Search: “sti”

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

This is an “interesting” review, Jeremy Clarkson (TopGear) reviews Gran Turismo! [Link]

I am going to order an iBook this week and was planning on using my old Waterfield Design Vertigo bag of mine which Nataly is currently using. But I was talking to Nibaq earlier and we were discussing bags and I remembered how fun it was to shop for my last bag iBook bag. This is why I decided my new iBook would deserve a new bag. Nibaq and I both have different requirements when it comes to bags. As he puts it he is “technical” when it comes to bags. Meaning, they must be big, ugly and fit his laptop, 20 cameras, 2 desks, his favorite blankey, half his wardrobe and 2 book shelves. Me on the other hand, I like bags that look good, are compact, simple and barely fit my stuff.

Its like the difference between a 60GB iPod and a 4GB iPod mini. One allows you to carry all your songs with you, while with the other you only carry the songs you need. So basically, I like to be choosy when it comes to deciding what I need to carry with me since this will be more of my everyday bag and not my “I will travel the world and need to take all my stuff with me” bag.

I just started my quest for the ultimate bag today but already I have a qualifier. I first checked the award winning Cargo bag at Waterfield Designs but I found it looking too much like a regular boring laptop bag and it was also overly priced. My second stop was at the Crumpler shop. I previously purchased the Budgie Smuggler for my Nikon D70 but got mixed results. The bag looked really good and was of excellent build quality, one of the best I have ever seen, but, it was a bit too bulky for my needs. I guess this comes with the territory of purchasing stuff online, you can’t try the stuff before you order them. But, the Crumpler bags are great and the companies personality is really down to earth. This is why I now have my eye on The Breakfast Buffet. I am thinking of getting the blue one and its priced nicely at $95. Its small, enough to fit a 12inch iBook and still has enough room to throw in my PSP, iPod, PDA and notebook. So, until I find something better, it seems this will be the bag I will be getting.

At first I thought this movie was a hoax or a spoof but it turns out its real and its a documentary. Its really interesting and funny, its about a group of people who live 2 lives, their real life where they work and have a regular family, and their play life where they are part of a huge army of medieval warriors. Maybe we should setup the same thing here in Kuwait. [Link]

This is Round 3 of the official Halo 2 Summer Frag Fest 2005 hosted by 2:48AM. This week we will have a new commer to our team, Edjamacated Guy who will be joining our side, Team Damen. This week there will also be a 1-on-1 personal grudge match between Fadibou and Ripping Fabric. There game will be best of 3 with a 25 kill limit and it should prove interesting to watch. Here is the roster for this weeks game:

Team Damen (Its German)
Edjamacated Guy
Nibaq
Fadibou
Mark

Team Da Hui
Ozy
Ripping Fabric
Kyon

Date: August 11th, 2005
Time: 6:00PM (+3GMT)
Prize: Winners will receive 2 Shani drinks
Setup: 2 TV’s and 2 Xboxs
Rules: 50 kills, two rounds, two levels, a third round if necessary, no time limit. Random starting weapons. One level chosen by Team Damen, one level chosen by Team Da Hui. If there is a third round, Nat will randomly choose it.

This is really funny, Animal experts in Croatia say a bear has learned how to trick people to let him in by knocking at the door. They believe the 35-stone brown bear probably learned the trick while nudging a door to get it to open. Experts speculate the nudging was mistaken by the owners for knocking and that the bear, pleased by the outcome, repeated the tactic. The Loknar family from Gerovo in western Croatia said the bear had knocked at their door three times and they were now refusing to answer the door. Mum Nevenka Loknar said: “We jumped out the window as he came in through the door and raided the kitchen the first time. “I opened the door and saw him standing there and I didn’t believe my eyes at first, then I ran for it as he walked in as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “Bears are a common thing in the woods around here, but no one has ever heard of a bear that knocks at the door. “The bear is so intelligent it’s incredible. We’ve tried to put up lots of obstacles to stop him coming in, like a wire fence but he still gets through. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew how to use wire cutters.”

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1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to change the world.
3. Put the hours in.
4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job.
8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

Come October 1st I will sign up at the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) website. Its a cool project where people will have 30 days to write a novel. I will sign up in October because thats when they will allow people to actually sign up for the challenge. Then, at midnight, on November 1, I will have to begin writing my novel with everyone else. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel by midnight, on November 30th. 30 days to write a 50,000 word novel. Sounds like an interesting challenge and from now till then I have lots of time to think of something to write about, maybe base my novel on a true to life experience.. will have to see. [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.

This site is crazy, I can’t believe there are actual hardcore fans of the movie Commando. It did bring some nice flashbacks of the movie though, I found this quote which I still remember from the movie:

Matrix: Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last?
Sully: That’s right, Matrix. You did.
Matrix: I lied.

Now I am going to go look for a Cobra fan site.. [Link]

I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Collateral yesterday. I really didn’t like Eternal Sunshine and I don’t understand how it was rated one of the best movies ever on IMDB. The movie just dragged too long and some of it was really cheesy. Collateral on the other hand was a really good movie. Tom Cruise was really great, I think this is one of his best roles ever, it really suited him. Jamie Foxx was also really cool, I still remember him from the days of In Living Color so its hard for me to accept he doesn’t have to be funny all the time, but in general I think he’s aged like some good old wine. He just keeps getting better.

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.

Fadibou sent me a link to an article comparing Vista to Tiger. Whats cool about the article is that it shows how superior Apple’s OS X is. Through out the whole article the writer compares the 2 products and then talks about how Apple does it better and the coolest thing about all this is that Vista is coming out late 2006 while Apple’s OS X has been around since 2001! Microsoft is still playing catchup to Apple, and now that Apple is going to be using Intel chips, Macs will be cheaper and their market share will grow. Next year is going to be a great year for Apple. [Link]

Is MSN blocked at your office? Still want to be able to get on and chat with friends? This is a solution. Use e-messenger.net to chat via your web browser, but it most probably would be blocked by your company so access e-messenger using a proxy service like Anonymizer, Proxify or installing your own proxy service on your server for free using PHProxy. Go to the url https://mob.e-messenger.net/mobile/ which is a similified version of e-messenger and log in. You should now be able to chat with your friends from your office.

Yesterday night I watched the movie The Machinist which stars Christian Bale (Batman Begins, American Psycho). I am not that big a fan of Christian Bale but he is a cool actor. So anyway when the movie started I spent the first 5 minutes trying to figure out if the actor we were watching was or wasn’t Christian Bale. It was incredible, Bale was like incredibly skinny, like you can see every single bone on his back and chest. Turns out for the movie he went down from 86KG down to 58! The guy is really fucking crazy, he is such an incredible actor for being that dedicated to the part. The movie was also great, there was some suspense at times which I usually hate but overall the movie with the ending was truly something. If you can get a hold of the movie definitely get it. Here is a link with pictures from the movie where you can see how skinny he was. [Link]