Bored, Part 1

Starting from today and continuing to the next four or five posts, I'll post pictures of bored people. This is the first in the series. This is my grandmother, dosing off at a boring party.

Lights in Streetsville

This is a picture taken in front of the Town Bakery in Streetsville, Mississauga.

Town Bakery

A little bakery in Streetsville, at center of Mississauga. Streetsville is a nice place to walk around , mainly because of its little town atmosphere.

News

Seeing how I haven't had a NEWS post for a while now, here it goes...

-iPods Updated. iPods got a lift, as Apple released second generation iPod minis. A 30 GB iPod Photo (7500 songs) was released to replace the 40 GB iPod Photo from before. Also, a brand new 6 GB iPod mini, the largest capacity iPod mini to date, was also released. The new mini stores 1500 songs. The 4 GB mini is still available from Apple. Apple also slashed the price of the 4-GB iPod mini to US$199 from US$249, and chopped the prices of the iPod photos, which are now US$349-449 (a $150 price drop). At the same time, Apple discontinued two 40 GB iPods (Photo and regular 40 GB) as well as an unpopular gold-colored iPod mini, leaving only four color options for iPod minis (Pink, Green, Blue, and Silver).


-Google Maps. Google decided to expand into the mapping side, by releasing Google Maps Beta. www.maps.google.com. It's pretty nice, better than Mapquest or Yahoo! Maps, since there are no ads and it is really easy to scroll maps. No need anymore to click little blue arrows to scroll around; simply drag and go! Though their mapping service is only available for North America (not Europe), it's better than Mapquest...

-Gmail. Somehow, everyone using Gmail just got 50 invites! This, I think (and I heard), is because Google is taking it's email service a little more out of beta. They want everyone using it some more. So everyone, including me, has 50 invites...

KR

This is my rendition/version of The Screensavers (www.g4tv.com/screensavers)'s beginning scene. In the real version, a picture is taken of a host (there are 4 of them) of the show, and they are photographed while engaging in some techincal activity (working on a PC, using a PDA, etc).

Made in Corel Photopaint using one original picture, one Halftone layer, a Kids Play layer, a Blocks layer, and a Whirlpool layer. Plus, the text and callout bubbles had three layers.

Mr. Cheap

Mr. Cheap variety store. The red color of their sign and the huge ice machine stood out to me as I took this picture.
Taken in downtown Toronto. Click to enlarge.

Building

A random building I liked and snapped a picture of in downtown Toronto. Click on photo to enlarge.

Real Sunset

You have seen sunsets everywhere. A quick Google Image Search gives us images of sunsets such as this:

But, as good as they are, these sunsets are not real; they don't exist where we live (unless we live in Hawaii or the Carribean, which most us don't). So I decided to take a fast motion movie of a real sunset--the one that falls in front of my (or perhaps your) house every day.

To view the movie, you need QuickTime player. Get it from Apple's website.

Click here for movie

Since the movie was pretty big, it has been deleted.

Click the above link to view the movie. Enjoy! It takes a while to download (its 2 MB in size). Also, if it doesn't work by clicking the link, copy and paste this: "http://www.geocities.com/abidhasan@rogers.com/Pictures/new-2.mov" into the browser address bar.

The process of taking the movie was fairly quick and simple: I took a picture outside from my window after every couple minutes or so for an hour. This was done from about 5:30 to 6:30 PM. In all, there were 73 pictures to start with. Then I went into Corel PhotoPaint and joined all the JPEG images together to make a movie. I did need to improve a couple pictures, doing things such as color correction, curve correction, brightness/intensity improvement and resizing the images.

Life Map

This map will soon be going on my website too. It's a map of places I've been in my life. Green dots mean that I have conciously (i.e. when I was more than 10 years old) been there, red dots mean that I've been there, but I was too young to remember that experience, yellow dot means I was born there (Karachi) and the blue dot means I live there (Mississauga, Canada). Lastly, the orange is the Great Trudge Across America (and some of Canada too) which basically refers to the driving trip that me and my family did to move and relocate ourselves from Irvine, California to Mississauga, Ontario in the summer of 2002. Plus, I went to downtown Toronto two days ago and I'll have pictures of that up soon. Click on map to enlarge.

Moritati

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
When all else fails, play dead.

From the Red Green Show.

Cartoony Pt. 2

Some more cartoony pictures. These are the last in the my brother's art series. From tommorow, I'll have pictures I've taken.

Cartoony

A cartoony picture from my brother's art. Click, as usual, to enlarge.
Happy Valentines Day.

The Wolf

Some more pictures from my brother's art. Titled The Wolf, these are of the wolf without the legs ;). I really like the one at the bottom. It has to be my favourite image from all of my brother's collection. Click on images to enlarge.

Art

This is some art that my brother did a while back. He's an amateur artist, who's just starting out with perspective and other basic art principles. These two images, hand drawn, were scanned on a LexmarkX75 All-In-One scanner at 600 DPI resolution.


These two pictures are first in a series of seven. As usual, click on the images for a larger version.

Walk

I had a good walk home today. I saw three people McDonald's employees- Karim, Peirre and Nick. They all go to Mount Carmel Secondary School.

Going to Paris

I will be taking, hopefully, a vacation to Paris France sometime in the summer vacations (from June 17th onwards)!!!! I'm so excited!!!! Finally something to look forward to!
Some of the things I hope to see there are:

Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame
Basilique du Sacre-Coeur and Beaubourg - Centre Georges Pompidou
Musee d'Orsay, Musée Picasso, and Musee du Louvre
Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Elysee
Château de Versailles
Jardin des Plantes (Le) and Cite des sciences et de l'industrie
Palais de Justice and Pantheon
Hotel des Invalides and Place de la Concorde (La)
Tour Montparnasse and Palais-Royal
Place de la Bastille and Place Vendôme (La) and Place Dauphine
The Concièrgerie and Montmartre
Place de la Concorde and Place de la Bastille
La Défense - major office, cinema and shopping complex, west of Paris


This picture, taken last year, is the view to the east of Ottawa from atop the Canadian Parliament's Peace Tower. Click on image to enlarge.

Random

Peter Griffin : Brian, there's a message in my Alpha Bits. It says "OOOOOO".
Brian Griffin : Peter, those are Cheerios.

Mithai_Detailed

A 'macro' of mithai, or Pakistani sweets, that I took while I was at a buffet dinner in Ottawa. Click on the image to view a higher resolution version. Flash was used in this image.

CN Tower: Big Edition

This is a picture of the same CN Tower taken from the same place. It is, though, a little more zoomed in. I thought that this was the better of the two pictures, and so I saved this for today. Click on the image to view a larger version.

By the way, Muharram is beginning soon, and I hope to write a little synopsis of the majaalis every day on my blog. More on Muharram here.

CN Tower

An old picture of the CN Tower, taken by my dad. Click on the picture to enlarge it. The picture is taken from Ontario Place (website). They were offering a discount because summer was ending, and we decided to go there. The picture is quite old, as it was taken in August of 2003. Tomorrow I will post another image of the CN Tower also from Ontario Place.