Happy Sheep Day

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

Anyway, Happy Eid all.

Hiyya Hiyya – Mo Qadsiya

Yesterday, I jumped at the chance to go and see the new “Jaber Stadium”. Anyone who watched the game yesterday will know that the place was packed. Cars were parking all over the place and there were no signs whatsoever to guide the people who were there for the first time.

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.

IT’S 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.

My Blackberry Curve 8900 is in Endless “App Error 523″ Restart Cycle

I woke up Thursday morning to find my Curve displaying the image above.It was reading “App Error 523″ and the next line has a clickable “Restart” button. I thought it was no biggy and I’ll just restart the device. but after a lengthy restart I get the same screen again. I didn’t install any new program and before going to bed I was checking my messages and it was working fine.
This sucks because this is my main phone and communication device. Nothing beats a good physical keyboard. Have to check with an expert for a solution.

Teabag in “estikana”? Don’t Think So

My Co-Worker asked the tea boy here at work for some tea and he brought him one of those super-sized “estikana” and he told him that I would like a normal sized estikana. The tea boy said ok and got him what you see in the image above. What a waste of perfectly good tea.

Sorry for the week without posting by the way.

يا فرحة ما تمت

I thought that my problem where over after doing my previous post. But due to epic clumsiness from me I’m in another dilemma.

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).

It’s All Good

About 2 weeks ago I posted about my PC and Windows Home Server both are out of commission. And I was taking my PC to Hawally that same day.

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.

Out With The Old, In With The New

During the past couple of months I finished the process of upgrading my mobile bag. I upgraded from a 13″ MBP to a 15″ MBP with an i7 processor which i needed when I was in the States and was away from my desktop to do the heavy lifting. Also upgraded was the portable storage HDD, from a 500GB to a 1TB WD I’m not exactly sure how am I going to utilize this storage on the go but whatever.

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.

Ramadan Umrah

On the first day of Ramadan, we went to Madina and Mecca for Umrah. It was my first visit to Madina and my first Umrah during the Holy month Ramadan.

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.

8TB of Data Gone?! And A BSOD Just For Kicks

Ever since I got back from the US about a month ago and I’ve been having problems with my gadgets.
When I first arrived I noticed that my SATA tower that is connected to my WHS is not reading any of the 3 HDD that are installed in it. I switched it off and didn’t switch it back on ever since.
This really pissed me off because it has 8TB of data, some of it is irreplaceable like family videos and pictures.

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.