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Cool, my post about how cell phones mess up the new ipods made it to engadget. My bandwidth though has hit 1.7GB already and thats from a 200KB file. Sucks. [Link]

Yesterday night I watched Coming to America. I watched it for the first time back in 1989 and really liked it so I figured I would watch it again since I had completely forgotten it.

Anyway the movie wasn’t bad the second time around but the coolest thing about the movie were the very famous actors who played very small roles in the movie because they were nobodys back then. For example it was the first movie Cuba Gooding Jr. acted in. Cuba played the role of a “Boy Getting Haircut”. He was an extra with no talking part or anything! It was really funny watching him in such a crappy role! Second cool actor was Samuel L. Jackson. Coming to America wasn’t his first movie but it was one of his early ones. In the movie Jackson plays the role of a “Hold-Up Man”. Again he didn’t have a name but at least he did have a talking part. Eriq La Salle who plays Dr. Peter Benton on the TV show ER had a major role in the movie playing the part of Daryl, the boyfriend of the chick Eddie Murphy gets a crush on. The final person who isn’t as famous but looked very familiar turned out to be Victoria Dillard (her pic). I checked her out on IMDB and turns out she used to be in the TV show Spin City. In the movie she played the role of a “bather”. She basically was topless in the bath tub bathing Eddie Murphy. Its really weird watching very famous actors act in movies were they were still very unfamous. I guess everyone does start as a nobody.

I just found a 12 page thread in a forum about new upcoming skyscrapers in Kuwait. A guy by the nickname of skoulikimou has 3D rendered images plus phone cam shots of the newest and under construction towers all over Kuwait City. Some interesting stuff, check all the pages. [Link]

Yesterday I posted some highlights, here are more:

– Ferrari F1 car on display
– Ford GT on display
– New Jaguar XK on display
– Audi RS4 on display
– Carrera GT on display
– Mazda RX8 on display
– Audi Q7 SUV on display (hidden in private room)
– Eleanor on display (Gone in 60 Seconds)
– Porsche Cayman on display
– New Subaru Impreza STI (Not for sale)
– Mitsubishi Evolution IX
– Renautl Megane Turbo
– Hummer H3
– BMW M5

If you have an iPod Video and you don’t want to spend time converting your movies to work on the ipod then just download them in the iPod format via torrents. You could try search sites such as torrentspy and thepiratebay for ipod videos but an easier way would be to go to Podtropolis, a 100% pure iPod Video tracker. Its a bit quiet there now since its still new but it should start getting more popular soon. [Link]

Update: Here is more ipodvideotorrents.com and videoipodder.com

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.

Wired has a very cool and informative article on the worst software bugs in history. Some really interesting stuff. [Link]

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 was reading Edjamacated’s post on the discontinuation of the Vanilla Coke drinks. What grabbed my attention was that he mentioned that you would soon find boxes being sold on eBay. Well he is absolutely fucking right and to show you how right he is check this.

Back in 1992 Pepsi introduced a new Pepsi called Crystal and it was supposed to taste like regular Pepsi except it was colorless like 7up. Well it didn’t do very well and the product was discontinued a year later in 1993. Now if you go to eBay and do a search for Crystal Pepsi, 12 years after the product was discontinued, people are still selling bottles of it on eBay! Crazy shit. [Link]

Revolver
I usually like Guy Ritchie’s movies (haven’t watched Swept Away yet) but I didn’t like Revolver. It was very entertaining to watch in some places and Ray Liotta was really good but my problem was that the movie was trying too hard to be weird while I would have rather it tried to look funky.

Straight into Darkness
This was a war movie about two American deserters during World War II. I hadn’t heard of the director Jeff Burr before this movie and I hadn’t heard of any of the actors either. This movie isn’t like Platoon or Apocalypse Now and you won’t be seeing any large military battles between the American and the Germans etc.. There is only one small battle near the end of the movie but I won’t give more details so I don’t ruin the movie. The movie was interesting but nothing spectacular.

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.. ))<>((

First interesting trivia:
Francis Ford Coppola made a commercial for Suntory whiskey with legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa in the 1970s. This event later influenced a salient plot point in his daughter Sofia’s movie, Lost in Translation.

Second interesting trivia:
In the movie Lost in Translation while shooting the whiskey ad in the movie, the director kept telling Bill Murray to make expressions more like Sean Connery. Turns out Sean Connery actually did do whiskey commercials and you can watch them by clicking here.

My friend told me about this place in Kuwait that can pimp out your car by making your doors open vertically instead of horizontally.. like Lamborgini’s. I think he said it costs KD1000 per door or something. So today on my way back home from work I saw this pimped out envoy with the doors open and I took a quick picture.

Oh and earlier tonight I was crossing the traffic light (walking) behind this old Ford Bronco when I saw a sticker on his rear window that said “Don’t Look Inside”, so I looked inside and wow, the guy had the whole interior of the car laid out with speakers on the bottom and the amps all around the inside windows. There were atleast 12 subs and an equal amount of amps all laid out. Really cool shit.

The 10.4.3 Update delivers overall improved reliability and compatibility for Mac OS X v10.4 and is recommended for all users.

It includes fixes for:

– AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS and FTP network file services
– AirPort and Bluetooth wireless access
– Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, and RAW camera support
– disc recording when creating and burning media
– .Mac sync services
– Spotlight indexing and searching
– Dashboard widgets: Dictionary, Flight Tracker, Stickies, and Unit Converter
– Address Book, AppleScript, Automator, Dictionary, Font Book, iCal, iSync, Mail, and Safari applications
– Disk Utility, Keychain Access, Migration Assistant, and Software Update
– compatibility with third party applications and devices
– previous standalone security updates

For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: https://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n301984

For detailed information on Security Updates, please visit this website: https://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798

The coolest update has to be Disk Utility: With Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later, Disk Utility can verify your computer’s startup disk (volume) without requiring you to start up from another volume. This feature is called “Live Verification.” If Disk Utility discovers any issues that require a repair, you will need to start up from your Mac OS X Tiger DVD or CD and use Disk Utility on that disc to make repairs. (You can’t repair your startup volume while your computer is started up from it.)