Empire of the Sun

Just noticed it's been 7 (seven, VII, V (in arabic :p)) days since I updated G-D. Yes, I have no new news since then (sad I agree).
Just finished watching Empire of the Sun. Now I urge anyone who hasn't seen this movie to go and get it NOW. It's a brilliant story of a british boy lost in China when the japs invaded it in WWII. Not only is it beautifully told, but it also shows you the torments of trying to survive in a war-torn country without parents or anyone to guide you.
Of course, being A Spielberg film does help :)

Live-shot h4x0r3d!

he he remember a while back I commented on a sad (and sick) site called Live Shot that let you kill real animals over the web? well it's now been hacked by "B4d-Byt3" and "swift" :D obviously linux fans (see for yourself). Serves them right for letting people kill real animals over the web.

Audigy 2 ZS

I only did this cos my old speakers broke. Seriously.
A long time ago (in a galaxy just here), my good old (and bloody expensive) inspire digital 5700 speakers (creative) decided to pack in. The decoder would suddenly stop outputting to a random channel. I spoke to creative and instead of repairing it, they sent me a whole new set of speakers! Being me, I decided to set those up in the living room (with the xbox/gamecube/dvd) and leave the broken set with the pc. Cheap I know....
Anyhow, finally the broken set starting getting on my tits. Random channels were turning off more than ever, and it was getting very annoying. I decided to invest in a medium-priced set of speakers. After extensive (well a few minutes) research I decided on creative's inspire t7900 which are a set of 7.1 analogue speakers that do not feature a decoder (just adding a decoder costs loads, and since they're only for the pc which can do it's own decoding, it'd be useless to buy one). To make things complete I invested in a soundblaster audigy 2 ZS (big creative fan here!). To be honest with you, there's absolutely NO DIFFERENCE in terms of sound quality or anything! Half life 2 pretends to support 7.1 but decides to ignore the side speakers, while anything 5.1 has it's rear speakers duplicated on the side ones. I have yet to find anything that truely supports 7.1
But there you go, as you've noticed recently I've gone berserk shopping wise (apple powerbook, ipod, psp, nintendo ds, speakers, sound blaster) but this only happens once in a while then I'll go numb again. Oh and I don't really have a life so I might as well waste it in front of this sweet radiation :)

Good Delicious and all that!

Alcohol

not sure how I'm typing this. or why.
I feel numb. finished nights today, no more working shitty hours!
Decided to get drunk the arab way (never gotten drunk before, but I sure am now!), ie get 3 friends, lots of food (mostly turkish kebabs), and 24 bottles of budweiser, 1 bottle of bailey's and a bottle of white wine.
The result? I am DEFINITELY drunk.... had at least 6 bottles of bear, glass of wine and glass of bailey's (damn irish cream, too good). Been laughing for no reason the last 2 hours, everything seems funny, even this boring blog entry.
got to sleep, already hung over from working nights, and now drunk. tomorrow is gonna be a baaaaaaaaaaaaaaddd day.
G-D y'all

Ambitious!

Yeap, that's what I was when I posted The First Night days ago.
I thought I could keep it up, and every day, before going to work, telling everyone about my adventures at work in the unholy hours of night. Problem is, I've been so busy and tired of it all that I couldn't even update G-D. Sigh.
I am STILL alive, and I got 2 more nights to go. Will it ever end?

The First Night

Just woke up. Came back home around 9:00, fell asleep somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00. My first night shift was what Doom had always told us, HELL ON EARTH!
I walked in to our EAU (Emergency Assessment Unit) only to be greated by the surgical SHO that was just going home saying "Hi Ali. Welcome to hell!". "Is it that bad?" I ask, he just nods and shuffles away.
I went in to the main triage area and saw lots of worried looking patients, many flustered looking nurses, and lots of doctors faffing around. To my delight, the person handing over to me still had 5 patients on their list that they hadn't seen! The house officer decided to leave at EXACTLY 9pm, while the day SHO was so slow all she had seen that day was 5 patients out of around 20 (the 2nd SHO on-call had to do all the work, so he had left by the time I got there as well).
With no other option than to put my head down and start ploughing through this field of disease, I started seeing the patients, one by one as Enya sweetly sings.
Throughout the course of the night I had a total 0f 15 patients, in other words I didn't even have time to scratch my ass, let alone think about the clever way to treat these people! I wonder how many wrongs I've done, and how many poor souls in that hospital have been harmed by my insane mind last night.
Here's a thank you to everyone who braved taking anything I prescribed last night. Hope you're still around to read this some day :)
Till tomorrow evening then, I leave you lucky people to enjoy your normal lives.

Tang!!!

