Search: “sti”

I just got an email from 23HQ (previously 23people). They have moved out of the beta stage and are upgrading all existing users to a free 2 year plus subscription. 23HQ is like flickr except not as crowded. I personally use it to put my favorite photos on and I also love the fact that my username is “mark” there. You can check out my favorite pictures by going to 23hq.com/mark

I got my new sneakers today from Aramex. I ordered them from Amazon since I can’t find the DCSHOE’s brand in Kuwait. I only wear DC’s, they are the most durable sneakers I have found and combined with my brother we have tried everything from DVS’s to Vans and DC’s always outlasted them all. I don’t skateboard (my brother does) but I only buy skateboarding shoes since they look really cool and they are built to withstand some of the harshest treatment.

My new sneakers are from the new DCSHOE’s Danny Way signature series. They fucking rock. Here are some technical features:

Super Suede
50% more durable, lasts longer, feels like regular suede

DGT Dynamic Grip Technology
DGT is engineered around the fact that each part of a skate shoe’s sole does different things, and wears out at different rates. With DGT, there’s soft rubber for control on ollies and flips. There’s medium rubber for grip and traction. Finally, there’s a tougher, thicker rubber for durability where it’s needed most.

Airbag
DC’s high performance skate shoes have a thermoplastic urethane airbag to provide cushioning in either the forefoot or heel area

Performolite Polyurethane
DC developed its very own exclusive composition of polyurethane and dubbed it Performolite. It’s softer and much lighter then standard polyurethane.

For more info on DCSHOE’s check their website [Link]

Thanks to Purg for the link to this site with famous Lebanese. Here are some interesting ones I didn’t know about:

Nicolas Hayek, creator of Swatch and savior of the Swiss watch industry.
Marisa Tomei, winner of Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in “My Cousin Vinny”
Frank Zappa, rock legend
Yasmine Bleeth, starred in “Baywatch” and “Nash Bridges”
G.E. Smith, guitarist and “Saturday Night Live’s” bandleader for many years (Smith is the translation of is family’s Lebanese name, Haddad)
Kathy Najimy, award-winning comic actress, the fun-loving nun in the “Sister Act” films and co-star of Kirstie Alley as Olive in “Veronica’s Closet”.
Tom Shadyac, director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective(1994), The Nutty Professor (1996), Liar Liar (1997), Patch Adams(1998), Dragonfly (2002) and Bruce Almighty (2003)
Ned Mansour, president of Mattel, Inc.
Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s

Here is the full list. [Link]

Update: Here is another list from a more reliable source. [Link]
Update 2: Wendie Malick is of Irish and Lebanese heritage. She plays Nina Van Horn on NBC’s hit show Just Shoot Me. [Link]

I love the way how Wired always give credit to Tony Fadell for the creation of the iPod. Majority of other media outlets usually make Steve Jobs the star. [Link]

A friend of mine is selling his 2GB black nano for KD70. Its not brand new, it has been slightly used for 1 week with the plastic cover still on so no scratches or anything. If interested leave a comment below.

The Skeleton Key
I watched two movies again yesterday. Seems this 2 movie a day thing will continue till the end of Ramadan. The first movie I watched was The Business and the second movie was The Skeleton Key. I will start talking about The Skeleton Key first since it was the crappiest of the two. The movie was just not scary enough. I mean the name of the movie is actually scarier then the actual movie. Here is the movies plot summary from IMDB:

A young woman helping care for an invalid in New Orleans finds herself caught in the middle of morbid going-ons centered around a group of Hoodoo (Not Voodoo, it’s different. Hoodoo is an old African American magic that only works if you believe in it.) practitioners.

The movie starts off slow and as I said it wasn’t scary at all. The ending of the movie was the best part but to get to the ending you have to sit through the whole movie which isn’t worth it. So if you want me to save two hours of your life and tell you what happens in the end just send me an email.

The Business
The other movie I watched, The Business, now thats a cool movie. I wasn’t expecting it to be any good since I hadn’t heard of the director nor the actors but decided to take the plunge and watch it. Here is the plot summary:

Set in the Thatcher era with the cool sounds of the 80’s, THE BUSINESS is an action packed gangster flick set in Spain’s sun drenched Costa Del crime. Frankie (Danny Dyer), is on the run from the high-rise’s of South London to a new life in Malaga with nothing but a tin stuffed full of cash. Having no idea that this delivery of cash to super-suave playboy and ex-con, Charlie (Tamer Hassan), will change his life forever, he soon becomes one of the gang, and finds himself drawn into a flamboyant and violent world of organized crime.

