[[image:carpoolers.jpg:SHERRI!!!!!:left:0]]Sila has introduced me to the best new sitcom this year. It’s called Carpoolers. Every episode knocks me out cold laughing. Marmaduke is the best character ever. “Dasher? That’s a stupid name. My name’s Marmaduke” And I can never ever listen to Air Supply’s All Out Of Love again without breaking into a laugh. Ever.
Continue readingAuthor Archive: hisham
Ten Terrifying Tales of Terror: A Tag
Thanks to Jerry of Simple America for this tag. To find ten tales of terror I’ve isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. I’ve seen very few horror movies when I was younger, and I found out in my late teens that horror doesn’t really affect me as much as I thought it did. Not to say that I’m totally impervious to them. I still do flinch when gore catches me by surprise. But to determine which movie actually causes you to feel horror, to have an unsettling thought form in your mind while watching the movie and stay with you for years on end, now that is something to write about. I’ve seen a lot of supposedly horror movies, but they just don’t affect me because they’re too focused on gory deaths or has a premise that is clearly too far detached from reality (as opposed to suggesting it, […]
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And On The 501st Post, Shane Meets Apollo
Yes, really. Awesome wikked. Take it away, Shane: Today was the Winnipeg Comic Con. Richard Hatch was the big reason I wanted to go. JUST to get a pic of him and I together and an autograph. I did that very early on in the day, think I was third in line. I knew later he had this acting/improv/rpg character creation session. I went, thinkin that there was gonna be a million people and I’d get stuck in the back and not even get to interact with him. The room turned out to be very small, and there were only about 50 people. Me, sitting up front. He starts asking why people are here. I raise my hand. Suddenly, I’m talking to Apollo. One on one….I’m mentioning about being a GM and wanting to crerate better stories. He then talks about how RPGing and being a GM is harder than […]
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Meanwhile At Irfan’s School (or The 500th Post)
After Aidilfitri, Irfan also had some events at school, before exam week begins. The first being his belated birthday celebration at school, which apparently everyone has. Great for him. We were lucky to have the teacher wish up a happy birthday back in our days. In any case, the vanilla cake with the chocolate topping (and strawberries, as astutely observed by Irfan’s classmate) was delicious. We believe the orange-coloured fruit is apricot. Irfan’s gang huddle around their prey, the poor defenceless cake. If you mouseover the image below you will find the words “The cutting of the cake” appear on it. The cake is distributed by the teachers to the little humans. Happy Belated 5th Birthday at school, Irfan! Also, there was a belated Aidilfitri celebration which happened a day after the day with the vanilla cake. Here is Irfan prepared for school in full Raya getup, with baju Melayu, […]
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Why It’s Been Quiet Around Here Lately
It’s been a busy month, even since before Aidilfitri. The reason of it all will now be shown as a series of photographs for the event that took place at Shangri-La Hotel on the 24th and 25th of October. Sorry, no photos of me cause I didn’t get anyone to snap one at any time. Here’s the aforementioned series of photographs with captions: Before I left, I shook the organiser’s hand saying, “Awesome party, yo.” Next stop: LIMA 2007!
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ACS Kids at Aidilfitri
At Aidilfitri Irfan met and played with a whole bunch of kids of his generation whose parent(s) were former students of ACS Sitiawan. Here are some pics of Irfan and friends. Too bad we didn’t get photos of children of Lan, Dila and Gnana. Here’s Chris C’s (the other Chris C) daughter Aleyxia whom Irfan invited to play with the hamsters brought back from Kuala Lumpur by Irfan’s Opah Ngah. The small dark on is called Ciki and the big orange one is called Oren. Irfan loved to go upstairs and feed the little guys seeds and carrots, loudly and spiritedly commently on everything they do. Then, Irfan tries to escape the camera, to no avail Awi and Hanim came with young Aisyah. She found Tok Irfan’s fish pond and Irfan’s plastic toy car very intriguing. She was also very friendly with Ain, trying to get Ain to help her […]
Continue readingOur Seventh Year
[[image:7thanniversary.jpg:Seven Years Already?:center:0]] It’s been seven years since Ain and I were married, more than eleven years since we met. Through all that time, there’s been a lot of ups and a lot of downs. And I’m glad I went through it all with Ain giving me strength at my side and I’m looking forward to more years like that.
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Finally! Transformers: The Score!
One of the things that I looked for immediately after watching Transformers was the soundtrack CD. I was disappointed that there was only Transformers: The Album released which had, you know – a bunch of songs. The Linkin Park song What I’ve Done wasn’t too bad. So were the songs from Goo Goo Dolls and Smashing Pumpkins. But there was not one track released that had the movie’s orchestral score as composed by Steve Jablonsky. In fact there was no score soundtrack album at all. I’ve been monitoring the online news about the status of the score soundtrack. On or off? There was an online petition, but would it work? Sifting through a ton of information in the internet I found only an mp3 of Jablonsky’s Decepticon theme on the web. And there was nothing on Amazon.com… until last month or so. And as of last week, it’s been released. […]
Continue readingEid Mubarak From Sitiawan
[[popup:aidilfitri2007.jpg:(thumbnail):Everone but Sila & Vin:left:1]]Click on the thumbnail on the left for a photo of everyone present for Aidilfitri this morning. Although it wasn’t perfectly done, the different families are colour coded for ease of identification. 🙂 Although you can’t see them, Sila and Vin were also present by way of Skype video call and were privy to the regular Raya ruckus. Ain’t information technology grand? Their actual presence are missed by us all and we’re looking forward to them able to make it for Hari Raya in the coming years.
