Barbapapa!

Since my disney post generated more interest in barbapapa than the trip itself (bastards!), here's a picture of the barbapapa toy I bought. He's the pink cuddly thing by the way :p

Autobahn and The Penguins

March Of The Penguins is a French documentary about the life of the Emperor Penguin in The South Pole. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, this movie is an ABSOLUTE MUST for everyone. A captivating documentary into the very harsh and unforgiving life of a penguin, this film is about love, passion, survival, courage, and hope. Filmed more like a romantic movie than a fact-only documentary, and narrated by the Freeman himself, this film will really grab you by the balls and suck you in, only spitting you out 1 hour and 20 minutes later with a big smile and a fuzzy feeling inside. It's available as a DVD already, so you can't do harm in getting one of the best movies you'll own.

Autobahn is a 1974 album by German godfathers of music, Kraftwerk. I've had the album for quite a while but never really listened to it properly. Dominated by its 22 minute titled track, the music paints a picture of driving down a motorway (autobahn in German), everything from turning on the engine to passing big trucks and being overtaken by speedy cars. The music does an amazing job at recreating the image, and can only be listened to entirely to be believed. An electronic landscape of ups and downs, beauty and ugliness, it's amazing that 4 young men in 1974 could come up with such a masterpiece.
Don't listen to Autobahn at home, nor going to work on your mp3 player. Shove the CD in your car, go for a long night drive, and let the music trance you. It's an experience that you'll never forget. I seriously recommend this to anyone with a car.

The Disney Post

Right, suppose it's time to blog all about Euro Disney!

We (me and Kelly) left Colchester on Friday at some unholy morning hour (I hate morning travel!), and arrived at Waterloo International in London at around 8:30am. Our train was due for 9:39.
We got on the Eurostar and 1 hour later we were going through the channel tunnel. 2 hours after that we reached Marne La Val Chesse (the train station at Disney). Luckily the train had a power socket where we were sat, so we watched March Of The Penguins on the laptop on the way (great film!)
We then checked in to our hotel (Moevenpick Dream Castle) which as a big but very cosy 4 star hotel, 8 minutes away from the park (there's a free shuttle bus every 10 minutes). As we had arrived mid afternoon we didn't go to the park that day, and just spent the evening chilling (ie doing nothing)

The next day we went to the park, and decided to go to Disneyland Park (the resort has 3 attractions, Disneyland Park, Disney Studio, and Disney Village). The moment you get in to the park you are hit with a magical, childhood like excitement. The colours, the shops, the buildings, the characters wandering around just make everything feel like you're in a disney cartoon!
The park is split into a main area, and four lands (adventure, fantasy, frontier and discovery). Each is themed accordingly (adventure land is arabic themed! for alladin I presume). Each area has one or two "adult" rides (eg Space Mountain roller coaster, Indiana Jones coaster, scary mansion etc), and lots of kiddy things.

The entrance takes you in to "Main Street USA", which is full of shops and restaurants and stuff, and right in front of you is the magical kingdom itself, sleeping beauty's palace!







Mickey and Minnie and someone else's kids :)











One of the beautifully crafted buildings in Fantasy Land, the part of the park that's for the younger ones. Here the buildings and colours are just out of dreams.








Sleeping Beauty's Palace in all it's, erm beauty :p this must be the most famous palace in the world if you ask me!









Me and Kelly













The Magic Kingdom at night
















Later on that evening we left the park (closes at 20:00) after watching an AMAZING parade of lights and music called Mickey's Fantillusion. We went to the village to have dinner in one of those shows/food places which was called Buffallo Bill's Wild West Show, it was great fun!




The next morning we went the Disney Studios Park, which is a smaller, more spaced out park with lots of shows and a few rides (including a great Rock and Rollercoaster with Aerosmith! Each seat has stereo speakers with Aerosmith music while you whizz around the track!). Our day in the studios was more relaxed than the park, cos it's smaller and even though there's lots to do, it's not as stressful as the big park cos it's all grouped together in one place, and there aren't that many screaming kids!

Me by one of those brooms from Mickey's The Wizard's Apprentice.




Donald Duck, in a parade at the studios park.







On our 3rd and last day there (Monday) we went to a close by shopping centre (one metro stop away from Disney) called Val D'Europe. I bought a few things there (including Jarre's Live at Gdansk DVD (collector's edition)). As we were hunting for somewhere to eat, I found a shop called Album (just like Forbidden Planet). Wandering in to have a look what do I find? A big, squishy, and very soft Barbapapa!! the cartoon is very famous in France (well, it is french), and toys are still being sold! I bought a pink, papa toy which is great. He has magnets in his arms to help him keep his arms around something, and ofcourse that big infectious smile and innocent eyes..... I was so happy to find such a thing (I doubt anyone who's grown up in the middle east doesn't have fond memories of the Barba family)...

We left France that evening and reached Colchester around 11pm that day. It was great fun and a holiday to remember for life :)

I'm back! and I got the Jarre DVD!

hello everyone!!
I'm back from Euro Disney, a wonderful, magical place!
had tons of fun there, got loads of pictures, so later on i'll post all about it. Got lots of tacky souvenirs too, the mugs and t-shirts and fridge magnets and all that crap!

I also managed to find a fnac store and got the last remaining copy of Jarre Live at Gdansk (collector's edition) which was released on the 5th of this month there. It's great! been watching it today, and it's alot better than the tv broadcast, with no more silly overlays and lots of fireworks and crowd noise. The direction is generally better also, but still has less panoramic views than I'd hoped for. But at least it's a jarre dvd and one of a concert that I was proud to be part of (and very close to the stage too!).

