It's amazing no one thought of this LONG before.
The idea is simple, take a picture of anything at a certain angle, set it as your laptops wallpaper, then take a picture of the laptop in that same angle! Not sure what I'm talking about? take a look at the picture below and you'll get it!
For more creative pictures like that one (all mac though), head over here.
I'll try to make my own one day. It seems it's a craze that's catching on!
Since deciding to "Think Different" and buy an apple powerbook, I've been regularly exposed to LOTS of anti-microsoft attitude, by virtue of nearly any apple site/forum I visit (even the official apple site hints of it sometimes!).
In the beginning, it was fun to read the microsoft/gates/windows/pc (which nowadays doesn't mean Personal Computer, it means a Windows based IBM compatible!) jokes and remarks. But there is a limit, and in the end it all becomes very fanboyish/zealot stuff that isn't funny any more.
Sure apple make great computers, sure their OS-X is way better than windows XP, and sure it's alot more stable, but let's not forget the impact microsoft had on the pc world. Windows XP is a fine product, one that made using a computer fun and productive. And ofcourse Office is fun to work with as well. Oh, and try to get any good games on OS-X. You will but about 2 years after the windows version was out :)
Point is, I own both apple and pc, and I enjoy working with them both. They integrate well (hell, they both share files over my home lan), and each has it's pros/cons. Oh and windows has winamp, the BEST software ever written by humans. EVER.
But, before signing off to an oblivion of 5x12 hour shifts (Thursday thru to Monday inclusive!), there is one anti-microsoft joke that I found so funny I have to share it: Introducing the all-new Microsoft Vacuume. The only Microsoft product that doesn't suck!
I kid you not.
Another crazy japanese idea, the kaba-kick is a russian roulette game for kids, where the loser gets shot with fake hippo bullets, and the winner stays "alive".
Not sure if this really is selling in japanese toy shops, but the idea is scary.
And on that notion, here's a small tribute to Bud Dwyer, the Pensillvanian polititian that, after being charged with corruption and bribery, called a press conference and shot himself in the head on live TV (the video is all over the net. Try google :p).
Here's to Bud, and a shot of his very last second in life.
Picture this: Friday morning, around 10:30am. I'm doing a ward round with the ever-faithful house officer. One of the new patients on the ward (codename FM) had had a heart attack the morning before. She'd been given the magic clot-buster drugs and was doing well. After saying hello to her and making sure she's ok, she mentions that she's got a bit of shoulder pain, radiating up to her neck. *SHIT* I ask for an ECG (heart tracing), and the nurse gives me one she'd done at around 9:30am, but just clipped it on the routine jobs thingie. Looking at the ECG, it's evident that FM is in the process of having ANOTHER heart attack as we speak!
Giving her a bit of morphine, I ask for another ECG. guess what? the attack is extending more and more into what's left of her heart muscle! *SHIT*
I gather all her papers and tracings and trot down to the cardiology (read: heart specialist) registrar, who happened to be conveniently on-call that day. She had one look at them and said "needs to be Blue-Lighted to London Chest. I'll come up". She came up and wrote up some fancy heart-doctor-only drugs, and spoke to her equivalent at The London Chest Hospital.
Soon after she had left, FM's blood pressure decided to dip down to 70mmhg systolic (anything less than 100mmhg is scary) *SHIT* calming her (and myself!) down, I tilted her bed head down and gave her some fluids in the vein. This helped up her blood pressure to 90mmhg. ACCEPTABLE.
The ambulance crew finally arrived, and me, a nurse, and 2 technicians took FM down to the vehicle. With use we had a plethora of pumps/monitors/adaptors/drugs and all that. They wheeled FM into the ambulance and then me and the nurse hopped in to sit sideways throughout the 50 mile journey. Soon after departing, our driver did what we were all looking forward to, he turned on The Blue Light. With lights flashing and sirens whistling, everyone got out of our way and we got there in record time. It was a rattly experience with everything jumping up and down, but an exciting one nontheless!
FM was a bit unwell in the last bit of the journey, she had more chest tightness and needed more pain relief (not surprising, her heart was half-dead already!). We got to London chest and took her up to CCU, where bed 5 was ready. The registrar there wasn't a pleasant one, I think that being faced with a sick person with half a dead heart at 4:30pm would make anyone grumpy.
We bought some ice creams (it was warm!) there and drove back home (no blue light, I pretended to have chest pain in the ambulance but they wouldn't buy it!). We reached Colchester at around 6:30pm, long after work had finished.
