One Rig to Rule Them All

Three Rigs for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Rig to rule them all, One Rig to find them,
One Rig to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

And for my vanity...

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

- Gandalf

Behold... The Rig of Power...

• Intel Core 2 Duo "Penyrn" 45nm E8400 @ 3.0 GHz with 6 MB of L2 cache
• Gigabyte P35-DS3R Revision 2.1
• Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GT overclocked @ 700 MHz with a custom Zalman fan
• 2x1 800MHz Kingston DDR2 RAM
• Western Digital Caviar SE16 500 GB SATA HDD
• Samsung 20X DVD+/-RW
• HEC 580 W PSU
• LG L194WT 19" WS LCD

Precious... My Precious...

ARSENAL GEAR

May God protect you.

And may you last me for many years and give me the power to conquer all those in Game-earth. We wants it... We needs it... It's ours... Ours...

Yes... Precious...

Stupid people!

Today I had a truly horrible experience! I decided to go with my family and watch I Am Legend in the theater. Don't get me wrong. The movie is actually very good, and I do enjoy going to the cinema with my family, so that's not the issue. I will try to write a review for this movie soon.

The experience itself was horrible. For me, going to a movie in a theater is the highest possible way of entertainment for me. It's my nirvana! But that's not the case every time. The problem is when people in the theater start talking! Theaters are made for watching movies, not chatting with friends. Talking in the sacred shrine of movies is unbearable for me.

I don't know if I am neurotic or my luck is really bad, whenever I go to the theater, I must meet one of these retards. A man with his finace, he tries to show her that he has some gray matter and she tries to show him that she is the innocent girl who can't think for herself, so he must explain the movie for her, and most of the time, he doesn't understand a thing of what is happening on the screen. A person who gets a mobile phone call and he must answer it! A mother who, in her immense stupidity, must take her 3 years old into the theater, and of course the kid must scream! A group of young men going out together, they don't care about the movie and all they want is to have a good time. Or worse, a group of young men and women going out together, again they don't care about the movie, and as in the first example, the man will play the know-it-all role. Or finally, my favourite, an old woman with her adult daughter who don't give a damn about the movie and they just sit there chatting! Wow, what a charming bunch of people I meet in the theater.

I require absolute silence while I am watching a movie, it's part of the rituals of watching a movie. You see, rituals. The process is very spiritual for me.

But it's never easy for me, I ask politely, and I ask not-so-politely, and most of the time nothing happens, or they just shut up for a short time before they start their normal routine.

Today, I had a nemesis in the form of a mentally-retarded individual who was accompanied by two women, possibly his wife and his mother or mother-in-law. They started talking. I asked politely to shut up. It worked for a few minutes, then two young men started talking, loudly, to my right. I hushed them. It failed. Then the trio sitting behind me started talking again, and this time I wasn't able to do a thing. I felt really humiliated. I am not an aggressive person and I believe in reason, but how can you reason with someone who is mentally-retarded? Someone who doesn't even think that he/she is doing something wrong. Someone who doesn't even think that they are attacking my freedom.

A friend told me that your freedom ends when others' begin. All I want is my freedom. I don't want to take anything more than my freedom. Theaters are made for watching movies, not for talking. People should respect this. They should keep their stinking mouths shut at all times when they are watching a movie. This is the right thing to do. This is what should be done. This is all I am asking. I don't want them to do anything special for me, just follow the simple, civilized rules of humanity. When you keep your mouth shut, you won't be harmed and you won't harm anyone. But when you talk, you annoy other people and you make a fool out of yourself.

So, please, people, shut up when you are in a theater. SHUT UP. SHUT UP!!!

Accordingly, I decided that this is a thing that will never resolve. People in Egypt will continue to talk when they are watching movies because they don't care about movies. All they want is to spend a good time with their friends and to have a good laugh in a stupid movie, so when they watch a movie that forces you to think they just start talking, to pass the time and to enjoy themselves so that the night won't be a failure!