The first thing that grabbed my attention in the movie was the cinematography. Every shot in the first 30 minutes of the movie was just gorgeous. The colors, the angles the situations, it starts off as a very beautiful artsy movie but then after 30 minutes the movie starts looking normal. I don’t know if they were pushed with time or something but the first 30 minutes looks allot different then the rest of the movie. The story is pretty cool, the movie never felt slow or boring, there was no nudity or excess violence yet the movie was still entertaining to watch and by the time you get to the end of movie you get really attached to the main characters. So between these two movies I watched, I would definitely recommend The Business.

Via Kottke, here is a link to pictures on flickr taken by putting the camera in long exposure mode and then tossing it up in the air. [Link]

Daring Fireball has posted some interesting observations from yesterdays Apple event. The most interesting ones to me are:

– The new iPods do not support FireWire
– The itunes video downloads are low-res 320×240
– Video playback battery life sucks. 2hrs for 30gb, 3hrs for 60

Here is the full list. [Link]

One thing I would like to add here. When I got my first iPod it came with a case, remote control and a power adapter. The new iPods don’t come with either and that really sucks.

I don’t know if I will be posting much this weekend so here are some links to keep you busy:

https://del.icio.us/popular/
https://waxy.org/links/
https://kottke.org/remainder/
https://engadget.com/
https://metafilter.com/
https://feeds.mark248am1.wpenginepowered.com/

Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids
I watched one and a half movies yesterday. I started watching Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids but I got bored 30 minutes into it and left to go have lunch. I knew it was going to be a documentary but I didn’t think they literally meant a documentary. Plus there was no nudity and all they were focusing around were these young kids growing up to in the brothels were their mothers work. Pretty boring stuff, would rather it have been a movie about the prostitutes themselves and not the kids or atleast I was expecting them to focus more on the prostitution part. The first 30 minutes I watched was about how they were teaching the kids to use the camera and take pictures!

Happy Endings
The second movie I watched was called Happy Endings. I really liked this movie a lot and I think its my favorite Tom Arnold movie ever. I really like Tom Arnold but in most of the movies he is just too silly so it was a good change to watch him take a serious role. It really suites him a lot. I won’t summarize the story in the movie since the movie is actually made up of many little stories that all interweave, kinda like Magnolia just not as hardcore. I actually had the movie for a couple of days now but I kept putting off watching it because I figured I would hate the movie because Lisa Kudrow acts in it. I really hate her, she is really annoying on Friends and I wouldn’t have been able to stand her for 2 hours in a movie. Luckily shes a completely different person in this movie, she’s allot more mature, quieter, not as high pitched and darker. I think this is probably one of her best movie roles also. Oh and Will’s cop boyfriend from the show Will & Grace is also in this movie which is pretty cool. So anyway, from the recent movies I’ve watched, this is one of the top 3. Its a happy movie with many happy endings that will put you in a happy state of mind.

The Bourne Supremacy
Once again I was able to watch two movies yesterday. The first movie I watched was The Bourne Supremacy. It was very forgetful and I think it would be a waste of my time to talk about it allot. I don’t know how the movie scored a 7.4 on IMDB. It was better then Be Cool and Kicking & Screaming but not better then the second movie I watched, The Village.

The Village
Two days ago McArabian suggested I should watch the movie The Village starring Joaquin Phoenix. So I downloaded it and watched it last night and it was a really good movie. It’s not one of the best movies I’ve watched this year but not every movie has to be the best movie ever to be good. Here is the plot summary from IMDB:

In a quiet, isolated village in olde Pennsylvania, there lies a pact between the people of the village and the creatures who reside in the surrounding woods: the townspeople do not enter the woods, and the creatures do not enter the village. The pact stays true for many years, but when Lucius Hunt seeks medical supplies from the towns beyond the wood, the pact is challenged. Animal carcasses, devoid of fur, begin to appear around the village, causing the council of elders to fear for the safety of the village, the pact, and so much more.