It had been an exciting day. Blue-lighting someone to London Chest was more fun than I thought, if it wasn't for the fact that there was a very ill patient with me, and a nurse that was sick throughout the journey!
Oh, and PLEASE don't smoke. PLEASE. This woman smoked 15/day, and she's just one of alot of people I see who end up like that. Don't say you weren't warned. Not everywhere has blue-lights to london chest.....
got an email today, with the above subject
it was from ebuyer.com, a reputable (and cheap!) internet only pc shop, so it couldn't be spam.
clicking it took me here. Not sure whether this is way cool or way sad. You decide.
Next episode: online health check: wee on your keyboard and a website analyses it for you :)
Or, as the western world knows it, House Of Flying Daggers.
I've seen it. More than once. Alot. I bought the sound-track. I cannot emphasise to you how important this movie is, for the whole movie industry, and for anyone who even remotely likes watching a good movie.
A beautiful story of love and revenge in feudal China, this film ups the ante that the classic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon created, and puts it at Godly heights.
The scenes, the wonderful colours, the martial arts, the story, the EXCELLENT music and the clever story that forces you to decide who's side you're on just make this movie an experience no one should miss.
This is one film that should not be criminally over-looked. If you even think you like movies, go and grab this one. Be captivated at what cinema can produce outside of Hollywood. 6 out of 5 SOBSTARS.
Cos they're just weird but also VERY creative!
Some mad (but obviously clever) japs decided to make a flash-game 2D beat 'em up, based on the mascots of japan's biggest bulletin board (2CH AKA The Ni Channel).
What's so cool about that then? well the fact that everything is ASCII! All the characters and they're moves are done in ASCII (but flash animated) and it has the depth of any street fighter game. Point your browsers here and go kick some japanese ascii ass :)
ps: the menus are jap, but just chose the first option, then you can choose (in this order) Battle, Free Battle, Vs Battle, Training and Options.
Can't even focus on a coffee cup,
Don't even know who's bed I'm in,
Where do I start? Where do I begin?
(small tribute to the chems there)
I have the runs. It attacked me last night after listening to a friend and going to Pizza Hut. I hate Pizza Hut. They suck. Since last night around 11 I've been on the loo at least 5 times, many of which were during the wee hours of the morning. I'm actually typing this while on the loo (oh the benefits of having a laptop eh?)
Talking of laptops, I have totally gotten used to my apple powerbook. The system is awesome, stable, and very very nice to use. Recommended to anyone. Gets 5/5 SOBSTARS :p
Quite recently, I typed "bastards" in google, to see what the first site came up as. To my surprise it directed me to some big corporation in the states! This has now been corrected (shame), but at the time it was quite a shock. Next time you're bored type something rude in google and you never know, it might even point you to here :)
Moby has released his new album (Hotel), which includes the advance single (Lift Me Up). I've been listening to this album nearly nonstop since it's been out, and all I can say is WOW! The album follows true Moby style, but this time misses out on his soul-diva lead singer and uses alot of his faint, haunting vocals instead. The music is just as we're used to from Moby, ie his well perfected style of gospel meets rock meets electronic. The album is alot mellower than his all-time classic Play, and is closer to the great follow-up 18. If you've never heard Moby before I say get Play, if you don't like that don't bother with the rest. Or if you're feeling adventerous, grab one of his old techno albums (Everything is Wrong comes to mind) and feel the beat. Anyhow, a great start to 2005 and again this gets 5/5 SOBSTARS
Finally, my beloved alsation died recently (aged 12) :( he's was still in Baghdad, and I had realised recently that he was unwell. My relatives decided not to tell me the day he died, but I found out eventually. I wish I was there with the poor soul while he passed away, but I guess all things come to an end. I do miss him more now that he's gone (he would bark like mad every time I called home!), and hope he's somewhere in doggy-heaven.
RIP Antar.
I just CANNOT DESCRIBE how KICK ASS this technology is.
If you're even remotely interested in computers, you HAVE TO watch this video.
Now imagine how this can change the face of computer use forever. Let's hope it gets implemented cheap one day.
Just noticed it's been 7 (seven, VII, V (in arabic :p)) days since I updated G-D. Yes, I have no new news since then (sad I agree).
Just finished watching Empire of the Sun. Now I urge anyone who hasn't seen this movie to go and get it NOW. It's a brilliant story of a british boy lost in China when the japs invaded it in WWII. Not only is it beautifully told, but it also shows you the torments of trying to survive in a war-torn country without parents or anyone to guide you.