So, I decided that I won't attend the 3, 6 and 9 p.m. shows anymore. I will only attend the 10.30 a.m. and maybe the 1 p.m. ones because they have the least possible audience, and besides, they are cheaper. Most of those who attend these early shows are either people who really want to watch the movie, otherwise they wouldn't go there in that early time with all the inconveniences it has, or they are love birds who just want to sit with each other, and most of the time they are silent.

If this doesn't work then I will stop going to the theater, but I highly doubt I can do this!!!

I have a dream: when I have the money, I will get the best possible projector and a screen and I will watch the movies I want, sitting in the comfort of my home, alone, in a dark room and without any interruption and with surround sound. High-definition movies in 1080p make this a possibility, and who knows, maybe when I actually have the money, quad-high-definition will be out, along with 12.1 surround sound!!! This will be fun! If only I had the money...

But even if this doesn't happen, a good 19" or 22" wide screen LCD with 5.1 surround sound and showing a 720p movie will be acceptable, and this is more affordable, you know. And the good thing is that you can get the movies for free, from you-know-where!!!

KDE 4.0 gets released!

I have always been more of a Gnome fan than KDE. But KDE 4.0 is pretty interesting. Some of the new ideas in this new release are amazing. The new artwork is so good, and in fact, so Gnome-ish!

But the sad thing is that they rushed it. So far, all reviews of the release candidates were not good. Reviewers spoke of instability and frequent crashing. Even some of the project's leads spoke of the same issues.

It's a safe bet that version 4.1 will be better, but this will be 6 months from now, but the month of April is getting nearer and we will see the distros that will be released, Kubuntu and Mandriva and how they will handle KDE 4.

openSUSE, Mandriva, Fedora, Kubuntu, Debian and many other distros are already providing either Live CDs for the final release of KDE 4 or they have already uploaded the updates to their repositories.

I will be downloading the Kubuntu 7.10 KDE 4.0 Live CD soon, God willing. I will post back here for my impressions, but I highly doubt that it will be stable or usable. After all, a lot of the awaited KDE 4 programs are still to be released, as Amarok 2.0 which is still in the works.

Operation: Clean Fingers

This is my good ol' trusty A4 TECH keyboard I bought in 2003. Thank God, it has been functioning ever since. It's a good keyboard with only one minor flaw, it has no LEDs for the Caps and Num locks.

Throughout the years I cleaned this keyboard several times. It's a painful and tedious process in which I must use a piece of cloth and glass cleaner to clean individual keys! So, I didn't do it too often.

I left this keyboard for almost 8 months or so without cleaning and this was the result... Behold...


You will notice that the W, A, S, D and E keys were clean. These are the keys used for games mostly. You will also find part of Tab, Lt. Shift, Lt. Ctrl, Lt. Alt, the Space bar and a small area of Enter to be clean, because these are the keys most often used. Oh, and I forgot to mention the Esc key.

After criticism from my family and friends, I decided that this must be cleaned immediately. And this was the result...

When my sister saw the clean keyboard, she asked me if I had bought a new one!

Mission Accomplished!

A night with the monkeys!

I never learn, do I?

Last Thursday, I brought to my home my 2 friends; Falcon and Kamolly. Originally, it was a mini-LAN party night meant to be spent fragging each other in CoD4. But, instead we decided to watch a movie. We picked some movies and I recommended one of my favourites: Kubrick's eternal 2001: A Space Odyssey. Well, I should have known better...

I don't know what the rest of my family thought, but I think that they thought we were on crack or something!!! Falcon and Kamolly's hysterical laughter rocked the house! Their comments during the "music" intervals in the movie were simply hilarious!

Kamolly kept commenting on the apes at the beginning of the movie and he made the night's most hilarious comment: he described the Discovery as the world's largest sperm!!!

Falcon, on the other hand, was laughing, even more than Kamolly, because of an episode of Futurama that was a parody of this movie.

I can't say that I was disappointed that they didn't like the movie. But I don't need their opinion to like or hate this movie. You can't help but LOVE this movie, if you are not on crack, that is.

