Adeel's Blog

Red Bull Racing Celebration Day

2011-12-10T23:09:00.001Z

After another great year in Formula 1 for Red Bull, the team decided to put on a show in Milton Keynes (where the team is based).

A large stretch of road going from Milton Keynes shopping centre down to Milton Keynes Central Railway station was sectioned off for the event. After finding out about the event I decided to pop along.

It was pretty cold but there was a pretty good turn out. Both Red Bull drivers Mark Webber and current champion Sebastian Vettel showed up and did a quick lap in their F1 cars. There was also a motorcycle display which included a backflip off a moving bike and former F1 and Red Bull driver David Coulthard driving a Nascar style stock car.

The event was great and I don't think I'll be able to get that close to a moving F1 car ever again.

Probably the best streak I'm ever going to have in MW3

2011-12-07T09:21:00.001Z

Around this time of year a loads of big budget video games are released and I tend to go into a strange hibernation and spend a lot of time playing them. One of the games I've played lately is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

I don't play a lot of multiplayer but I thought I'd give the online modes in MW3 a go and I spent most of my time running into walls and ending up on the losing side, but I did manage to get a little streak going at one point that I thought I would share a video clip of it (and it was a good way for me to test out some of MW3's video editing and sharing features).

By most Call of Duty player's standards it's a very poor streak but for me it's the best I have done (so far).

New Blog Look

2010-11-01T11:28:00.001Z

I haven't looked at Blogger's templates in a long time so I was a little shocked to see that they had improved a lot and there are some really cool looking designs, so I thought a new look was in order. After spending all of 30 seconds and doing zero customisation I have changed my blog from the old green Blogger template I used to a newer layout by clicking on a few buttons.

Blogging platforms have progressed a lot over the last few years and it's great when you can just click a button and change everything in an instant. I also like the fact that if I wanted to I could customise the look and feel too.

Here comes a new challenger.........

2009-05-21T13:35:00.014+01:00

After wanting to write a review about the Hori EX2 Fighting Stick for the 360 I started a post and never finished it.

Anyway after waiting for months and just randomly checking out on amazon.co.uk I saw a Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick by Mad Catz as being in stock, so I placed an order and it arrived so I thought now might be a good time to redo my previous blog post and compare the two sticks from the point of view of a terrible beat'em up player (if you actually want some good reviews of the sticks I would suggest visiting 1up.com for a review of the Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick, About.com for a review of the Hori EX2 or The "Break It Down" Blog for a comparison).

When I first tried comparing them I noticed the weight difference to be massively different, the Hori EX2 Fighting Stick is extremely light when compared to the hefty weight of the Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick. Neither are too heavy or too light but Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick feels a lot more substantial when on a table or in your lap.

When I looked at the joysticks side by side the obvious difference was the placement of the buttons (other than the difference in size). Most fighting games I've played only require 6 buttons and use additional buttons as extra mappable button combinations (i.e. pressing RB is a combination of 3 other buttons). The Hori stick only has 6 main face buttons and has the LB and RB buttons at the top which doesn't make them too easy to use when playing a game which the Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick has 8 face buttons for easy access.

Apparently the Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick uses Sanwa parts and not being a fighting game aficionado I had to do a little googling and found out that Sanwa is manufacturer of arcade parts in Japan. From my point of view (the know nothing point of view) the buttons and the actual joystick are slightly more responsive on the Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick and make a slightly more satisfying click to the Hori's clack noise.

Design wise the two joysticks are very different, with the Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick have some nice Street Fighter 4 artwork on the top and the Hori X2 Fighting Stick sporting a more simple and plan look. The Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick also has a turbo function, a nice cable hideaway and the start and back buttons are moved off the top of the controller to help stop people accidentally clicking it, which I am told is an automatic disqualification on the tournament scene.

Price wise the two sticks are far apart and I guess both are very good for their price ranges and it comparing them isn't really fair. Hopefully I can get my uncultured beat'em hand on the Hori Tekken 6 fighting stick there maybe a better comparison with the Street Fighter 4 Tournament Fight Stick or get hold of a Mad Catz Arcade Fight Stick and compare that with the Hori EX2.

