Hulleye Comes By!

happy new year to all chinese and muslims.

links of the day.

worth 1000’s photoshopping contest of celebrity day jobs.

to celebrate the year of the dog, here’s the top 100 greatest dogs in pop culture history.

maxim’s 100 things to know about women.

duck hunt 1945: a sweet mashup game comprised of “duck hunt” and “call of duty.”

the dontcallthis.com experiment: they post a number, allow people to leave voicemails, then make the messages available for downloaded. Wwo will call, why will they call, and what will they say?

here’s what the entire drive from LA to new york is like in this time lapsed under three minutes mellow video.

how to use firefox without touching your mouse.

more wrongs of corporate america. the repentance of a hitman of a different kind.

“John Perkins didn’t wield a gun - he wasn’t even a paid-up CIA agent - but he did have nefarious ways of making countries around the world bend to the will of the US. Until, he tells Gary Younge, his conscience got the better of him and he looked for other ways to change the world.”

On November 24 2002, Lucio Gutierrez swept to power in Ecuador’s presidential election. It was a momentous victory for the populist, leftwing leader who had pledged support for the poor indigenous Indians in a country where 60% live in poverty.

The way John Perkins tells it, within a week Gutierrez had a visitor. “An economic hit man walked into his office and said, ‘Congratulations, Mr President, I just want you to know that over here I’ve got a couple of hundred million dollars for you and your family if you cooperate with your Uncle Sam and our oil companies. And over here I have a man with a gun in his hand and a bullet with your name on it.’”

Within two months of his election, Gutierrez had apparently made his choice. Implementing a swingeing austerity programme that attacked the very livelihoods of the people who elected him, he raised fuel prices by more than 35% and froze public sector workers’ salaries for a year.

read on.

vonaurum’s comment reminded me of my latest obsession, star trek: new voyages. this brilliant project was envisioned by james cawley, a professional elvis impersonator. james cawley, who plays kirk, and director jack marshall are the cocreators of star trek: new voyages. they are repairing a rift in the space-time continuum, fixing the most glaring flaw in the history of science fiction. as every geek in the galaxy knows, captain kirk and the crew of the uss enterprise set out on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds. to seek out new life and civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before. but nbc canceled the show in 1969 after only three seasons. new voyages aims to fill fans in on what they missed. in september, cawley and marshall assembled more than 50 trek lovers from across the US (and the uk and canada) to shoot the third episode of what should’ve been season four. at their current pace of one episode a year, they’ll finish the five-year mission in 2054. this project got featured in wired. you can also find the episodes on google video. in essence, this is what you call “open source”.

guess who’s personal blog i came across? genius.

munjal gives us the insight on the up and coming beta release of riya. and all i can say is wow. my mouth is still open wide in astonishment at the screenshots and all the fixes that have come in. the UI needed some major overhaul and i’m extremely delighted to know that it will get it. this looks brilliant guys. good luck with it.

ed harriman on cronyism and kickbacks,

The sums are simple. Reconstruction will cost considerably more than originally imagined. The American administration has committed most of its funds. The Iraqis have neither the money nor the expertise to run the projects that have been completed. There’s little transparency or accountability. To judge from the audits published so far, at least $12 billion spent by the Americans and by the Iraqi interim and transitional governments has not been properly accounted for. Almost three years after the fall of Saddam, the GAO reports, ‘it is unclear how US efforts are helping the Iraqi people obtain clean water, reliable electricity or competent healthcare.’ The Bush administration has decided to provide no more reconstruction funds.

The auditors who have discovered Iraq’s deepening financial crisis have been ignored. They asked the US ambassador and the US military commander in Iraq for their views. Neither replied. The US State Department was to submit estimates of how much it will cost to complete all American-funded projects in Iraq to the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Office won’t discuss the matter. Earlier this month, Brigadier-General William McCoy told reporters: ‘The US never intended to completely rebuild Iraq . . . This was just supposed to be a jump-start.’

more here.

all sorts of great useless knowledge here from why yawning is contagious, to why men have nipples. where it’s bad to crack your knuckles, or if carrots improve your vision? what’s more sanitary, getting peed on getting spat on, or whether sperm is nutritious? apparently the times online has done it’s research well. more useless knowledge, i knew all the results of all this questions before i read this article, but it’s a nice concise summary of useless trivia. also varma, let’s us know from his useless knowledge archives that the average American woman owns 8 bras and typically wears each one 5 times before washing them.

zappa on crossfire. just a little something in light of google bowing down to censorship, and going against their “don’t be evil” statements. i really should go and dig out my old zappa albums.

part 1.

part 2.

business week interviews shaukat aziz during his stay in the US. he speaks about how pakistan is picking itself up after the earthquake and the US bombing and his tenure as prime minister.

So you feel things are much better than they were five years ago?
Definitely. I think most people now feel that. And one indicator is that you can’t find hotel rooms in Pakistan anymore!

The U.S. is a big backer of your reform efforts.
They’ve been a great ally and a great friend of ours.