This movie is like a poem, you either love it or you hate it...

Finally, after countless comments and an insane amount of laughter, especially at the movie's legendary ending, they left.

I have recommended this movie to 2 friends before, one of them saw it and its sequel, 2010, and he liked it!!! The other didn't, for now...

The codeword was: monkeys!

The Kingdom and Eastern Promises

I try to keep up with my tradition that Thursday night is the movie night. This is not always the case, depending on what I am playing. But the thing is, I never run of good movies to watch. NEVER!!!

So, tonight (technically, we are on Friday's morning) I watched 2 movies: The Kingdom and Eastern Promises.

THE KINGDOM

There is something about this movie that I didn't like. Agreed, this is a good action movie, but take care of this: action movie. Although this movie tries, very hard, to carry a message, it fails... Not miserably, but it still fails.

The movie is about a terrorist attack on a foreigners' compound in Saudi Arabia. This is followed by the trials of a FBI team to get on Saudi soil, until eventually they manage to do so, or there wouldn't have been a movie, duh!!!

I hate Jamie Foxx! The guy can't act. The rest of the cast was OK. But the Arab cast was a hit and miss. First of all, they all sounded like voice overs from Battlefield 2! But I have to mention that they spoke correct Arabic. Maybe not 100% correct, but better than any movie I have seen. Non Arabic movie, that is.

The 4 superheroes making up the FBI team land in SA and they start teaching the Saudis how to investigate and how to collect evidence. This is really absurd. This reminds me of the scene in Kingdom of Heaven when Balian started digging a well for the Arabs to irrigate their crops. Balian was a blacksmith from England who knew nothing about life in the desert, but still he taught them. The same Tarzan the Ape Man Complex...

The movie tries to be balanced, and it is better, much better, than, say, Munich at that. But still, it's biased! By the end of the first 10 or 15 minutes, I think a Western audience would be so angry of Saudis and Muslims in general that whatever you say during or at the end of the movie won't help change this image. Some effectively symbolic shots really grab a Western audience by the throat and scream at them for affection.

It's understandable that the director wishes to show the Saudi world to a Western audience who, presumably, know nothing about this world. While no parts of the movie were shot in Saudi Arabia, the movie tries to capture what it is to be in a Middle Eastern country. But unfortunately, this didn't go without its faults... For starters, the movie draws attention to the females dressed in traditional Saudi dress more than once. It should have been done only once. Most of the urban areas around the Western compound look like the people in there live in the 1980s or something. In fact like my friend Falcon said, it does look like a level cut from Call of Duty 4. The environments are dirty, gritty and looks like there was a war fought there not too long ago, even though nothing actually happened there, yet. They also remind me of the gritty environments of Black Hawk Down. But the thing I want to say is that, Middle Eastern countries do not like this, not anymore... And certainly not in a rich, actually ridiculously rich, country like SA. In many parts of the movie, I sensed disrespect to Muslims, but in other shots, the movie tries to show the audience some of the activities of Muslims in a respectable way. My guess is that the director wanted to show all the colours of the rainbow in his movie. But the fact remains that the movie shows more Muslim villains than it shows Muslim good guys!

The action sequences are nicely done and it looks that we are getting more and more movies (and games!) featuring combat in the Middle East. I mean, the audience has already seen action in jungles, forests, European beaches, Mars, bla, bla, bla. Now it's the desert's turn.

I was originally going to give this movie a 7, but there was a thing that made me chop off another point: stupid cinematography! I don't mean that the shots are bad, it's just the camera is too shaky! It's a nice effect in action sequences, but when you have 2 people talking to each other, why do you have to shake the camera? I got a headache watching this movie. It was a nice effect but overused.

Nothing will ever beat Lawrence of Arabia when it comes to a movie done by a Westerner about the Middle East.

6/10

EASTERN PROMISES

Now, that's a good movie! If you have seen, and liked, A History of Violence, you will like this movie a lot. It share the same atmosphere. I will get to that later. And if you haven't liked HoV... Why?!