I'll be back, with euro disney news and the best thing I found in france..... pictures and blog soon :p

OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Picture this: you've got an exam tomorrow. You're stressed, over-knowledged, and pretending to be revising at 23:30 at night, to save your ever-insistent mum's breath (for those (if any) non-arab readers, arab mum's interfere with their children's lives until their very last breaths, even if the kids are 60 year old grand parents!).
Anyhow, what do you do? well I for one had the senses to pack my Nintendo DS (that I'm officially in love with, remember?) with me and with it I got M&L, but also Mario Kart DS.

Everyone knows Mario Kart, the fun arcade racing game from the SNES era. It's been reinvented alot (N64, GBA, Gamecube) and now NDS. The thing that makes the NDS version so special though is it's dual screen (one for the game one for the important map) but also it's the first nintendo game to be officially internet enabled!! Yes that's right, now you can play mario kart against anyone in the world.

Nintendo has always promised to go into the online console market when they deemed fit. And their NDS is the first to do so. It comes with wireless built-in, so to go online you can either use your own wireless network if you have one, or buy a cheap nintendo USB wireless dongle, or (here's the best bit), go to any of 15,000 European hotspots, and join from there for free (eg McDonald's and a ton of other public places). Amazingly, 7,500 of those are in the UK.

Anyhow, so there I was laid in bed at 23:30 with my NDS, Mario Kart, and those crappy white iPod headphones on to make sure the boss (mum) doesn't hear. I connected to Nintendo WFC (wi-fi connection) and starting searching for opponents (that's another thing, going online and starting a game couldn't be easier! there's no lobby, there's no chatting, hence there's non of that famous abuse/anti-beginner attitude in nearly all online communities). A moment later I'm with 2 other people, and the race had begun!

I got 2nd place in the first race, which earned me 5 points. Midway through the 2nd race I was lagging behind. We were racing in Wario Stadium, a track full of ups and downs and boosts. I was just approaching a hill and my 2 opponents had already crossed ahead of me. Luckily, I had one of those kick-ass Blue Turtle Shells that zooms right up to the first racer and explodes with lots of proximity damage! I released at the exact moment when he was about to be overtaken, and the Shell blew up and toppled both racers! This happened just as I was jumping over the hill, and saw the carnage happen right beneath me, as I took the first place.

And as the battery ran out. NOTHING. BLACK SCREEN. ZILCH.

I hadn't realised that, due to a marathon M&L session (I reached the mothership, whatever that is!), I had abused the battery and it was in it's last minutes! just as I had bombed 2 rivals, jumped over them and laughed my evil laugh, and just as I took first place, the damn NDS decides to run out of juice, and just SWITCH OFF. And I wasn't sensible enough to pack the charger. HMV, here I come.

But you gotta give it to the big N for releasing the best version of Mario Kart on the DS, for making playing online so fun and easy, and for being the wonderful people that they are. Oh, and soon, Animal Crossing-Wild World is coming out for NDS too. Where you can invite people from around the world to your virtual village, and it's goodbye social life and everything else forever.... I just can't wait.

Wish me luck y'all. SoB out

The truth about 22mbit

Right, I'm in London now (was here since yesterday).
I've got the 2nd part of the lovely mrcp exam tomorrow... it's a 2 day exam so all fun and games!

But, on to more important things!

I installed the adsl 2+ router yesterday (netgear, looks great and works good too), and after a few teething problems I am now connected to the web at top speed. If you remember a while back I said it would be an estimated 18mbit/second, but the reality is that it's synced at 16mbit. That's exactly 2mbyte/sec download speed.

Web browsing has generally been the same since 512kbit, so no change there... but downloading stuff from fast servers is awesome. In reality, the "pure" data reaching my hard disks is 1.6mbyte/second. I tried downloading a full dvd just now which was 4.4gig compressed, and that took 45 minutes. So the original hope that I could download 1gbyte every 10 minutes has been fulfilled!

Now what?

Mario and Luigi : Partners in Time

I am officially in love with my DS (PSP go to hell, haven't turned it on in months!) why? cos of Mario and Luigi! The original M&L was a GBA game called (superstar saga) that I never really got to completing. Essentially a hybrid between RPG, action, platform and everything in between, M&L:PiT lets you play as all 4 brothers (what?! there's only 2 right? wrong! there's a time hole in mushroom kingdom and so the younger baby M&L are partnered with their older counterparts!). Now this makes for some very interesting puzzles and gameplay mechanics, including wonderful combo attacks. Using both screens is great too. The top screen is either a map or a chronicle of the younger brothers as they venture off in places only they can reach to (eg small holes, small platforms etc). But the best thing about this game is it's sense of humour! The game seriously is funny... very very funny. Not since the good old days of monkey island has a game made me laugh so much.... until now the funnies bit has been 2 hammer brothers that talk in l337, making for the funniest and freshest dialogue I've seen in a video game for AGES:
"AREA RESTRICTED. ALL NOOB INTRUDERS 2 B HAXORED BY US L33T HAMM3R BROZ.! WE R TEH SHROOB ALLIES. WE ROXOR U AND THEN ROFL. THEN U AM CRY. WE RECEIVE ORDERS THRU ANTENNAS ON THESE L33T HELMES. THEY R HOTNESS. WE MUST OBEY ALL ORDERS. WE LIKE 2 PWN NOOBS 4 TEH MASTER SHROOBZORZ."

Thank you Alpha Dream and Nintendo. Thank you very much.