Rechargeable Fan for the Soul

No sir, chicken soup is not the only thing needed for the soul, rechargeable fans are just as important, especially if you live in Pakistan, and specifically Karachi.

The other day, I woke up in the morning to no electricity, bumbled about in the dark, got dressed, went to work, came back to no electricity. In frustration went to sleep, woke up 10:30ish, had barely managed to get out of bed and think about dinner when electricity went the third time, coming back at 1:30 am. One can endure the pitch dark but not the stuffy, humid Karachi heat. Humidity here was 81% or something yesterday. Anyway I have a trusted rechargeable fan. It runs like no tomorrow. Charge it fully once and it can last 8 hours or more without needing a recharge. Small enough to put on your bed and sleep with the wind in your face.

And I don't know why I made this post, maybe cuz the title is probably the only interesting statement in the entire thing or probably just for the heck of it I guess!

*poof*

Go Knock Yourself Out!

Many of us have tried doing quick funky graphics designing at one time or the other. Anything worth its salt requires time, effort and preferably loads of processing power. While stumbling around the internet today, I ran into Glogster. A site that claims you can 'poster yourself', and that too in 5 seconds. Essentially it is a flash based site with loads of background and artwork available, which you can throw together to create anything that comes to your mind. You can even upload your own photos/artwork and even video/audio. It is *pretty* cool. At least you can spice up your websites in no time!

The catch is it is only web-based. Trying to come up with a hack to download it as .jpeg or something. Maybe croft might have some clue. Anyway signing up is for free, and here is my first attempt for the purpose of this blog. Just random stuff put in a bag and jumbled. I swear the cat thinking about the fish climbed onto the scooter on its own! Pretty cool no? :D



*let the glogging begin!*


Addendum (after a few hours of experimenting):
Okay so the best solution I've figured so far for saving to your computer:

1. Use AFPL Ghostscript (also called Aladdin GhostScript. Make sure you get AFPL and not GPL as that doesn't have support for color printing). The current stable version is 8.54, available for download here . Also download and install GhostScript View GUI from here. The current version is 4.9.
2. Now right click on your glog and select print. Make sure you have a color printer installed. Select that, and check print to file. Save to disk by using .prn as the extension.
3. Now open the .prn file using GSView. Select file -> convert and save in any file type. for regular desktop printing .bmp with 72 pixel resolution would work. It also has 600 pixel resolution available which I suppose can be used for commercial printing. Though I won't vouch for the results.
4. The saved file will have a glogster tab on the top. Using trial and error, work your graphics below it and then u can edit out that area using image cropping.

Here is what my .jpg looks like (without the cropping, click to enlarge):


Thats all for now.

*Over and Out*

Cause to Celebrate

Long ago, I celebrated here, the 400th visit as recorded by my faithful statcounter. Since then we have progressed nicely along, and with the last post, the one below this one, we have reached another milestone; one whole year of faithful blogging, at least one post every month in the past 12 months.

*blog roll please*


oops i mean drum roll! ^_^



disappears into thin air *poof*

for your past *click* *here*

So I have a counter on my blog, which as is obvious counts the visits to here, and also comes bundled with a number of features including where the recent visitors came from and also the referring URL. While I was randomly clicking away at the referring URLs, one of them was a google search for I-T (Iqbal Talaat Bhatti's) blog. So I clicked away from link to link and this is what I stumbled across:

this blog → my statcounter page → Google search: "Iqbal Talaat Bhatti's blog" → youtube result for Iqbal Talaat Bhatti (movie alpha) → Similar vidoes on youtube → *some more clicking* → Batch12 GIKI welcome add → Batch12 GIKI farewell video.

So here it is. Some things I can say about: "I was there when it happened"

Batch12 GIKI Welcome Ad (2002)

Every year, the freshman batch in GIKI is welcomed in by the junior year batch. Typically it includes publicity, multimedia advertisements, all leading to the weekend of the welcome show and the concert. So in 2002, my batch i.e. batch12 (class of 2006) was welcomed in by batch10 (class of 2004). And here is the welcome add that they made for us:




Batch12 Farewell Video (2006)

So like the welcome, the farewell to the senior year is given by the Sophomore year. We did it for Batch10 in 2004 and Batch14 did it for us in 2006. Crofty (Saad Sadaruddin Khan) and Polly (Fahad Rasheed) surprised the rest of us Batch12 people with the following dedication to the batch. Reflects croft's skill at flash and polly's eye for photography and ear for music. It was an emotional 4 minutes 39 seconds for the 170 or so people in the auditorium. Here it is:




About Movie Alpha (sometime in the dark ages between 2002 and 2006, actually the 5th semester)

There are no words to describe this piece of work which I-T, Basim, Babarman, Rizvi and some other people in my batch found the time and brainwave to make back in the 5th semester. Here it is, and you have been *sufficiently* warned!