its a kinda interesting and fun survey on how the mind thinks... check it out...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml

oh btw, eid mubarak!

monday: prison break

tuesday: amazing race

wendesday: invasion, lost

thursday: survivor, apprentice

i haven't watched this much tv since high school... damn, i need a life  ... then again, tv hasn't been this great since the x-files... so enjoy while u can...

I've added a new album, just a few pics... I went to my brother's graduation ceremony recently for the toronto police college... if u have internet explorer, u can check out the video i made of the services pipe band... anyways, it was a really interesting ceremony... very orderly... loved the way they marched in and out of the buildings... and how their parade commander shouted instructions out at the top of his lungs!... the chief, bill blair was there also... he actually handed out the badges to all the new recruits... anyways, check out some of the pics below...

on another note, this will probably be my last blog entry for quite a bit... as i'm heading to Chicago and sunny side California tomorrow... hopefully i'll have a lot more pics to show you guys (all 4 of u who view my blog; yeah i know, i'm not a popular person, but life isn't a popularity contest, at least that's what i try to convince myself... hehe)... but yeah, see yall in a week or two... lates!

oh and btw, i do actually go to lectures at ISNA :P... and god willing, will do so this year too!

I forgot to upload the weekly pic last sunday.  Actually, I didnt' really forget, but rather had no time.  I was up till like 5:30 am on Sunday (yes, I know I had work the next day) trying to 'fix' my X-B-O-X so that I could play games on it that I purchased at a minimal price.  Anyways, this new picture is actually 13 pictures stitched together to form one big panorama of the front campus at UofT downtown (the better looking campus btw, beats UTM and Scarborough any day of the week and twice on Sundays :P).  But yeah, I also managed to convert the jpg to a movie, so check that out also.  Its pretty neat. Below is the pic and underneath is a link to the movie.  Click both to check em out.

 

Download movie here

So yesterday I went to go fight my this ticket I got... I was stopped at a 4-way intersection for making a 'rolling stop'. The cop asked for my license and driver's permit... I gave it to him and he looked at it... Meanwhile, I'm like pleading with the officer... asking him to let it go, because I"m poor as it is... and I cant' afford a ticket... He was like, "that's waht they all say"... so he then looks at my permit and sees that it wasn't currently validated... so he goes, wher'es the sticker? ... i'm like oh crap!... hoping that its in my glove compartment, i go to check... and thank god it was there... so i stick it on to the permit... and then he gives me a choice... he goes, "so i can either give u the ticket for a rolling stop, which comes with 2 demerit points, or i can give you the ticket for not validating u'r permit, which has no points"... surprisingly and naively, i'm like, "which one is better you think?" ... hahaha... anyways, he gave me the latter, failing to validate permit... so i had a $110 ticket on my hands which i decided to contest... so i called their office and booked an appointment with the prosecutor, called a 'first attendance meeting'

so that was yesterday... my first attendance meeting... there were about 15 other people there... people were called in alphabetical order... finally my name got called and i went into this small room where it was just the prosecutor and i... he's like, so u got charged for not validating u'r motor vehicle? ... and i'm like ... "yeah it was actually the permit which didn't have the sticker on it... the car had the sticker on it tho" ... and he's like ... "really?" ... and i'm like "yeah", showing him the permit and exactly which sticker i had left off... i basically brought in everything, u know, just in case i needed some sorta evidence or whatever... so he's like ... "actually, the ministry is supposed to stick it on to the permit, not you" ... was like ... and then 2 secs later ... .... and he goes, i'll withdraw the charges... and not a second after he said that i was like ... literally smiling from ear to ear ... it was a happy moment ... i saved myself $110 !!!! ...

anyways... that's my court story... a victorious moment in my life... now i gotta figure out what to do with the $110 i just saved :D

this past weekend i went paintballing in milton... there were about 50 other guys there... here are a few statistics to sum up the event:

number of hits on the mouth: 1
number of hits on the ear: 1
(the fact that i had face protection: priceless)
number of hits where the sun don't shine: 1
(the fact that i had protection there: even more priceless)
number of cuts due to hits: 1
number of hits on the rest of my body: 3
number of mosquito bites on my right hand alone: 26

but all in all, it was an awesome event... not as exhiliarating as playing halo, but still we had a great time... wish i had some pics to show but i didn't take any... ahh well... speaking of pics, i think i'm behind on my 'weekly pic' thing... i think i might just have to skip this week cuz i haven't taken any new pictures in a such a long time... and i've run out of ideas too... or maybe i just need to be a little more creative...

