The Render

What a weekend for sports!

I was channel-surfing last morning and to my surprise landed on the Wimbeldon Men’s Tennis final! This year’s contenders were the brilliant Roger Federer and the amazing Rafael Nadal. What an awesome matchup. By the time I started watching the match, the two were two sets into it, with the first set looking like a clean (6-0) sweep of Federer over Nadal but things started to get heated up in the tie-breaker of the third set.

I love watching Roger Federer play his game. He’s got so much composure and he seems very humbled. Oh and he’s got amazing skill to boot, heh. This was actually the first time I actually saw Rafael Nadal playing a game as opposed to watching him in the hightlight reel of most newscasts. He’s got a lot of skill and it’s always nice to see talented young people rising up the ranks.

Tennis is such an amazing game. It’s simple enough that anyone can just pick up a racquet and play but also complicated enough for players like Roger Federer, Pete Sampras and the like to show us amazing control and spin. It really is a refined sport, there’s a lot of prestige involved (especially at Wimbeldon), there’s a rich history, there’s tennis etiquette and so much more that I feel makes the game special. Moreover, the tournament is international, attracting players coming from all over the globe which undoubtedly calls for fierce competition and a great experience for the tennis viewer.

By the way, Roger Federer won the match 6 sets to 3 leading him to a fourth consecutive Wimbeldon title…wow.

Mac owners may be pleased to note that Apple has released an update to their Mac OS X operating system. With the update, the version number becomes 10.4.7. For a complete list of fixes in this update, click the appropriate link on Apple’s Support Downloads page.

I don’t know about you but I love an update!

The Camino Project has released the latest version of Camino (1.0.2). Some improvements over v1.0.1 include security fixes and a fix allowing Camino’s bookmark metadata to be added to Spotlight’s ‘Privacy’ tab.

For those who haven’t given Camino a chance, now’s a great time to check it out!

For all you Opera (browser) fans out there, if you haven’t already heard, Opera 9 is now available for download on the official Opera-browser site (opera.com). Some new features include mini-applications called “widgets”, tab thumbnails and BitTorrent support built right-in to the browser. Check out the official Opera-browser website for more information on new features.

Having tried out Opera 8.5x, I didn’t really see a reason why I should use it compared to Safari but I’ve installed Opera 9 since it was publicly released. Perhaps I’ll write a little mini-review of the browser like I did for Shiira.

Until next time,

Happy Browsing!

I’ve come across a new browser for the Macintosh platform called Shiira. I heard about it a while ago but since then I’ve opted for Camino and enjoyed it as an alternative to Safari. After using Shiira, I think I’m going to uninstall Camino!

There are so many cool features in Shiira. One of the best is the ability to perform an expose-type gallery of all your open tabs. What an awesome feature! I’ve also looked at the Omniweb browser and liked their tab-thumbnail feature but I prefer Shiira’s expose-style gallery of tabs a lot more. It saves a lot of screen space over a page-thumbnail/sidebar implementation and that’s a big concern for me since I don’t like my 12.1-inch iBook screen to be filled with one application.

Speaking of sidebar, there’s one in Shiira too. The sidebar has vertical tabs titled: Bookmars, History, Download, Page holder and RSS. The Bookmarks tab allows you to manage bookmarks. It even allows you to import your Safari or Firefox bookmarks! The Download tab allows you to see all active downloads and pause/stop them and the RSS tab allows you to read and search all of your RSS feeds. The RSS tab is amazing. It took a while for me to get used to it because adding RSS feeds wasn’t as simple as doing so in Safari. The feature that makes it so amazing is that I don’t have to load the RSS feed contents in the main browser window. The RSS tab consists of two windows: A list of RSS feeds and a corresponding RSS article viewer. Simply click on an unread article and the contents are displayed in that part of the sidebar. I haven’t played around with the Page Holder tab yet so I can’t offer any comments on it.

I recommend Shiira to anyone who’d like to try out something other than Safari. Although both browsers are great in their own right, Shiira is definitely one of the best browsers I’ve ever used.

On June 15, 2006, I, Sayam Masood, received a Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc) degree during the convocation ceremonies held in Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto. It was so awesome to see friends again! From what I gathered, it seemed like a lot of people hadn’t kept in touch so convocation kinda served as a reunion of sorts.

This moment in my life has made me reflect on so many things. When starting any kind of study, whether it be at high school, college or university, one is constantly working towards some sort of diploma, degree or the like. Each problem set, each midterm, each final exam is just a stepping stone to obtaining your degree. But in the midst of all the work and stress, one sometimes forgets this and feels overwhelmed. The key is to make the best of each situation, try to find the positives, if you don’t succeed at something, figure out why and make an effort to learn from your mistakes. Try to make the best out of each problem a course presents you with. Hey, it’s better than being negative all the time, right?

My high school and university days were some of the best days of my life. My thanks goes out to everyone who supported me and gave me those awesome memories!

I’ve been dealing with a cold these past few days. I’m feeling a little better today though, so I’m glad that I’m getting back to normal.

I’ve been recommended to put honey in warm water with a dash of lemon to cure the cold. I think I’ll give that a try soon [smile].

Gotta love these mid-summer colds eh? Hehe.

I thought it had been a while since I did any programming in Ruby/Rails so I’ve decided to work on a little programming assignment for myself. Besides, I got sick of playing PS2. I’m done the basic stuff and am just thinking about what else to add. I hope to unveil it sometime soon so keep an eye open for that.

Other than that, nothing much’s been going on…I’m loving the rain we’re having here in Toronto lately. I just love the way city streets reflect light when it’s raining and the flurry of activity when a raindrop hits a puddle…

On with programming!

Yup, it’s that time again…end of the school-year room cleanup.

I’ve been dusting and sorting away through books and papers for like 4 hours now. Phew, it’s time for a break. I didn’t realize how many lecture notes, assignments, midterms and rough sheets were lying around until I started the clean-up.

The most time-consuming part of the exercise was my bookshelf though. What a mess that was! Anyway, the bookshelf’s pretty much all dusted-off now and the books/items on it are arranged in a nice, clean fashion. Although I’m not totally done cleaning up my room, I think my mom will be proud of my accomplishment [smile].

After setting up a blog on another popular blogging system, I came to realize how many awesome themes the WordPress blog system has and really wanted to get in on the action. Actually, a friend of mine also has a blog powered by WordPress and I guess that kinda tipped me over and now I’m with WordPress.

Hope you like the new blog, I certainly do.

I made a trip downtown this fine summer afternoon to meet a friend who had an interview with a company down on University and College. We hadn't seen each other in a while so we caught up over lunch. I had a good time and the food was pretty good too, hehe.

Now, you might be wondering what all that has to do with the title of this post. Well, as you know, there are a few stores in the Eaton Centre area that sell videogames so...I bought two, that's right, two PS2 games!

Hope they're as good as the reviews make them out to be!

Okay, I'm off. Boy am I hungry!

Greetings everyone!

So, you’ve managed to take some time off your day and visit my blog!

I don’t really have much to post about right now, just that my engineering exams are now over so I’m waiting for marks to come out and am looking for a job in the IT industry. If you happen to know any places that are hiring, please do let me know.

In the meantime, thanks for stopping by and be sure to keep visiting. I’ll try to blog as often as I can!