So the movie starts off very quiet and “normal” but by the time you get to the last 30 minutes everything changes, you just sit there and go no fucking way, no fucking way. I like movies who can do that to me. McArabian was also right when she said that The Village is a good Phoenix movie. Since I watched Ladder 49 and now this, my views on Joaquin Phoenix have changed a lot and all for the better. Adrien Brody and Sigourney Weaver also star in this movie. I personally think she should stick to fighting aliens, it doesn’t suit her to be an old mother in a village. So if you readers can watch this movie I would definitely recommend it.

Two pictures of the same street, one from 1991 and one from 2005. It’s amazing how fast Dubai grew, I have seen pictures of Kuwait from 1983 and the places still look the same today! [Link]

[via]

Kicking & Screaming
I am a big fan of Will Ferrell, so when I heard about his new movie Kicking & Screaming I had to get it. Once I read the plot line of the movie though, I had a feeling this was more of a kiddie movie not an adult movie. According to the plot summary on IMDB “Family man Phil Weston (Will Ferrel), a lifelong victim of his father’s competitive nature, takes on the coaching duties of a kids’ soccer team, and soon finds that he’s also taking on his father’s dysfunctional way of relating…” Reading that I was a bit reluctant to watch the movie but since it starred Will Ferrell I decided to watch it yesterday afternoon. The movie didn’t turn out to be THAT bad, there are some hilarious scenes in it, but the movie is really made for kids so there are a lot of silly jokes and cute little kids doing stupid facial expressions. This is nothing like Old School basically, nothing like it.

Unleashed (Danny the Dog)
Second movie I watched last night was Unleashed (Danny the Dog) starring Jet Li. I was expecting this movie to basically be a beat-em-up but it turned out to actually have a story. This is the plot summary from IMDB “A man (Jet Li) raised into behaving like a dog, escapes from his captor to start a new life, who seeks to reclaim him because of his unnatural martial arts skills that are triggered when unleashed.” I really liked the cinematography of the movie so no matter how lame the story was it still looked good. The way Jet Li acts like a dog in the movie was pretty stupid. I hate it when people act like animals and this time it was no exception. The soundtrack which was composed by Massive Attack is also very forgetfully so not much was going for this movie. Now I am not saying it was boring or as bad as Be Cool, because its not. The movie was just not special, the fight scenes were regular and nothing different and the story was stupid. I didn’t enjoy it that much and I would have rather watched something else.

Be Cool
My streak of good movies ended yesterday after watching Be Cool. Although the movie features a lot of celebrities including John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, The Rock, Danny DeVito, James Wood and Steven Tyler, the movie was still boring and slow. John Travolta plays the part of a successful movie actor who wants to get out of the movie business and decides to go into the music industry where he ends up getting into trouble with the Russian mafia and a competing music company. The coolest person in the whole movie was surprisingly The Rock who played the role of a gay bodyguard who wants to become a movie actor. I swear if it wasn’t for him I would have turned the movie off after the first 30 minutes.

Ladder 49
The second movie I watched yesterday was Ladder 49 which also starred John Travolta. This movie was a lot better then Be Cool and a lot more exciting. The movie is about a rookie firefighter who joins John Travolta’s fire station and matures to become a seasoned veteran. The firefighter who is played by Joaquin Phoenix gets married, has two kids and then reaches a point where he has to choose between his risky job which he loves or taking a desk job which would make his family a lot happier. The last good firefighting movie I watched was Backdraft but that was ages ago so it was good to watch another one. I usually hate Joaquin Phoenix in movies since he usually plays the role of a dickhead but he was pretty cool in this movie and John Travolta’s acting compared to Be Cool is wayyyyyyyy better. It really doesn’t suite John Travolta being a tough guy, maybe it worked in Pulp Fiction but it wasn’t working in Be Cool. I got a lot more movies still to watch and hopefully I won’t have another Be Cool.

The new NHL season just started after the cancellation of last years season. This time they are back with a new look and a new set of rules. To learn more about the new rules check this link. [Link]

Update: I just realized I haven’t watched Hockey since like 1994. Back then the Toronto Maple Leafs were my favorite team and they had Matt Sundin, Doug Gilmour, Felix Potvin and Dave Andreychuk. Now none of my favorite players are still with the Leafs, sucks.