My Poor English

2009-01-29T23:16:00.004Z

I just read over one of my posts on this blog and noticed that my spelling and grammar is worse than a 10 year-old.

I've just gone over a few posts and fixed some spelling mistakes (those that I could spot) but the grammar and text is still basically the same, I'm surprised people managed to read what I wrote.

Anyway thanks for trying to read my posts ~~and I'll try to read over what I write in the future and do a spell check before posting~~

Retro Gaming

2009-01-28T13:53:00.007Z

I remember reading online about people's retro games console collection, so for the sheer fun of it I thought I would post this image of my old school games consoles sitting on the top of my bookshelf.

I have owned other consoles in the past like an original Mega Drive, a Playstation and an Amiga 1200 but they seem to have gone walkabouts.

TNA makes an Impact at the Wembley Arena

2009-01-26T12:17:00.018Z

This January I attended the one of the TNA 2009 Maximum Impact! Tour shows held at Wembley Arena.

Having visited WWE Raw and WWE Smackdown tapings in the past I decieded I would visit more live profesional wrestling events. After a few years of always learning about these events when the titckets had been sold out I managed this time to get some tickets early on.

As far as the show went it was a really good show and had some great moments and some of the wrestlers showing off some awesome moves.

Having seen some of TNA's TV shows on Bravo and because of that I was expecting a lot of high flying moves so I took my camera along to get some cool action shots. To TNA's credit there were plenty of good action shots for me to take but sadly due to my lousy camera work the action was a little too quick for me to time a photo with and I ended up with a lot of blurry and out of focus shots which were taken either before or after the "Oh my how did they pull that move off!!" moments.

If only I had the ability to slow down time I might have been able to take an uber cool photo.

Playing With PlayTV

2008-12-14T21:06:00.009Z

I have had a PlayTV attached to my PS3 to turn my games console into a Freeview PVR for a few months now and after wanting to write about it for months I thought I would finally get around to it.

I bought the PlayTV to replace my existing Sagem Freeview box, which was getting a bit old and using my PS3's existing hard drive the PlayTV would allow me to record TV.

Setting up the PlayTV is very simple all I needed to do was plug in my existing coaxial cable into the PlayTV and then plug that into the PS3 via one of the spare USB ports on the front, however the USB cable sticking out the front is a bit noticeable. The kit also came with a sticker to stick on my existing PS3 remote so it would label what the buttons on the remote would do with PlayTV. Once I turned my PS3 on I just popped in the supplied DVD and the software installed within a few minutes.

Once the software has installed the PlayTV shows up in the Playstation 3's XMB in between the Video and Game options. When you go into the PlayTV the menu system is easy enough to navigate and reminds me of Apple's old Front Row interface with options appearing in a circular shape.

You get a weeks worth of TV listings in the guide and as far as recording features there's nothing amazing but you record and pause live TV as well as setting up scheduled recordings.

Navigating through you recordings isn't too difficult as they are just in a list format and you can change the sort order to help you find what your looking for.

The picture quality is good and on a par with some stand alone PVRs. However the picture does freeze for a second every now and again, but this is somewhat rare.

When I first got the PlayTV I did notice a few issues such as the guide taking a few minutes to load however this seems to have been fixed in a software update.

My PS3 came with a 60GB hard drive which due to the amount of programs I recorded filled up very quickly and instead of just deleting some of the programs I had watched I choose to replace my PS3's hard drive with a larger 500GB hard drive. Replacing the hard drive wasn't too difficult after watching a few clips on YouTube on how to replace my PS3's hard drive and only took a few minutes to swap out the drives (however it took over an hour to back up my data and over another hour to restore my data on my new hard drive).

Another Holiday Over and I’ve Achieved Nothing.

2008-07-27T13:55:00.002+01:00

I am coming to the end of my one week holiday I took and like last time I have pretty much done nothing interesting.

I did however manage to get a few achievements on Rock Band and Scene IT? Lights, Camera, Action.

