sikander.org » 2005

ottawa for a day

sikander — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 17:45:02 +0000

a busy day; drove from toronto to ottawa with my dad who had a meeting there. met dooh close to his house. went downtown and had excellent food at the Persian Cuisine Express. watched Syriana at the World Exchange Plaza. met dad near bank/slater. dropped dooh at his house and then drove back to toronto. long day but good movie and a peaceful drive.

rescue on highway 401

sikander — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 17:45:54 +0000

my cellphone rang around 330 pm. i picked up and it was shekhar. i knew he was coming to toronto again since shweta was going to participate in the North American Talent Hunt finals. but shekhar & co. had had some trouble on the highway..... they ran out of gas!! lol.

i know shekhar has a habit of ignoring the gas meter when it gets close to empty. once we were driving from mississauga to north york and the meter was exactly at E but shekhar kept insisting that we have more than enough to make it.. and we did. E is not completely empty but more of a warning to get gas as soon as possible. surprisingly you can drive quite a lot of kms after hitting E.

but not today. they were stranded on the highway, in the left shoulder, somewhere close to Yorkdale mall. shekhar was wondering if i am free and if i can bring them some emergency gas right away. calling a tow truck would cost more than $100 - $150 just to reach the closest gas station.

since i wasn't doing anything majorly important, i agreed and left right away with gas in a small red gas container. they were on 401 west bound while i was driving on 401 east. i passed them about 20 minutes after leaving my house and then made a U turn after yonge street to get back on the 401 express west bound.

it was a bit scary driving at 110 km/h on the fastest lane and then slowing down to come to a halt on the left shoulder. since its winter and there were remnants of the last snow fall on the shoulder, i was worried about whether i would have enough space to come to a full stop without loosing control because of the highspeed and snow. thankfully everything went ok and i reached them safely.

later in the evening shweta sang in front of more than a hundred people... and she won!!!! now she'll be going to India for the semi-finals.. airfare paid and provided by the organizers. so cool and awesome. congrats! lunato also called from korea to congratulate here. Rogers TV asked for a short interview and she will be on TV during one of the many multicultural news they have on the Rogers Local channel.

we had a late dinner at dennys and then went downtown toronto. eventually around 4 am shekhar dropped me home and they departed for their long journey back to ottawa.

Supersize French Vanilla

sikander — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 07:20:35 +0000

mmmm french vanilla cappuccino from tim hortons

sorry lunato, i know you love timmys and have run out of the tim hortons gift coffee packs that i sent :P

Toronto @ Night

sikander — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 07:18:39 +0000

took some pictures of downtown Toronto on my way there to pick up thrawn from the yonge street store. i ought to buy a tripod to keep the camera steady when taking long exposure shots out in the open. still, i think they look pretty decent.

Post Office Inspection

lunato — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 07:17:23 +0000

i had a day off regular work today and went to a different post office for an inspection. sikander asked me to take my camera with me and take some pics so here they are. now i have to write a boring report about their daily operations and how they can improve.

Thrawn @ Work

sikander — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 07:15:26 +0000

over the summer thrawn started managing one of the four Bellagio In Wear clothing stores that saef's family owns. he continued working part time when school started and would go there after his classes. one of the stores is on Yonge Street in downtown toronto, one on Eglinton/Dufferin, and another on St. Catherines/Dufferin.

i've picked him up from yonge or st. catherines quite a few times depending on whether he has a ride home or if he is taking the Go train/bus. these pictures are from the St. Catherines store sometime around 8 pm.

Jersey Wedding

sikander — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 07:06:28 +0000

we dont have any relatives in canada. but we do have some in usa and the closest ones, geographically speaking, are in new jersey. i'm not entirely sure what my relationship with them is.. probably the bride is my cousin or my aunt. my parents were invited so they drove down to new jersey for two days. i was thinking of going and recreating the opening of the Sopranos with my digicam :P

good luck to the newly weds. i hope they have a happy and joyous life together.

Seagate Barracuda

sikander — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 07:24:03 +0000

my computer died two days ago. it rebooted automatically and then halted at the boot screen with a message saying "Hardrive failure is imminent. Backup immediately." i turned off the computer immediately, called harry and asked if he had ever seen such a message before. he had and he also advised me to back up immediately and get a new hardrive. i called skid and asked which should brand i should buy since he has had two hardrives fail on him in the past. his recommendation was a Seagate barracuda. i had two Western Digitals in my computer.. a 60GB and an 80GB.

the computer never did turn back on. the warning message was about the hardrive but the CPU had died too. doh! i had a 2.5 Ghz Celeron and i decided to upgrade to a 3 Ghz Pentium 4. i had to buy a motherboard as well since the old one had fried itself along with the cpu. it was probably some kind of a power surge that killed everything.

in the meantime i connected my laptop to my dell 2405 for a very odd computing experience. infonec worked on my computer for a day and a half and installed the new motherboard and cpu. i also bought a 120 GB seagate and a DVD writer for backups and today i spent most the day installing Windows XP and setting up all the required programs.

luckily the hardrive that was going to fail imminently only had a few corrupt folders and i did not loose much. phewh. a very sudden and expensive upgrade... but wow, CounterStrike runs soo much better now.

Piano lessons

lunato — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 04:26:06 +0000

Cutest niece in the world

lunato — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 04:21:03 +0000