Try this test (put in bogus information for name etc... and just go straight to the test)... its about 18 questions but the end result might surprise you (as it did for me):

http://www.alllooksame.com/frameset-register.html

i got 3 out of 18 right ... which they define as 'inversely amazing'... and supposedly its not easy getting that many wrong ... so i'm pretty proud of myself :D

but back to the question: does this make me a racist? ...

I personally dont' think it does. Why?... Sure there are different races in the world. But not being able to tell one apart from another doesn't imply that I am discriminatory to any particular race. Maybe i'm just a little ignorant. So maybe I should take the time to find out about other races. After all, God split us into races and tribes so that we may get to know one another and appreciate the differences... no?

But i'm still not a racist

I've been busy. I probably not an excuse because uploading a picture shouldn't take that long anyway. Fact to the matter is, I haven't even taken any photos recently. So I'm left with putting up a *really* old picture. This was taken with my Nikon Coolpix 2500 camera and it was during my graduation. We were walking, single file, across university front campus when I decided to take a picture of Convocation Hall.

I'm hoping by next week, I should have some new pictures. But here's the pic for this week:

I took this picture with my macro conversion lens again. One of the quirks with this lens though is that when used with the Canon S1 IS at full wide-angle, then you can see vignetting at the corners. I made some modifications with photoshop to this picture also. It has become a habit for me, but I think everyone does it. By the way, I have no idea what the name of the flower is.

Anyways, I always put the picture on my other website, so the pic can be viewed here:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/rehan/siddiqui/photos/LT_IMG_2913.jpg

Also, I added a bunch of other pics I took at the park I went to last week. I find flowers the easiest pictures to take. First of all, they don't move. Secondly, they are usually outside, so when taken during the day, there's an abundance of light. Maybe there is an art to them I don't really know. Ah well, check em out here:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/rehan/siddiqui/photos/sets/flowers

But yeah, here's the weekly pic:

(... that is, the time i watched the last two episodes of 24)

WOW!!!... I am in awe ... literally, figuratively and physically ... I have just witnessed the season finale to the greatest show humankind has put forth on TV... by far, 24 is the most awesome show ever, EVER!!! ... no ending could get better than that... to those of you who haven't watched the season finale, READ NO FURTHER!

this season had the greatest villains... marwan especially... he is so calm and collected and sophisticated, he's everything jack bauer is not... u never hear him scream in any of the 24 episodes... nor does he display as much emotion as jack does... it was rather unfortunate that they killed him off because I would have loved to see him in another season... we are, however, lucky that Mandy will most likely return for another season... she got her presidential pardon for revealing the whereabouts of marwan and probably will make another appearance... this time i'm hoping its a bigger role, because her character really is great... she's basically everything jack bauer is, except she's a villain :P

this season also had a pretty good plot... CTU managed to stave off 2, count em, TWO nuclear attacks... had some pretty good luck along the way, but hey, the tv show is as realistic as they can make it... we also saw the return of some of my favorite characters, including Tony Almeida and former President David Palmer... Too bad Nina Myers didn't come back ... I hear she is dead, but i refuse to believe it! It would be great to see her and Mandy come back to give more trouble to CTU... haha. So yeah, Tony gets back with Michelle, which is just as well... What was surprising tho was that in the last episode, Michelle couldn't do what Tony had done for her in the previous season... Last season, Tony lost his job and faced possible jail time (if it wasn't for jack, he'd still be in jail now) by trying to save Michelle's life... this season, Michelle was put in that same precarious position where on the one hand, she could save Tony's life, but on the other, she could save millions of people's lives... she chose the latter... haha. Sorry Tony, she's just not that into you :P

and finally the best ending off all time... just like a typical '24' episode cliffhanger, the final episode of this season wasn't any different... we are left wondering, what will happen now that JACK BAUER IS DEAD!.. of course he's not really dead, but as Palmer said, "for all intents and purposes, Jack Bauer is dead"... where will he go? what will he do? will he be back?!?! ... it was quite the scene at the end, when Jack puts on his sunglasses and walks along the railway tracks into the sunset (actually it was probably the sunrise, cuz it was 7am)... the writers left it very open i guess so that they have a lot to work with next season... and it gives the audience that sense of wanting him to come back... but we shall see next season... in the mean time however, i have to watch season 3... i kinda missed the first few episodes... hehe ...

