CNN blooper

An image from the CNN news report on the earthquake/tsunami in South East Asia:


My question: where on earth is Thialand? lol:)
There are 97500 results for "Thialand" in Google: here.

iAd

I made this parody of the Apple U2 Vertigo advertisement in Corel Photopaint (www.corel.com).

The silhouette is of my brother, while the back color is Apple's orange.

The ad is big enough to be placed on a desktop background.

To see it, click here.

Room

My room was cleaned today. Here are the before and after pics:

Before:



After:

Gingerbread PC

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

A link from Yoshi's (the Screensavers modder) web site, this gingerbread PC is made from gingerbread:). A good one for Christmas! Merry Christmas!

Stained Glass

All throughout last night and well into this morning, there was a snow storm in the Mississauga and Toronto region. Weather.com.


That snow storm also bought with it hail and freezing rain. The glass on the window in my room was hammered with that hail and freezing rain all throughout the night and it looks very, very interesting now. The window looks as if it has stained glass or some type of pattern engraved on it. It really looks beautiful:). Here is a picture. (This is freezing rain that is stuck on the window, by the way, not some engraving on the window):

Toronto

I went to downtown Toronto today to watch a movie and go to the Eaton Centre.
It was snowing, though, so walking around wasn't exactly fun:(.

The movie I watched was OCEAN'S TWELVE at the Paramount Famous Players theatre. I liked the movie overall, i would probably rate it 8/10, but Ocean's Eleven was definetly better than this. Ocean's 11 had a generally deeper story line and it also had more action in it. If you liked Ocean's Eleven, though, then by all means I would recommend this to you.

There were two good things about this movie: humor and Julia Robert's role. Unlike Ocean's 11, where there was sparse humor and most of the movie was action, Oceans 12 simply has more humor in it. It's not all funny, I admit, but it is still there. Another good thing about this movie was that the role of Julia Roberts was more meaningful and developed. In O11, Julia Roberts was a minor character, whereas in this movie she was more central. I liked that--being central fits Roberts' personality more.

Finally, a picture of the CN tower I took randomly because it looked good. I also took some pictures at night, but they werent that good . It wasn't too good as it was really cloudy and foggy and snowing)

Pictures

An interstingly boring picture of fruits that I found in the fruit basket. With the flash on, I have limited the background visibility.


My oven really is hot!! This image taken by my brother (of the oven with an upsidedown camera) shows the words "hell" when the time was 11:34. Apparently the best time to bake something is 11:34, since that's when the oven is feeling hot;).

Stronghold 2

Stronghold 2 is coming out in Spring 2005!

I currently own Stronghold and Crusader and I am going to buy Stronghold 2! These are both great games, very addictive. The genre is castle sim/RTS. In Stronghold 2, a fully (and newly) developed 3D engine has been created and this game will be 3D.

Link is here.

Photos

I updated the photos page of my Website. The page now is much simpler, as I no longer have thumbnails of the pictures, but their descriptions. Also, now I uploaded six or seven new pictures and then I made a Guide Map of Mississauga, which shows on a map where some of the pictures were taken.

Go visit it at www.geocities.com/abidhasan@rogers.com
.
Abid

Pictures of my birthday cake, as promised.

The cake came from Baskin31Robbins (I dont know why they call themselves 31, they had more than 40 flavors).

And this is mY someone's writing. This is in Urdu, And they really don't know how to write. he/She was trying to wrIte to get my pResents for my birthday. READ THE CAPITALS!!!!!

Nintendo DS

An excellent review of the Nintendo DS can be found here. I still think, even with all the features of the DS, that the gameboy advance is better; only for two reasons--battery life and size. The DS is too power hungry and it is simply too big. That's all I have to say:-).

Freedom

I'm free!!! Winter vacations have started. I guarantee that if this week were any longer, I would have started ditching school:). Speaking of ditching, I did skip periods 1 and 5... That means I skipped Biology and Geography.

