Thursday, May 29, 2008

The Owl

If you can't see the embedded video click here




The Owl - I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
Director: Emmanuel Ho [link]

2D motion graphics at its best, it is said that this video has been done natively on Adobe After Effects using Illustrator paths only. In other words, it is almost impossible yet this experimental motion graphics director managed to do it.

"Emmanuel Ho studied graphic design in Vancouver, Canada. His current research interests are: Film experiments (visual grammar), experimental editing/montage, and motion experimentation."

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Review | Wasabi


Everybody knows I never take chances when it comes to fill my stomach when I'm hungry, and I don't think I have learned my lesson from my past experience with Japanese food at Maki, so here comes the story closure for ALL Japanese restaurants...

My friends, as always, insisted we try something new and they chose Wasabi. I told them I'm hungry and I really need to eat something good. "Ohhhh you'll eat your chopsticks" they said and so off we went.

When you go there you'll see their cozy environment, nice reception, good service and so many "calming" things which is very good, but the odd side is people just don't know how to mind their own business. They scan every living creature going in and out the restaurant. They stare so bad I though I'm a new inmate in a jail. In other words it's a place to see and be seen.

Now for the food there's no doubt that Japanese food has it's own fans. Their chopped up rolls look delicious you'd never want to touch it, just sit there and watch because once you taste one roll you'd want to stick those chopsticks down a Japanese chef's throat. The only edible dish was the Beef Rolls and still they don't really taste that good either but I guess I was really hungry.

The price wasn't as high as Maki though it still is overpriced for a small roll of ?raw? meat.

And to conclude the Japanese food series we pray...

Thank god for the blessing of Mach-bos,
Thank god for the sweet taste of Ma7shi,
Thank god for hummus and shesh kebabs,
Thank god for the heap bags of rice so our moms cook what's best for us,
And god bless our mothers for not making our traditional food anything close to Japanese food.


*goes to Al-Tabbab*

Thursday, May 22, 2008

VerveEarth




If you are a hardcore blogger you'll love this... Based on Google Maps, VerveEarth is a site that combines ease-of-use and the idea of bringing all online journals/weblogs together, all in one place.

"What is VerveEarth? VerveEarth organizes the world's content by geography. People can explore blog and mainstream content using a map and share their discoveries with friends."

Friday, May 16, 2008

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Mac Fried

This post has nothing to do with McDonald's.

My PowerBook G4 is officially dead. For four days I've been trying to restore it but I couldn't. Apparently my hard drive got some internal error and my attempts to revive it lead to frying the whole logic board (motherboard).

It all started with Leopard's BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) although I didn't have Application Enhancer installed. Everytime I reboot after the grey Apple logo it boots up to a blue screen with nothing but a cursor (kernel panic?). I solved this problem using single-user mode with

sudo fsck_hfs -l /dev/disk0s3
/sbin/mount -uw /


Moments after I log in everything freezes and I have to reboot again, and as mentioned earlier, BSOD kicks back in.

I went for another solution, reinstalling OS X. I boot on Safe Mode, insert OS X DVD, mount the disk and restart for installation, and again it stops on BSOD with me unable to go through installtion process.

And on to my last resort, I tried to install OS X using Single-User mode and that's where everything went down hill. I followed a step-by-step solution yet I couldn't force it to install.

After that I took it to iCity workshop. One day later I get a call telling me my logic board is fried and there's no way of recovering it nor the hard drive. Luckly I was able to backup all my data using Safe Mode before taking it there so I haven't really lost anything except the Mac itself.

I have big plans for this summer so I won't be getting a new Mac until late August. Hopefully there will be newer models to choose from though so far MacBook Pro 15" is my choice.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

On Porsche and Art


Got a new Porsche and don't know what else to do with it other than driving around? Sick of it already? Then check this outrageous video and you might get an idea of what to do with it next.

This German a$$-ho... I mean "artist" trashed a brand new 997 Porsche Carrera S.

As our good ol' persian messenger in the movie (300) said:

"THIS IS MADNESS!"

Sunday, May 04, 2008

1200p ?

Not so long ago Alienware started distributing their new Area-51 m17x laptop. According to their website this new model comes reinforced with one of the best graphics cards in the market, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX, making it able to support, as they say, "Extreme High Definition" video output.

Now most of us techies already know 1080p (if not, please check here*) which is by far known as the best standard resolution in production.

So, is there really is a 1200p resolution?

The answer is... Not this day.

1080p (1920x1080) is the best standard widescreen resolution for (16:9) ratio where the so-called 1200p (1920x1200) is a quadruple widescreen resolution of (4:3) ratio known as WUXGA. And since most current HD DVDs/Blu-Rays support 16:9 as their video standard, it is highly doubted for the 1920x1200 WUXGA resolution to take the spot because the standards for HD are 720i, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p.

Soon we will be seeing more outstanding resolutions and standards but up until this day 1080p is the master. 1200 WUXGA has potential but it's not better because it's just a reproduction of the 1080p. They both will play the same quality though with the WUXGA there will be unused segments.

*1080p vs 1080i @ blogallalong.com [link]

For Sale | Hummer H2





Hummer H2
Perfect condition
2003 | ODO: 135,000 Km
DVD monitor + Reverse camera
Regular service
Price: 9,200 KD (negotiable) 8,800KD

Contact: Sulaiman @ 6868737