I have recently found that I'm pretty useless without my computer... and my life is so dependant on it that if I were to lose it, my life would drastically change. At the moment I have 3 computers. One is a laptop which I use for software development and just to surf and chat while lying in my bed (love that wireless connection :D). My other computer is my server which I recently bought but haven't made much productive use for. The third computer is my desktop, which has been with me for about 4 years now i think? Something like that... but about 1 week ago, it died on me. The power supply unit gave way. Out of all three, this was the most important one too. It's got everthing on it. All my digital pics, movies, games... 2 freakin hard drives totally 180 GB... I have all my personal info on it too, like my resume. So now that its gone (hopefully temporarily), as pathetic as it sounds, my life is at a standstill.

For example, I can't complete my brother's taxes cuz the info and software is on that computer. He's been bugging me for a while now too. All my emails are on that computer. Like every email I've rec'd since... 1998 or something. Trust me, that's a lot of emails. Something on the order of 10,000 or so. Oh, and the season finale for 24 was on Monday, but my friend's surprise birthday part was the same day. Had my computer been working, I would have taped it using my TV Tuner card on that computer. That computer is also connected to my TV, so that means, I can't watch any movies or nothing from it either. Man, I feel so ... so... useless!

Anyways, I ordered a new (well, used) power supply unit and hopefully I'll be getting it today, so that my life can get back on track... haha. In the future, I think I need to distribute workload to my other computers so that I'm not dependant on any one computer for everything.

I was hearing on the radio a few days ago, something I was a little shocked by. Apparently, a study was conducted in London where it was found that IQ drops about 10 points in people who are constantly interrupted by e-mails or phone calls or such. And this is more than twice the impact that smoking marijuana has on IQ levels, which is only a decrease of 4 points! I shouldn't be surprised however because I am prone to this 'infomania', the bombardment of information. How many of us stop everything we do as soon as that MSN Messenger window rolls out onto our desktop informing us of new email in order to see who it is that wants our attention and why? Or how about when that little envelope suddenly appears in our system tray alerting us that we have new email in our Outlook inbox? Its like the world stops, we zone out of what we were doing, and zone into that latest email. This obviously poses as a distraction and hence has negative consequences. What I mean is, we lose our ability to concentrate on what we're doing, whether its work or talking to someone. Speaking of talking to people, I've noticed a new trend now a days, and this occurs especially in the workplace. People leaving conversations, like right in the middle of them, just to answer cell phone calls. Not only do i find that utterly rude and distracting, but it just kills the conversation and all trains of thought within. Anyways, just another consequence of technology... hmmm, maybe the next time i talk about this subject, it might be something positive

I took this picture at this park called Guildwood Park, out in Scarborough down by the lake. It was actually more of a garden because there were people there who were taking wedding pictures, all dressed up, including the brides and grooms. I was there to take pictures of the flora mainly and got some nice lookout pictures of Lake Ontario from high above. I think it was the Scarborough bluffs actually. I'll be posting those pics later on this week. But for now, here's the main pic. I used my wicked-azz super macro-lens for this shot to get right into the flower. I love that lens, because of its high magnification factor. And its perfect for my camera when I attach an adapter lens. I'm not sure, however, what the name of this particular flower is. For all I know, it could be a weed, like your everyday dandelion. hahaha... but what i liked about this picture was that i caught the ant on it. I think its an army ant... anyhow, u'r comments are always welcome and appreciated... thanks :)

Added a new picture... see below... its my typical favorite skyline picture... but from a different angle this time, as I actually took it from this place downtown on Cherry Street. I had to modify the picture a bit using Photoshop because the actual picture didn't come out as I had wanted. I basically increased the brightness and contrast a bit. But this made some invisible noise in the image to appear quite unwantingly. So then, to fix that I had to use a filter in Photoshop that essentially 'despeckled' the noise. I think what it did was just blur the image a bit. This got rid of the noise, but it created another problem. My image was a little blurry. So then I sharpened the image and voila! ... Not a masterpiece, but hopefully one of these days I'll go back and take the perfect night shot of the Toronto skyline.

Btw, for some reason, MSN messes up the pictures that I upload to their servers. So if you look at the picture in my 'photos' section of this blog, you will see the 'not so great' version. Instead, click the link below to see what the picutre looks like:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/rehan/siddiqui/photos/LT_IMG_2662.jpg

Or click the picture below to compare the above version to the MSN messed up version (I feel like I'm being repetitive :P):