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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.

I watched a Million Dollar Baby last night. It was a really good movie but if I had known the ending was going to be so sad I wouldn’t have watched it. I also understand now why people were saying the title of the movie was so terrible. I also got to watch LA Confidential yesterday. I had watched it when it first came out as a cinema copy video and I remember getting bored half way and turning it off. Yesterday I watched it all over again and I liked it a lot. The coolest part was that the mob boss Mickey was played by Paul Guilfoyle, the police captain on CSI. Speaking of which, the first episode of CSI NY will be on August 22nd on TV Land.

My favorite search engine in the late 90s was HotBot. I even had an @HotBot.com email address until they got taken over by Lycos and all the emails got shut down. So every now and then I check HotBot.com to see if anything has changed and I try the search engine to see if they updated it and the answer was always no. So to my surprise I checked HotBot.com over the weekend and it turns out they finally updated. HotBot now uses Google and AskJeeves for its searches but whats cool about HotBot is you can customize your own start page.. visually. You can have it basically looking anyway you want or you can use some preset themes they have provided for you. You even have a lot of options on how you want to results to be displayed on the page. Its a pretty cool update and I’m going to start using HotBot a lot more often now. [Link]

K sent me a link last week about Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s Mercedes SLK that was fitted with an SLR engine. It seemed a bit like too much BS and it was causing the same BS feelings in various forums. Today K sent me a link with details on this extreme makeover and it turns out this is a real car and it really is an SLK with an SLR engine. Check it out. [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 is a link to a 6 page pamphlet meant as a public service to help educate bloggers about this growing problem of blog depression:

There is a growing epidemic in the cyberworld. a scourge which causes more suffering with each passing day. as blogging has exploded and, under the stewardship of the veterans, the form has matured more and more bloggers are finding themselves disillusioned, dissatisfied, taking long breaks, and in many cases simply closing up shop. this debilitating scourge ebbs and flows but there is hardly a blogger among us who has not felt it’s dark touch. we’re speaking, of course, about blog depression. [Read More]

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]

This can’t be happening, what will happen to the Reebok Pumps?? I hope Adidias doesn’t rebrand all of Reeboks sneakers to Adidias. I really love the Pump Fury’s, would hate it if they became Adidas Pump Furys… [Link]

Wow, this was a surprise! Apple just released a 2 button mouse a minute ago, the MIGHTY MOUSE! AMAZING! [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.

According to Naharnet, “King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has died in a Riyadh hospital, the royal court announced in the Saudi capital on Monday. The statement said Crown Prince Abdullah was immediately proclaimed the new monarch of the world’s largest oil exporting nation.”

How will this effect Kuwait?

If we did this in Kuwait we would probably get shot at. A group of flashmobbers in San Francisco decided to dress up as zombies and terrorize the streets looking for human brains. This link will take you to pictures of the event. [Link]

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]

If anyone is interested in buying my Roomba, please contact me. Its in excellent condition and comes with 2 virtual walls. What is a Rooma? Its a robot vacuum cleaner. Email me or leave a comment below. Asking price is KD50.

Note: Originally purchased for $215 (with virtual wall and taxes, excluding around KD20 shipping to Kuwait).