Man oh man! I can't explain how I feel now! As Marjorie put it in Little Britain: "MAN I LOVE DE CAKE!!". In my case it's "MAN I LOVE DE TANG!!"
Let me elaborate. A few days ago a good friend of mine went to London. When he came back he said my mum had sent me something with him. It was a jar of Orange Flavoured Tang!! This EXCELLENTLY DELICIOUS powder squash is something I haven't had since being in Baghdad, 5 years ago! For some weird reason it just doesn't exist in the regular shops here, and my mum had found it in some remote arab shop somewhere. Oh the bliss of mixing 4 teaspoons to make one cup, the sweet/sour taste of it all makes me all nostalgic.
I surprised a few friends of mine, both arab and others that had lived/worked in arab countries, and they were all jumping up and down like me :)

Sad I know, but again I moan about nights. Trying to stay awake as much as I can makes me talk about silly things, like how Tang has made my day. Get me a life please........

Swing Shift

Another pretty word for the darn fucked up thing called "nights". Tomorrow I start a 7 day slog of these so called swing shifts, ie working from 9pm till 9am. As I'm the poor soul looking after nearly 200 medical patients + all new acute admissions that night, it's a tough job. Very tough. The first night is shit cos you're still thinking you should be asleep at 3am rather than jumping up and down some poor nanny's chest. That's fun for ya.
Got my PSP, this thing rocks! playing the excellent lumines (well it's made by Rez creator, so that's not a bad thing) and ofcourse ridge racers. But still I'm loving my DS more, the great yoshi catch and go is so cool, and this touch/shout/blow at the screen feature of the DS makes it all so good to play with.
Life is good after all. Nights are here though so not posting for a while.......

The long entry

It's late here. Very late. 2:20 am, Sunday is looming in and of course the vision of working again on Monday really isn't very inspiring. Freddy Mercury is telling me all about his "One Vision", and I'm typing this on my bed in London while hoping that the damn linksys doesn't drop the wireless signal again (decided to give my crappy linksys to mum, so I can use wireless net when I visit. It does the job but stalls alot).

Lots of things been happening in my life, but of course Good Delicious is the one the last to know. Gotta make sure I update this place more often.....

First off, my bro comes back from Jordan tomorrow. Hope he's managed to get me TONS of turmus (some funky mouth filler that only they seem to have), and also the obligatory baqlawa etc etc that every visitor to an Arab country has to get.

Went down to the Apple shop today in Regent Street (Great big place with lots of cool stuff). Wanted to get a case for my iPod (couldn't find anything nice and it was way too crowded). But i did manage to get my hands on replacement headphones for the crappy default ones (sure they look sexy but they just don't do the job right). The Sennheiser PX100 are a cool set of neo-retro headphones that finally do all that digital music some justice. My only gripe with them is that they're not as loud as the in-ear ones and also as they're not goofily big (ie DJ big), they don't isolate the outside world as much as I'd like. Still, these are minor things and I would highly recommend them to anyone wanting a replacement to the cheap stuff they give us in the box.

As I was allergic to money today, I decided to listen to those voices in my head and give in. The result? Well I placed an order at lik-sang.com for the potentially excellent Sony PSP. Yes, I know I've always hated anything PSX related, but this damn fine piece of electric wizardry is too good to miss out on. As it's coming from Hong Kong I hope it'll be here mid/late next week. More on it once I get my hands on it.

Earlier today (well, technically yesterday), I received an email from an old friend called "something to laugh about". As she's never sent me any mass emails before, I thought it might be interesting. It contained a link to this video, of the hilarious aussies, The Umbilical Brothers. 2 VERY talented people (one's a ventriloquist, the other's an acrobat. Both are psychic!), who had a sold out tour on Broadway called Thwak! To my delight I found out that they're touring London now, and am going to see them tomorrow (well, today technically) at London's Peacock Theater. Make sure you check the video for some great laughs!

Finally, just a random website I stumbled upon the other day. Live Shot is something only the Yanks would cook up. A crazy idea to say the least! Some "clever" guy who owns a hunting ground in texas decided to setup internet hunting! By paying a subscription, cyber hunters can access a range of computers around the hunting ground and look around with HD cams and then with a click of a button, SHOOT LIVE AMMO! Yes, that's right anyone can just start shooting about! The project is still incomplete and all you can do now is shoot at cardboard targets, but they hope to change that very soon with real game involved!
It really is scary this. The fact that some kid thousands of miles away can shoot at some poor boar is just mind blowing. What if another "real" hunter is killed? who is to blame? As the media loves to blame any death tragedy on video games (columbine anyone?), I wonder if they'll let this website loose for the whole world to shoot about on. Please no.......

Lemon jelly - 64-95

At last. I type this way too late for bedtime with my trusty iPod delivering me the latest creation from those clever people at Lemon Jelly.
Their latest album is called 64-95, and is a homeage to the different musical styles between those years. The duo have taken some famous (and not so famous) samples from various songs throughout the years and mixed them with their well-known catchy beats/guitars/bass, thus making a great album for anyone familiar to Lemon Jelly. It's also a great place to start if you haven't heard any of their previous 2 albums.
Worth mentioning is that there are a few tracks that are a bit distant from the usual style. Of note is the openning track which features some heavy electric guitars and has a more of a rock feel to it. Great track still!
It's not chill out music as they're frequently labelled. This is calm, fun to listen to music that's great for any occasion, any where and any time.