The movie takes place in modern day London and involves the Russian mafia. I won't get into any plot details for fear of spoilers. The plot is not the most complex of plots but it's very good.

Now, what made this movie excellent was the atmosphere. Like in David Cornenberg's other movie, the mob is real. These people are real and they live like other people, well, sort of. The scenes where you have mob members setting with family, cooking, drinking, ... etc makes you believe that they are real. They are crazy, stylish people, but they are real. Some of the locations and scenes in this movie are pretty memorable too.

Acting is great, although Naomi Watts screen time is rather limited. Like HoV, again, this is a somewhat short movie. At about 100 minutes, I think it was a bit short. The other actors did a great job too. But I think HoV had better acting... After all, it had Ed Harris!

I recognized Howard Shore's music from the opening credits!!! As usual, he is great!

This is a highly recommended movie. Watch it ASAP.

8.5/10

EDIT: Part of the review of The Kingdom was edited from its original form. The reason for this is that I saw it was a bit unbalanced. And I did reference my friend, Falcon, who was the first to comment on this post.

Grindhouse

I was very interested to see this movie. Directed by Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill) and Robert Rodriguez (From Dusk Till Dawn, El Mariachi Trilogy and Sin City) and it made it to the IMDb Top 250 in its release week although it performed poorly in the box office.

The idea is simple, you have 2 full length feature movies with trailers for fake movies in-between. I am a fan of Tarantino and Rodriguez, so you must think how excited I was to watch this movie.

The movie was not released in cinemas where I live, so I got my copies from you-know-where!!! I only got to see one of the fake trailers, out of four. I will look for the rest and try to see them, but this review is for the 2 feature movies; Planet Terror by Rodriguez and Death Proof by Tarantino.


Planet Terror

This movie is a spoof of all the cheap zombie/sci-fi B-movies. You get crazy soldiers with a crazy scientist, redneck Texans, vigilante police officers with shotguns, some hot chicks and a hero who is a nobody and everyone calls him Wray, but when things go wrong, it turn out that he is El Wray, the badass.

Wray's girlfriend gets attacked by zombies and her leg is chopped off, instead she has an assault rifle with an attached grenade launcher!

This movie resembles From Dusk Till Dawn a lot. If you liked the former, you will certainly like Planet Terror. The movie has a visual filter than makes the screen grainy and very old, like you are watching a movie in a very cheap theater, which is intended by the makers. The soundtrack of this movie is also pretty good. The main rock theme blends with the action smoothly, and it has the cheesy feeling that accompanies the whole movie.

All in all, the movie was good. It was so cheesy to the extent that it was good!

If you like zombies or other sci-fi related movies, or if you want to see a ridiculously cheesy action movie, you will like Planet Terror.

6.5/10



Death Proof

This is Tarantino's newest movie. This guy has a problem. He is very self-conscious. If you have seen Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, then you saw Jackie Brown, you will know what I mean. His hits will make him so full of air that his next movie will be not-so-good. In our case, Kill Bill is the good movie and Death Proof is the bad one.

This movie is incredibly boring, and I have seen a lot of boring movies, so I know what boring is! It's so full of ego, I thought it would burst. There is ZERO plot. There are lots of f-words and strong language for no reason other than ... well, to make the movie sound cool. Anyone who have seen Pulp Fiction will know that f-words can make the dialog a bit interesting. But this is too much.

The plot (which doesn't exist!) is about a stuntman who stalks young girls using his creepy stunt car. The movie is made of 2 parts with ZERO relevance to each other, other than the stuntman and the car. The dialogs are very, very long and again, incredibly boring... like Ocean's Twelve-boring. It's like a group of random girls talking about random things which have no relevance to each other or to the audience. The girls are also, very sleazy and almost all of them sound like Uma Thurman (The Bride) from Kill Bill. By that I mean, strong, over-confident and foul-mouthed women.

The car chase scenes are well done, but boring. This movie pays homage to all the 70s car chase movies, and this is referenced more than once in the movie. Car chases are good, but you can't base a movie on them!

