Baseball Cap

I just realised something (while reading Abdullah's "Come Get Some" blog) : I never talk about politics.
Not in real life, not on the blog, no where.
I don't even think about politics. Nor discuss it. Nothing.
It doesn't interest me the least. I don't even watch the news.
And I'm not talking about the local UK politics. I'm talking about Iraq.
People here are obsessed with it all, the Kurds vs Sunnis vs Shi'ites. All they do is talk and talk about it, and about the shitty state Iraq is in now, and about the violence and the terror and hunger and fear and the general hell. All from the comfort of their houses, in one of the world's safest and richest and most advanced countries.
It's easy to observe things from outside, but what about those inside. What do they have to say about it all? from the hell of their houses without electricity nor water nor safety?

Maybe that's why I don't do politics. Maybe it's cos when I decided to leave Iraq all those years ago, I decided to leave it for good, and just take with me the memories, but most of all, keep the friends that I made there.
Or maybe I don't do politics cos it's just damn boring.
It hurts me to see what's happenning to the place I spent some great times in. It really hurts. Maybe that's why I don't do politics - I just don't want to talk about something that hurts....

Xbox Live GamerTag

As you might've noticed, my ever-faithful sidebar has got a new addition to it, my Xbox Live GamerTag. This Tag business was created with the Xbox 360, in which you had an online identity (your live username, mine being DrSbaitso - for the old enough to remember what that is ;) and an online reputation and profile thingie.

Nice thing about this tag is that it tells you the last 5 games I've played (the icons at the bottom). So at the time of writing the last thing I played was Kameo - Elements of Power. Clicking on a game's icon takes you to the "achievements" page, as each game has got certain targets you try to reach, in order to increase your gamer score.

People with higher scores tend to be matched up when looking for online matches, in order to try and balance out skills (unlike the original live, where you nearly always got matched up with a geek that played the game 100s of hours and kicked the living shit out of you before you even started).

In other news, Sony have announced a tentative September release date for the PS3 (allegedly March 07 for .eu), but even better than that, they're also releasing a PS3 exclusive of a certain crap game, God Of War :D

Guess I'm owning all 3 mofo next-gens then.....

Where did you say you live again?

This I can't believe. But it's true nontheless. Was randomly surfing wikipedia tonight (am on-call for 24 hours, sucks), and searched for "fucking", to find out that it's not just a rude (and very pleasurable) activity/word, it's also a VILLAGE IN AUSTRALIA.
Seriously.
No Joke.
Just imagine living there. The embarassment of telling someone your address.
Hi, I'm Ali. I'm from Fucking. (Aren't we all LOL?)

I better go to sleep. I stayed up late last night, and this morning I found an email from Amazon in my inbox, thanking me for ordering (Learning Unix for Mac OSX) at some unholy after midnight hour. So I go sleep now, before I find an email tomorrow from Amazon thanking me for ordering (The Dummies Guide to the Net) or something like that.

SoB out.

Where?

Those of you astute enough might remember a post here called "When?", about a picture that I found of a friend of mine looking, let's say, rough....

Unfortunately, due to outstanding demand from said friend (well one text message, 2 emails, and a few lines on msn), I have removed the post. That said, I'll still sneak his picture somewhere online, most probably a gay dating service for frustrated Arabs. Or Something :)

Oh and kudos to Wolf who caught the post before it disappeared, and actually saw the funny side of it all. Here's some Smirnoff on me.

Space of Freedom Photobook

After alot of postal errors, delays, ex-girlfriend mistakes, and so on, I've FINALLY managed to get my hands on a copy of the offical Jarre Gdansk photobook! The damn thing was released in Poland only, and I asked my ex to get a copy for me.
She did, but sent it to the wrong address. It then returned to her parent's address, and she then sent it to the right one! Anyhow, it's great to see the offical photos of the event, shame i have no clue what they're saying. I might get her to translate it one day :p

In other news, I've discovered that Dead or Alive 4 for the XBOX360 is a great game! fluid, beautiful, fast, and easy to get in to, hard to master (cliche!!), it really is a unique title. Best of all, you can fight online against others, and when you join a session you hang around a virtual lobby, watching the other plays duke it out on a big screen, just like in the old arcade days when you were waiting for a machine to be free.... bless tecmo :)

Where are you baby....

.....we used to have so much fun

Hello. Best way to start this long overdue update is by the universally known word, HELLO. Hope everyone's been ok and kicking.
I for one have been fine. My friend Ziad (who came here in September from Dubai if you remember) decided to visit Britain again on a 2 week holiday. We had a great time, went clubbing, pubbing (:p), saw Cirque Du Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall (friggin' awesome! best circus ever!), and did loads of other things too. He's gone back to UAE now.

When he was here, my mum decided to give me a heart attack and actually buy me an XBOX360 as a gift for passing MRCP 2!! I was shocked! She gave me the cash and I had to hunt all over the place to find the damn thing (they're in shortage worldwide). I managed to get the last remaining "CORE" version from Virgin. I bought 2 games with it (condemned, perfect dark) and two wireless controllers. I had to order a hard disk from ebay (necessary to save games, download stuff and connect to xbox live), and a vga HDTV cable from lik-sang (yeap! hong kong!).

Anyway, all that arrived, and before hand I had treated myself to a 27" widescreen LCD HDTV television (DiBoss from amazon, dead cheap). I connected the xbox to it via analogue VGA and set the xbox to widescreen HDTV. DAMN THE PICTURE IS AMAZING! HDTV rules! it really has to be seen to be believed!

Next, I got the Sky people to install a Sky+ receiver in my room, and now i can watch tv here and rewind/pause/record live tv (it has a built in hdd that records the stream all the time). They will start broadcasting in HDTV mid this year, so that's another use for the tv.

The TV also has a DVI input which I connected to the PC as second output. The monitor is cloned onto it, and it's used as the fullscreen overlay device for videos. I watched HDTV Shrek 2 and Kill Bill on it the other day, and believe me, once you've seen it you REALLY can't go back to crappy "DVDS". Seriously. It's that amazing. Once HD-DVD or BluRay come to the market, we're gonna start watching films the way they're meant to be :)

Another use of this TV is that now kelly (and other friends that come over) can watch me do stuff on the pc, for example the poor girl would have to endure some quake 4 deathmatching online, watching it on the tv :p



As a side effect of the above things, I had to drag Ziad to HomeBase and get some cheap shelves and a TV unit to house all this crap. We spent a whole evening DIYing and sorting things out, but now after wobbling about for a bit, everything appears to be stable (I hope.....)

So as you can see I'm happy, and still wasting a ton of cash on crap. But this crap is awesome and last for quite a while. Also, playing X3 in the middle of the night with my 5.1 headphones on, the Cyborg Evo, and on the wide screen telly is a heavenly experience.... One day i'm going to lock myself in the room for 24 hours and do a marathon X3 universe session. Someone, get me a life (and convince my girlfriend not to dump me once she's read this :p).

SoB over and out for now, and back online for a long time to come...........