Of course, being A Spielberg film does help :)
he he remember a while back I commented on a sad (and sick) site called Live Shot that let you kill real animals over the web? well it's now been hacked by "B4d-Byt3" and "swift" :D obviously linux fans (see for yourself). Serves them right for letting people kill real animals over the web.
I only did this cos my old speakers broke. Seriously.
A long time ago (in a galaxy just here), my good old (and bloody expensive) inspire digital 5700 speakers (creative) decided to pack in. The decoder would suddenly stop outputting to a random channel. I spoke to creative and instead of repairing it, they sent me a whole new set of speakers! Being me, I decided to set those up in the living room (with the xbox/gamecube/dvd) and leave the broken set with the pc. Cheap I know....
Anyhow, finally the broken set starting getting on my tits. Random channels were turning off more than ever, and it was getting very annoying. I decided to invest in a medium-priced set of speakers. After extensive (well a few minutes) research I decided on creative's inspire t7900 which are a set of 7.1 analogue speakers that do not feature a decoder (just adding a decoder costs loads, and since they're only for the pc which can do it's own decoding, it'd be useless to buy one). To make things complete I invested in a soundblaster audigy 2 ZS (big creative fan here!). To be honest with you, there's absolutely NO DIFFERENCE in terms of sound quality or anything! Half life 2 pretends to support 7.1 but decides to ignore the side speakers, while anything 5.1 has it's rear speakers duplicated on the side ones. I have yet to find anything that truely supports 7.1
But there you go, as you've noticed recently I've gone berserk shopping wise (apple powerbook, ipod, psp, nintendo ds, speakers, sound blaster) but this only happens once in a while then I'll go numb again. Oh and I don't really have a life so I might as well waste it in front of this sweet radiation :)
Good Delicious and all that!
not sure how I'm typing this. or why.
I feel numb. finished nights today, no more working shitty hours!
Decided to get drunk the arab way (never gotten drunk before, but I sure am now!), ie get 3 friends, lots of food (mostly turkish kebabs), and 24 bottles of budweiser, 1 bottle of bailey's and a bottle of white wine.
The result? I am DEFINITELY drunk.... had at least 6 bottles of bear, glass of wine and glass of bailey's (damn irish cream, too good). Been laughing for no reason the last 2 hours, everything seems funny, even this boring blog entry.
got to sleep, already hung over from working nights, and now drunk. tomorrow is gonna be a baaaaaaaaaaaaaaddd day.
G-D y'all
Yeap, that's what I was when I posted The First Night days ago.
I thought I could keep it up, and every day, before going to work, telling everyone about my adventures at work in the unholy hours of night. Problem is, I've been so busy and tired of it all that I couldn't even update G-D. Sigh.
I am STILL alive, and I got 2 more nights to go. Will it ever end?
Just woke up. Came back home around 9:00, fell asleep somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00. My first night shift was what Doom had always told us, HELL ON EARTH!
I walked in to our EAU (Emergency Assessment Unit) only to be greated by the surgical SHO that was just going home saying "Hi Ali. Welcome to hell!". "Is it that bad?" I ask, he just nods and shuffles away.
I went in to the main triage area and saw lots of worried looking patients, many flustered looking nurses, and lots of doctors faffing around. To my delight, the person handing over to me still had 5 patients on their list that they hadn't seen! The house officer decided to leave at EXACTLY 9pm, while the day SHO was so slow all she had seen that day was 5 patients out of around 20 (the 2nd SHO on-call had to do all the work, so he had left by the time I got there as well).
With no other option than to put my head down and start ploughing through this field of disease, I started seeing the patients, one by one as Enya sweetly sings.
Throughout the course of the night I had a total 0f 15 patients, in other words I didn't even have time to scratch my ass, let alone think about the clever way to treat these people! I wonder how many wrongs I've done, and how many poor souls in that hospital have been harmed by my insane mind last night.
Here's a thank you to everyone who braved taking anything I prescribed last night. Hope you're still around to read this some day :)
Till tomorrow evening then, I leave you lucky people to enjoy your normal lives.
Man oh man! I can't explain how I feel now! As Marjorie put it in Little Britain: "MAN I LOVE DE CAKE!!". In my case it's "MAN I LOVE DE TANG!!"