The only good part of this movie was the soundtrack, which is, typical of Tarantino, very cool. The visual filters present in Planet Terror are almost missing in this movie, which is really a shame, considering that they added a lot to the feeling that I am watching a B-movie.

This is one Tarantino movie that I really didn't like... And I even liked Jackie Brown, which was great compared to this crap!

6/10... Sorry Q!

Overall rating for Grindhouse (subjective, not an average): 6/10. Only watch if you are a fan of either of the 2 directors. But if you are a regular guy who wants a good movie, avoid this.

EDIT: I changed the score of Death Proof. Now it's 6 instead of 4. It's still a bad movie, but what made me pump up the score was the fact that this movie was highly memorable! Whenever I am driving, I can't help but remembering it. But, thank God, I don't drive like Stuntman Mike!!!

The score for Grindhouse as a whole is not changed. It's still 6/10.

The dust settles...

Oh it's over. The past few months were full of great games, released one after another. The worst thing is that all I could do was to look, but not to touch! My aging PC, Metal Gear REX, just can't do it. It's very old!

2007 may go down in history as the year for gaming. But I still think 2004 was better. In 2004 you got Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, Doom 3, Far Cry, UT2004 and GTA: San Andreas. While in 2007, you had Halo 3, The Orange Box, Crysis, Call of Duty 4, Unreal Tournament III, BioShock, and many more.

REX managed to run the CoD4 demo quite well, I still have to run the full game. It ran The Orange Box magnificently. This game compilation deserves a separate post.

My PC needs and urgent upgrade, but I will wait a bit more. AMD's Phenom has just been released. It offers great value for money with good performance and peace of mind! The AM2 socket will continue to 2009. Intel is discontinuing its Socket 775 next year. Let's wait and see.

A mantis in my window

This happened a couple of weeks ago. I was sitting in my room when I looked at the window and saw it. This was the largest praying mantis I have ever seen. These creatures have always fascinated me. They are beautiful, calm and deadly predators (like cats!).

I tried to take photos in macro mode using my Sony DSC-W50 digital camera. But it kept focusing on the mosquito wire of my window rather than focusing on the mantis itself. So, sorry for the quality of the photos. I could have shot the exterior of the window by opening it, but I didn't want Mr. Mantis to pray in my room, besides, if it managed to get inside my room, it would have driven my cat crazy!

I lost my virginity!

OK... I am lying! But that's the closest term that can describe what happened to me tonight!

Ever since I joined medical school, I made a secret pact with myself that I won't take private lessons. It was part ideological and part practical (lessons = waste of time).

Thank God, I am doing well in college and my grades are fine. But I decided to give a try at attending a private lesson in internal medicine. My glorious college doesn't offer good lectures and some professors don't attend, and those who attend, shouldn't! They are not born to be lecturers. Maybe they are superb doctors, but they can't teach!

Anyway, I decided it will be very foolish of me if I didn't take a lesson based on ideology alone, if the price was that I will be a less qualified doctor than my peers. Grades can go to hell, I want to be a good practitioner! So, I made the decision.

To start, I felt like something broke inside me! Seriously, it was like an idol that was breaking apart! It reminds me of the victory scene in Shadow of the Colossus when you kill a colossus and in turn, his idol is destroyed. I haven't taken a private lesson for 5 years... since I was in school!

Let's sum it up with that: the tutor was very good (and God damn the stupid policies that prevents a guy like him from explaining the whole internal medicine curriculum for us in college!). But the surroundings were abysmal. The entrance was surrounded by secondary school students. The center has everything from a cafeteria to a place where they sell pre-paid mobile phone cards! There was about 300 students in the lecture hall. The tutor arrived more than an hour late.

I really don't know if I can go on like this. The subject is tough, but taking a private lessons won't make it go away. The problem with me is that I am picky! If I am not 100% content with the person (and the surroundings) teaching me, then it will be useless. I am better off alone.

I will try another tutor and see.

Final piece of advice: If you are interested in medicine... don't study it here!