Next time I go on holiday I think I need to plan ahead and go somewhere interesting.

iReady for iPhone but iPhone not ready for me

2008-07-20T08:03:00.010+01:00

After months of waiting I managed to get a iPhone 3G on launch day.

I have had an iPhone for a while now so I though I would give my impressions on it. First of it's a pretty good device and I really like the fact that my contacts, email, photos, music and podcasts are all on one device. I have however had a few problems with GPS which resulted in a few big problems.

I went for the iPhone as 3G coverage in my area is pretty good and had pretty much all the features I wanted in a phone and my old phone (Nokia N73) was starting to get very buggy as it kept taking a minute or so to move from the text message screen to the home screen.

I had no real problem using my finger to navigate the screens, menus or applications. Even my stubby hands were able to use the on screen keypad after a little while I got use to it and I now almost always select the right key.

The web browsing on the device is great and probably the best thing about it. I can be anywhere and surf the net. There are a lot of good iPhone enabled websites which make reading pages and navigation very easy but for the majority of websites navigating and read them is not a problem as the zoom/pinch function allows me to zoom into a block of text and read it at whatever size I want. I am also glad that O2's tariff allow for unlimited data access (although it does have a fair use policy) which means I don't need to worry too much about data charges when surfing the net on 3G or EDGE and O2 didn't increase their tariff's to include 3G, so well done O2 and keep it up.

I use exchange for my personal email but all my contacts and calendars are stored in Address Book and iCal on my Mac. The iPhone was handle this odd arrangement without any problem so I can now send and receive emails from anywhere and I can quickly check.

The phone audio quality is decent. I would say my old Nokia N73 was slightly clearer but the iPhone's phone audio quality is fine.

Photo's look very nice and the pinch action makes zooming in and out of photo's a breeze.

I haven't watched too many YouTube videos yet but clips look really good on the iPhone.

I had a quick look around the app store and too be honest I can't really see many applications that I may want. I don't really want to use the iPhone as a gaming device so and I spent a lot on technology stuff recently so I don't have much spare cash left to pay for applications so that left me small selection of free applications. I do really like the Last.fm application as it a great way to find and listen to music and the Remote app is also useful as it lets me use my iPhone as a remote control for my iTunes library and my Apple TV.

The iPod feature on the iPhone is fantastic. The audio quality (from the headphone connection) is not as good when compared to my 160GB iPod classic but it's still good. The audio quality from the iPhone's inbuilt speaker isn't too loud but this is a feature I would hard ever use. Video playback is vastly better when compared to my iPod and picture quality is very clear for a mobile device. The iPhone's accelerometer means you can watch videos in a widescreen..ish (it's not 16:9) format. The only problem I have with the iPod feature in the iPhone is that there isn't enough room on the 16GB Solid state drive to fit all my stuff. As all my music is ripped to Apple Lossless it takes up a large amount of space to store a few tracks on the iPhone. I have synced all my podcasts and several playlists to the iPhone but I still take my iPod Classic with me to work so I can listen to whatever track I want to while at my desk.

The iPhone is very prone to finger print marks all over the device and the supplied cloth is used a lot and pretty much goes where the phone goes. I was also very worried about scratching the front so I stuck on a protective cover to the front called invisibleSHIELD which after drying out isn't too noticeable and stops me from worrying about scratching the screen.

I did however have a few problems with the iPhone. The main issue I had was that the GPS was not working. It could not find my location no matter where I was. I could not get GPS to work on my iPhone and I went over a load of stuff with Apple support including turning thing off and on, resetting network settings and restoring the firmware but I still can't get it to work.

When on WiFi or Edge it did pinpoint my location but it thought I was in the sea near Canada which is strange as I was in Milton Keynes (England) at the time.

Firstly I tried several different locations near where I live. Including vast open areas such as fields and lakes (no trees or buildings blocking any view to the sky), built up city centres, outside my home in my garden and in a car on an A road.

I also tried these locations with a TomTom 520 and the TomTom spotted my location within a few seconds.

I also tried several different setting like having 3G on and off and WiFi on and off.