But how do you feel when the U.S. bombs a Pakistani village?
You know our view. It’s a very regrettable incident. We cannot condone it. Innocent lives have been lost. At the same time we are very committed to fight terrorism, jointly with the U.S. and others. Because terrorism is no solution to any problem, and loss of innocent life is unfair. So we are committed to fighting terrorism. But there is a need for more coordination and more communication. The people of Pakistan are very angry.

yes ladies and gentlemen, this is your prime minister speaking. jack ass frosh students in first year university judge national economies by hotel room capacities, yet i could swear i read the same thing being said by our prime minister in this interview.

in case anyone cares, whenever people browsing here using internet explorer came along, the sidebar (the one with the quotes, blogroll, news feeds etc.) on the right used to drop all the way down to the bottom of the page. i’ve finally found the time to fix that.

it’s the way IE handles objects and is a non-standards compliant browser and objects in one container wouldn’t be able to overlap into the next container. so that issue should be solved now. people using firefox and other browsers wouldn’t have experienced this issue.

a lot of my readers know that one of my favourite bitching topics is corporations and, the biggest bitch of them all is wal-mart. forbes looks at how it took over the world.

here’s something new. a complete and concise list of the top 50 people in america who are absolutely loathsome. believe it or not, it’s a surprise ending, the number one spot isn’t by bush, but i’ve hinted towards him recently. this is a hilarious read. go through the whole thing.

20. Oprah Winfrey

Charges: Winfrey’s entire life is an exercise in self-aggrandizement, from the TV show which tells us what to read and how to live to her eponymous magazine, every issue of which features her smug countenance on its cover. More than just another insufferable Hollywood egotist, Oprah is something more akin to a housewife messiah, providing false hope and faux spirituality for experience-deprived worshippers. Everything she does is strategically designed to draw more praise, more devotees, and of course more money. Recently had celebrated poet Maya Angelou on her program to promote her new poem, which Oprah read for the audience as if she wrote it herself, as she seems to actually believe.

Exhibit A: Dr. Phil.

Sentence: Crushed by self-commissioned 40-story platinum Oprah statue.

25. Paris Hilton

Charges: Won’t go away. A head so empty, the rails of coke that sustain her must dissipate in clouds around her ears; this residual high the only explanation anyone would come within five feet of her. Brainless, her spinal cord defies physics, like an Indian rope trick. Her Carl’s Jr. commercial, while an uninspired approximation of eroticism, was still hotter than her actual “sex” tape, in which she only made noise when she wasn’t screwing—that’s not hot. Squints inexplicably for photo ops, suggesting even minimal focus is beyond her. Her continued success as a celebrity famous for nothing, despite the eerie resemblance she bears to the inbred banjoist from Deliverance and a lack of talent so profound that others become duller as they approach her, indicates that something is fundamentally wrong with humanity.

Exhibit A: Somehow, everybody in America knew that this completely pointless person had lost her dog, and we are all diminished by the experience.

Sentence: Locked in a room with a high steel ceiling which lowers a centimeter per hour, until she either solves a Rubik’s cube or is crushed; whichever comes first.

Read on for more.

She came to the surface to see the sun, Do you think she could be the only one. She must just have left the sea , Her hair was spun satin as it glistened in the sun. Smokey blue eyes reflected the tides as she smiled at me, Her rising and falling breast was like the calming wind after a storm. Gently, next to my ear she began to sing songs of love. Her hands reached to me I saw it in her eyes as she yearned for the forbidden. My heart melted as I had no choice but to surrender myself to this mystical maiden so beautiful before me.

it’s been a while since i posted science stuff, so i’m glad i am today. the title of this post says it all.

remember the ferrofluid videos i had linked to? here are some stunning pictures at the end of this page of the same stuff. it’s absolutely brilliant to look at and there is a new video (10MB) on there as well. do check it out.

aleem give’s a glimpse of the future along with a disclaimer…”it’s closer than you think.”

well congrats to all pakistani’s. it is the 20th anniversary today of a proud moment in our history. (note sarcasm) 20 years ago today, the first computer virus was born to the credit of lahori’s, basit and amjad alvi. they successfully crippled computers all across the united states as computer screens in the US read:

“Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Basit * Amjad (pvt) Ltd. BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791,443248,280530. Beware of this VIRUS…. Contact us for vaccination…”

when the brothers began to recieve a large number of phone calls from people in USA, Britain, and elsewhere, demanding them to disinfect their machines, the brothers were stunned and tried to explain to the outraged callers that their motivation had not been malicious. they ended up having to get their phone lines cut off and regretted that they had revealed their contact info in the first place.

still semi-successful in business today, the brothers run a popular ISP and VoIP service via Brain.Net today.

F-Secure has some amusing comments.

so the man who created the internet and did remarkable other thinks like noticing changing spots on zebra’s, al gore, has just recently BLASTED the bush administration back to texas.

we’re all aware there are issues surrounding president bush’s recent wiretapping authorizations. al gore has written an intelligent, stirring, and comprehensive speech to the legislature that addresses these matters directly and in a way that may serve to wake up even the most staunch supporters of the president.

a friend of mine just helped make a film. do check it out. good shit raul, you loser. don’t forget where you were before you were in philly you bastard.

after that k5 article, you should read this slate article on whether the missile strike in pakistan was illegal or not.

am i the only one who finds this video extremly and positively disturbing?

yup he truly is…

and the latest news and personal favourite, sharon gives the book of joel a bad name….how dare he!!

thanks big fella!