Continue readingFestivities And Then Some
Tomorrow is the last day of the month of Ramadhan. Tomorrow we head back to Sitiawan for Aidilfitri. We will try to beat the crazy traffic (an evil, sentient gestalt entity which appears every holiday season) by leaving Kuala Lumpur at 0200 hours. Also, this year is the first time Irfan happily chants, “Yay! Yay! Balik Raya!” which after a full Ramadhan of solid exhausting work, brings a smile to my face and takes my enthusiasm for the festive season up a notch or so. I still have a bunch of stuff to do before the end of the year which is weighing down on me like cinder blocks on my shoulders. Which just translates to… I’ll be back Tuesday night. I’ll also try to take and upload some Aidilfitri photos in the meantime. SELAMAT HARI RAYA AIDILFITRI TO ALL Yes, and even to Cindy O. Bear in the back […]
Continue readingDesktop-Adorning Mandalorians
[[popup:mandalorians.jpg:(thumbnail)::left:1]]So the other day I put up a thumb to the desktop wallpaper that was on my Ubuntu side of the computer. Here’s the wallpaper on the XP side of the laptop, its size reduced from 1280px by 800px. There’s a whole bunch of folks in Mandalorian armour. I found the image for the wallpaper on DeviantArt but now I can’t seem to find it again to link it here. Click on the thumb to view the image.
Continue readingGungan Slicer, A SWAG Request
[[popup:gunganslicer.jpg:(thumbnail):… with a bad attitude:left:1]]My first official completed SWAG request since this blog went live is done. The artwork was requested by Acheron and he wanted a picture of a Gungan slicer (a Star Wars term for a hacker, is all). So, here’s a purple skinned Gungan like Captain Tarpals, wearing a headgear with a comlink and a blaster pistol, quickly typing on the keyboard to retrieve some restricted data from a computer database. Hopefully, he isn’t discovered by guards any time soon. As a bonus, here’s a SWAG blog (Swog?) entry of the picture taking it through three days as a work-in-progress in this laptop, from its pencil work in Painter Classic to what it turned out to be.
Continue readingLaptop Problem, and then a Solution
I still haven’t replaced my home workstation since it crashed and burned back in April. I’ve been using this work laptop 100% for my computing and browsing needs since. It used to work great until a couple of months ago when everything (in the Windows partition, mind you… Ubuntu still works fine) suddenly seemed to be work slow. The problem was very apparent when video and audio were running. Not all the time, but enough times to really annoy the shart out of me. Also, another annoying symptom is that it takes 10 minutes for the laptop to finish its startup cycle. But now… no longer. I did some googling (which I should have done months ago) and came upon some help in various websites. So apparently, the primary IDE hard disk switched transfer modes from DMA to PIO. I thought I’d post how to fix this problem if any […]
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Irfan: Five Years After the Day
Tonight was Irfan’s 5th birthday, as can be noted via the photo of his cake below. See? It’s in the shape of the number five. Five. Five candles, ah ah ah. But yeah, Ain noted that it looks like the letter ‘S’. Here is the close up of the ancient inscription found on the cake during the archaeological dig: So, here we go by the numbers as per last year. Many thanks to Atok Irfan for his photography skills to get great photographic shots: Then I got behind the camera to take a picture of Atok & Opah Irfan: There were two cameras trying to take a photo of Irfan and Cik Emma. However, both were looking at the other camera when the button was pressed. Finally Irfan receives his birthday present from Atok Irfan! Check out the excitement in his eyes: It’s an Optimus Prime! But…. how to get […]
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Fragments From The Rim
All my life I’ve loved the idea of the Star Wars universe. When I discovered that there was a Star Wars Roleplaying Game published by West End Games back in 1987 I was excited. But this won’t be about how I got into RPGs, but the review of one of the best SWRPG supplements ever: Galaxy Guide 9: Fragments From The Rim Here is a list of why this supplement by Simon Smith and Eric Trautmann rocks: It’s a well-written book. It has tragedy and humour all packaged up in the entries and the vignettes in the book. The characters to be used as Non-Player Characters (NPCs) have fantastic backgrounds. Parts of the book are designed to actually make you chuckle, not in a non sequitur humour kind of way, but well within the context of its universe. It’s diverse. It shows you a dozen aspects of life in the […]
Continue readingThe Return of SWAG
[[image:swaglogo01.gif:SWAG banner:left:0]]Five years ago today, a bunch of tabletop roleplayers and artists and web programmers who met by chance on SWRPGNetwork’s Holonet Forums and shared a common dream (well, two really) finally launched the Star Wars Artists’ Guild after months of planning. One of the founding members was me. The Guild was created in order to create Star Wars artwork for the RPG, whether it be D6 or d20 or even if you made GURPS or Wushu or Fate games out of the setting. Today, in the hands of Kris Vanderwater, SWAG is relaunched (using Drupal replacing the old pMachine as its content management system) and all that’s old is new again. Thanks for your effort in relaunching the site, Kris, and Happy 5th SWAGDay. And also thanks to everyone from Bob Rogers, Chris Curtis, Derek Jones, Daniel Falconer and all the others who helped conceive and ran it initially […]
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