I tested with different firmware (if you do a restore in iTunes the version number goes up from 2.0 (5A345) to 2.0 (5A347)).

I tried resetting the network and carrier settings.

I made sure that the date/time and international settings were correct for the UK (according to Apple these need to be correct otherwise when it tries to compare times with the sats/servers and they are vastly off it won't work).

I have turned off all radios and tried and then just turned on location services.

After several calls to Apple Support and having my phone replaced, I found a strange trick on the AVForums (big thanks to AVForums and coops233) website that made it work, turning the Auto-Lock to never. I am not sure how Auto-Lock is related to GPS but turning it off testing GPS and then turning it back on worked!

Now that GPS works the Google Maps application is great. You don't get turn by turn directions but it does pinpoint where you are.

The other problem I currently have is that when I play a podcast from start to finish on the iPhone it does not register as played on iTunes and I still have not found a solution to this.

Other than the problems I had with GPS and marking podcasts as played the iPhone is a great phone.

My Bad Luck

2008-07-19T18:33:00.002+01:00

A few weeks after buying my USB only Drobo a newer version is released with FireWire connections.

My original plan was to hold off getting a Drobo until Data Robotics (makers of the Drobo) released a Drobo with a FireWire port but sadly I ran out of external hard drive space and went and bought one with only a USB connection.

Oh well can't complain too much as the Drobo has served me well so far.

I will... I will... Rock You

2008-07-19T00:19:00.008+01:00

Rock Band is one of the most fun games I have ever played and tonight was the first time I managed to get 100% on a song.

I was so pleased with myself that I had to blog it so it could be marked in history as the moment I flawlessly played a pretend guitar and thought I was a rock legend!

It maybe one of the easier songs on the set list and I was only playing on medium but it won't stop me bragging about it.

Drobo

2008-07-06T19:03:00.005+01:00

Recently I noticed my 500GB external hard drive used to store my iTunes library was filling up fast and about to run out of space soon. I looked around for a replacement external hard drive but I didn't like the idea of having to replace the new external hard drive in a few months. So instead of buying a new external hard drive I bought a Drobo and two 1TB external hard drives.

I went for the Drobo mainly because if I need to increase the disc space all I have to do is swap out a hard drive and add a new one in. It also sort of backs up my data and protects it from hard drive crashes (as long as I have more than one hard drive in there) without requiring me to do anything.

Setting the device up was a breeze. I just plugged in the hard drives I bought and then plugged the Drobo into my Mac via USB. I then just moved my iTunes library over from my external hard drive to my Drobo via iTunes and the task was complete. The transfer was so simple I decided to open up all my external hard drives and pull the drives out and put it into my Drobo to increase the space of my Drobo. I now have 4 hard drives sitting in my Drobo.

As I had so much free space i decided that I would do something I had never properly done before.... back up my computer. I setup Time Machine to back up my Mac to the Drobo and now I have my machine backed up on a regular basis without requiring much interaction by me.

As good as the Drobo is there are a few downsides. Although I have a total of 3TB worth of hard drive space plugged into the Drobo only 1.81TB of space to use as the other space is used to back up the hard drives (although this is also somewhat a positive). I previously plugged in all my external hard drives via firewire as I am a little short on space USB sockets but the Drobo can only be connected via USB, however I guess I might be able to get around this if I could be bothered to use an external USB hub. For the most part I can't really hear to much from the Drobo but there are occasions when the fan kicks in for a short period of time and it starts to make a really loud whirling noise. Also the Drobo is very expensive when you factor in the cost of a few hard drives you are easily into the few hundreds of pounds, but personally I see this as a long term purchase so over a long term it should be better value for money.

All in all I am rather happy with the Drobo as it's been running away happily for a few weeks now and the shinney black finish and green and blue lights make it look cooler than the average external hard drive.

Fantastic MacBook Repair Service

2008-04-29T10:26:00.001+01:00

At the beginning of April I noticed that I could not remove my battery from my MacBook. I called Apple and got an appointment at the new Apple Store in Milton Keynes to have a look at my MacBook. The guys at the Genius Bar looked over my MacBook and managed to remove the battery but they said the latch to hold the battery in place was stuck and needed repair and they quoted a 5-7 day repair time.