P.S. these above clips are extremely short and should be fine for dialup/low bandwidth use.

The acclaimed critic of U.S. foreign policy, Noam Chomsky, analyzes Bush’s current political troubles, the war on Iraq, and what’s really behind the global ‘war on terror’ in this interview by Geov Parrish at Alternet. If you haven’t heard or read of Chomsky, shame on you.

You’ve been tracking U.S. wars of foreign aggression since Vietnam, and now we’re in Iraq. Do you think there’s any chance in the aftermath, given the fiasco that it’s been, that there will be any fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy? And if so, how would it come about?

Well, there are significant changes. Compare, for example, the war in Iraq with 40 years ago, the war in Vietnam. There’s quite significant change. Opposition to the war in Iraq is far greater than the much worse war in Vietnam. Iraq is the first war I think in the history of European imperialism, including the U.S., where there was massive protest before the war was officially launched. In Vietnam it took four or five years before there was any visible protest. Protest was so slight that nobody even remembers or knows that Kennedy attacked South Vietnam in 1962. It was a serious attack. It was years later before protest finally developed.

What do you think should be done in Iraq?

Well, the first thing that should be done in Iraq is for us to be serious about what’s going on. There is almost no serious discussion, I’m sorry to say, across the spectrum, of the question of withdrawal.

Keep reading. Trust me it’s worth it.

Digital cinema expert Patrick Von Sychowski says:

This short film, described as ‘[u]ndoubtedly the most obscure and esoteric animated film ever produced by the Disney empire”, recently re-surfaced on several P2P networks. I’m sure that it won’t be getting a two-disc Disney DVD Collector’s Edition treatment anytime soon.

Snip from description:

Walt Disney’s The Story Of Menstruation — Presenting the Story of Menstruation. A Walt Disney Production Through the Courtesy of Kotex Products — was originally delivered to the International Cellu-Cotton Company on October 18, 1946. It runs approximately ten minutes. It has been estimated that the film has been seen by approximately ninety-three million American women. Neither sexuality nor reproduction is mentioned in this influential film, and an emphasis on sanitation makes it, as Disney historian Jim Korkis has suggested: ‘a hygienic crisis rather than a maturational event.’

Schoolgirls in the 1950s were shown ‘educational’ films, such as ‘Figure Forum’ and ‘Facts About Your Figure’ (made by the Warner Brassiere Company) and it helped create ‘needs’ for such things as foundation support, cosmetics, and a variety of ’sanitary’ products in young girls as early as eleven years old.

IMDB Link, and here is a larger jpeg composite of 7 stills from the movie.

via BB

You figure that in today’s day and age with computers and mathematicians, this would have been figured out a lot sooner.

Elevator company Fujitec America has installed a new elevator system in Seattle’s Metropolitan Park West Tower that groups riders together based on their shared destination. According to the company, you may wait a bit longer for the elevator but your overall time spent getting to your desired floor will be reduced. From the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Self-standing and wall-mounted kiosks with touch screens are installed in common areas where elevator passengers wait. Passengers enter their destination floor on the touch screen.

The requests are processed, and a message is displayed informing users to ride a specific car.

“In a conventional system, waiting passengers crowd into the first available elevator, which often results in the car stopping at numerous floors, increasing travel time,” said Joe Rennekamp, vice president of engineering at Fujitec’s corporate offices in Lebanon.

In time, the new Fujitec system becomes even more efficient at grouping passengers by learning elevator-use patterns, said Rennekamp…

so k5 has an interesting discussion going on about the recent air raid in pakistan. scroll down.

obscenity of the day via tost.

oh and here’s some more for all you ikea fans.

Visualcomplexity.com is a great site if you want to see illustrations featuring lots of boxes & circles connected to each other with lines and text sprinkled liberally here and there.

via kottke.

a superb summary of critical digressions or the argumentative pakistani by husain naqvi from 3QD.

well i’m back. much happy to see all the love and people wanting me to continue posting around here. not really sure why though. all i do is paste obscure news from around the world.

nabeel - been there done that, both taking the rickshaw photo and getting held up and wallet stolen.

super cow - it’s eid. you’re dead.

ayesha - i got lots. will share soon.

adnan - sorry dude. didn’t even check email once. i only got about 700 emails to sift through.

mars - was fairly safe.

xill-e-illahi - will wonders never cease. =)

aurum, exseno - was a lovely bonfire at sandspit for new years night.

kay - the only sadaf halai i know of is my sister in law. you won’t find any other sadaf halai since sadaf really isn’t a bohra name. and no, all of them aren’t related. there are two major halai families that i know of. then there are the memon halai’s. theyre another category altogether.

shaima - thanks for the wish dear.

for my debut link of the year, how about trying to prove if jesus existed?