was supposed to be? [Link]

So far in 7 days I have made $20.32 via the Google Adsense program. It doesn’t sound much but at this rate I should be able to make over $1000 a year if my websites don’t get more popular. I have placed the google ads on 248AM.com and Miskan.com but I receive the bulk of visitors on my other older sites. I am thinking of expanding even and placing ads on more of my sites. So far I am impressed with Adsense. [Link]

Since I installed the Xbox Media Center I started downloading movies from the web again. I stopped downloading movies along time ago because it was a pain watching them on my computer. Now with the Xbox Media Center I stream all the movies onto my TV in the living room. I downloaded 7 movies this weekend, Sin City, The Jacket, Monthy Python and the Holy Grail, The Ring Two, Napoleon Dynamite and Anchorman. I only managed to watch 3 movies though.

Sin City turned out to be great. I had totally forgotten how the actual comics were made up of short stories so I was glad to see this got transferred into the movies. Mickey Rourke was the best thing about the movie, I am glad his career is back on track now.

The Jacket was so so. My brother thought it was an amazing movie so I was expecting it to be so, but I found it un-eventual and slow. They could have done so much more with this movie. Adrien Brody is a good actor though, I like him.

Napoleon Dynamite was hilarious. I have never seen such sad looking characters in my whole life, they are the most incredibly dorky and geeky people you could ever meet, and they fucking kicked ass. Pedro is like the man!

Tonight I am probably going to watch Anchorman. I am also downloading the A-Team season 1, hopefully that will turn out to be as good as I remember it.

Overall the quality of the movies were really good, like DVD quality and all were actually DVD rips not in movie recordings. The only downside is that from all the movies I downloaded non of them have Dolby Digital so I am stuck watching all the movies in Stereo mode only.

As some of you may have noticed I placed a Google Ad on the right column of my blog. I also placed some ads on various other sites of mine after I read someone made $10,000 a month from these ads. After placing the Ads on my site yesterday afternoon, today I checked the stats and it seems I made around $1.25. Its nothing close to $10,000 a month but say I make $1.5 per day, in a year thats around $550. Its what I call fun money, little money you make which you can buy gadgets with. Its easy money but I really want to make $10,000 a month.. [Link]