Let me elaborate. A few days ago a good friend of mine went to London. When he came back he said my mum had sent me something with him. It was a jar of Orange Flavoured Tang!! This EXCELLENTLY DELICIOUS powder squash is something I haven't had since being in Baghdad, 5 years ago! For some weird reason it just doesn't exist in the regular shops here, and my mum had found it in some remote arab shop somewhere. Oh the bliss of mixing 4 teaspoons to make one cup, the sweet/sour taste of it all makes me all nostalgic.
I surprised a few friends of mine, both arab and others that had lived/worked in arab countries, and they were all jumping up and down like me :)
Sad I know, but again I moan about nights. Trying to stay awake as much as I can makes me talk about silly things, like how Tang has made my day. Get me a life please........
Another pretty word for the darn fucked up thing called "nights". Tomorrow I start a 7 day slog of these so called swing shifts, ie working from 9pm till 9am. As I'm the poor soul looking after nearly 200 medical patients + all new acute admissions that night, it's a tough job. Very tough. The first night is shit cos you're still thinking you should be asleep at 3am rather than jumping up and down some poor nanny's chest. That's fun for ya.
Got my PSP, this thing rocks! playing the excellent lumines (well it's made by Rez creator, so that's not a bad thing) and ofcourse ridge racers. But still I'm loving my DS more, the great yoshi catch and go is so cool, and this touch/shout/blow at the screen feature of the DS makes it all so good to play with.
Life is good after all. Nights are here though so not posting for a while.......
It's late here. Very late. 2:20 am, Sunday is looming in and of course the vision of working again on Monday really isn't very inspiring. Freddy Mercury is telling me all about his "One Vision", and I'm typing this on my bed in London while hoping that the damn linksys doesn't drop the wireless signal again (decided to give my crappy linksys to mum, so I can use wireless net when I visit. It does the job but stalls alot).
Lots of things been happening in my life, but of course Good Delicious is the one the last to know. Gotta make sure I update this place more often.....
First off, my bro comes back from Jordan tomorrow. Hope he's managed to get me TONS of turmus (some funky mouth filler that only they seem to have), and also the obligatory baqlawa etc etc that every visitor to an Arab country has to get.
Went down to the Apple shop today in Regent Street (Great big place with lots of cool stuff). Wanted to get a case for my iPod (couldn't find anything nice and it was way too crowded). But i did manage to get my hands on replacement headphones for the crappy default ones (sure they look sexy but they just don't do the job right). The Sennheiser PX100 are a cool set of neo-retro headphones that finally do all that digital music some justice. My only gripe with them is that they're not as loud as the in-ear ones and also as they're not goofily big (ie DJ big), they don't isolate the outside world as much as I'd like. Still, these are minor things and I would highly recommend them to anyone wanting a replacement to the cheap stuff they give us in the box.
As I was allergic to money today, I decided to listen to those voices in my head and give in. The result? Well I placed an order at lik-sang.com for the potentially excellent Sony PSP. Yes, I know I've always hated anything PSX related, but this damn fine piece of electric wizardry is too good to miss out on. As it's coming from Hong Kong I hope it'll be here mid/late next week. More on it once I get my hands on it.
Earlier today (well, technically yesterday), I received an email from an old friend called "something to laugh about". As she's never sent me any mass emails before, I thought it might be interesting. It contained a link to this video, of the hilarious aussies, The Umbilical Brothers. 2 VERY talented people (one's a ventriloquist, the other's an acrobat. Both are psychic!), who had a sold out tour on Broadway called Thwak! To my delight I found out that they're touring London now, and am going to see them tomorrow (well, today technically) at London's Peacock Theater. Make sure you check the video for some great laughs!
Finally, just a random website I stumbled upon the other day. Live Shot is something only the Yanks would cook up. A crazy idea to say the least! Some "clever" guy who owns a hunting ground in texas decided to setup internet hunting! By paying a subscription, cyber hunters can access a range of computers around the hunting ground and look around with HD cams and then with a click of a button, SHOOT LIVE AMMO! Yes, that's right anyone can just start shooting about! The project is still incomplete and all you can do now is shoot at cardboard targets, but they hope to change that very soon with real game involved!
It really is scary this. The fact that some kid thousands of miles away can shoot at some poor boar is just mind blowing. What if another "real" hunter is killed? who is to blame? As the media loves to blame any death tragedy on video games (columbine anyone?), I wonder if they'll let this website loose for the whole world to shoot about on. Please no.......