I going off to enjoy,

Abid

Lots of things

A lot of things going on right now.
-School -Applying to University -Work

I am pretty busy, but at least the winter holidays are starting next week (i.e. Friday). My birthday was the fourteenth of December. So far in gifts I have gotten some money from my kind brother. As for my parents, nothing yet. They were buying me a watch, but I don't really want or need a watch at this time. Also I got a cake from Baskin-Robbins. :) I'll have some pics up of my "bday" real soon.

This is the busiest week of school so far. Thank God work isn't in the way this week (I'm working Saturday and Sunday). In my spare time, I am making a program in VB, basically a text editor (I named it Ted 2). Ted 1 was completed in the summer, but with the amount of updates (feature updates) it got over time, I thought it would be nice to get a new verison made. In programming, update = bugs :). So I thought of making Ted 2 from scratch with more features--but the features in Ted 2 are integrated, meaning that they aren't 'superimposed' or 'tacked on' as much as in Ted 1.

Lots of things

I didnt get much sleep last night. Not only was I working till 12, I also had to do part of my Physics ISU, which basically included cutting it down to 7-8 pages and printing it. I had to get up early to give it in too.:(

Speaking of work, McDonalds is introducing new Subs!! The toasted subs will be nice. For that they had to get a new sub toasting center in the back kitchen, for which they took the whole night.

Faster and Optimized Firefox Release Builds

Site 1

Site 2



I just came across this. These are versions of Firefox which are optimized for specific processors--i.e. they are faster.

One of the major problems I had with Firefox was the startup time. Whenever I had wanted to look up something quickly on the Web (such as a dictionary definition or other quick fact), I always used Internet Exlporer because it opened up faster. Though I knew that Firefox was safer and rendered individual pages faster than IE, I still opted for IE in quick situations because of the startup time. Now, that's changed.

The new Firefox releases are optimized for various processors. There are basically 3 editions of the new browser, namely M1, M2 and M3. Each of the new builds are specialized for a series of processors. Since I am running Windows on the Celeron 2.8 GHz processor, M3 is the correct release for me.

After the installation, I have noticed great improvement in Firefox startup times. The startup time has decreased from about 6-8 seconds before to almost 3-5 seconds now. This means that I can now use FF as my primary browser even when I am looking up something quickly because Internet Explorer also takes 3-5 seconds to start up. I love FF:)

Winter

It's December the 7th today, and finally some real snow is upon us here in Mississauga. With temperatures dropping steadily over the last few days, it finally snowed today. And that wasn't fun:( I walked home today, but luckily I was well and warmly dressed.


Second thing--my birthday is coming soon and I have to think of a gift fast.:)

Leo Laporte

I met Leo Laporte today!!! Leo's site is at here.

Leo was in Chapters Indigo at Etobicoke today (1950 The Queensway, Etobicoke ON) from 12:30 to 1:15 PM. I went there to buy his book Leo Laporte's Technology Almanac. Since he was doing autographs too, I got it autographed too. Andy and Amber from the Call for Help show were also there, along with some of the behind the scenes guys like the Linux Expert, Photoshop Expert and Microsoft Office Expert from the Call for help shows. It was really fun.

Leo first came and talked a little about the show and where it's headed in the future. Then he talked a little about other things. Some pictures:

Some more pictures are here and here. I didn't want my picture floating around the web, so I used PCPaint to spray them all brown:)

iPod Update

Today was report card day @ my school. I got an 88 for an average. That is including Geography. I will apply to university without that though, so my avg for those classes is 88.33%. Not too bad!

iPod Update

I updated the firmware software on my iPod mini to version 1.2. iTunes had been bothering me to do it every time I synched the iPod to my computer, and finally I decided today that I'd finally update it. Some of the nice features I like and noticed were:
* Multiple On-The-Go playlists (you can now save an on the go playlist and start a new fresh one and when you sync back to your PC, the new playlist that was saved on your iPod now comes up in your library)
* Delete songs from On-The-Go playlists (same way you add a song, you can delete it too; just press and hold on the song name to remove it from the OTG playlist)
* Hear Click Wheel clicker through headphones (I havent tried this yet, though the Readme included with the download says that you can).

ITUNES MUSIC STORE IS FINALLY IN CANADA!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am so happy. Finally I can download music to transfer to my iPod legally and easily and all of it will work!!!

Too excited!!!