After 5-7 days went by I got a call from the Apple Store saying the part had been replaced but the part they replaced it with also had an issue so they had to reorder the part and it would take another 5-7 days. Again 5-7 days went by and they called and said the part had not come in and it hopefully would be another day.

About 2 days went by got a call saying the part was taking too long and instead of waiting they would give me a new MacBook!

Anyway I now have a brand new MacBook (they took a new one out of the box and transferred my data across). I now have a newer MacBook with a better spec (I had the old 2.0 C2D now have a 2.4 C2D)

Top result! I have worked in electrical and PC retail and know that repairs can take some time and sometimes things go wrong so I was understanding about the delay but I was not expecting them to say it's taking too long so here's a new one. Thanks Apple Store MK.

My poor old Xbox 360 and my PS3

2007-11-12T12:51:00.001Z

For the last 3 weeks I have been without my Xbox 360. After almost 2 years of use my 360 decides to throw up the dreaded Red Ring of Death. What makes it worse was that it decided to do this the night before my holiday started. I ended up spending the next week with very little to do.

I sent my 360 off to Microsoft to get repaired but after endless phone calls and each representative on the phone telling me something different about my repair I doubt I will see the thing again any time soon (and I have heard the Microsoft don’t even send you your own console but send you a refurbished console back instead).

I think my Xbox 360 decided to die on me because that week I had bought a PS3. I bought the PS3 because that week the 40GB version was launched and the 60GB version was given a price drop. I bought the 60GB version as it has backwards compatibility, SACD playback, 2 more USB sockets, a card reader and 20GB more hard drive space for an extra £50 when compared to the 40GB version.

I bought a PS3 bundle which included 2 games and 2 Blu-ray movies. I have not really used the PS3 as a games console as I prefer my Xbox 360 and games seem to be missing something when there aren’t any achievements. The main reason I bought a PS3 was for Blu-ray movie playback and for its price it’s a good player as the picture quality is on a par with my HD DVD players.

FOWA and Diggnation

2007-10-04T10:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I visited the Future of Web App (FOWA) Expo and the live taping of Diggnation in London's ExCel.

All in all it was a very good day (even though I went by myself).

The expo floor was a little dull and there wasn't much to see although Adobe had a really nice booth setup though where they were showing off some of their products like Flex and handing out free beers and letting people play the Wii.

Microsoft also had setup a few Xbox 360's all with Halo 3 running.

I got to the Expo in the afternoon so I missed the first few speakers but the afternoon speakers on the developers stage were really good. Daniel Burka of Digg.com and Pownce gave a lot of good information on how to listen to users and take in user feedback. Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress.com spoke in great detail about the architure and setup behind Wordpress.com. Matthew Haughley of MetaFilter presentation was on building a community and he made some good points on how to build a community, support a community and how to react when your community does not like something. Heidi Pollock formerly of Yahoo! Mobile and currently part of BluePulse gave an informative presentation on how to create mobile websites, the restrictions and frustrations on creating websites for mobiles and how to cater for the thousands and thousands of different mobile handsets. John Resig of Mozilla (and the lead developer of the JQuery JavaScript Library) spoke about the future of JavaScript and all the cool stuff they are looking to integrate into the Firefox browser. The last presentation I saw was from Kevin Rose of Digg.com, Revision3.com and Pownce, he spoke about how he setup three startup companies in three years and the pitfalls he had along the way.

If there is a lineup of speakers as good as this next year (and if it's in the UK) I will defiantly go again.

After the FOWA Expo was the live taping of Diggnation. Diggnation was so much fun and it was really funny. I tried to take a few pictures but the all came out blurry (mainly because I kept on laughing when trying to take a picture) I really can't say much more other than it really was a great show and I hope they come back to London and do another live show soon.

While I was in London I also took a picture of the Dome/o2 (or whatever it's called these days).

Me and My Apple TV

2007-08-12T19:05:00.000+01:00

After my experience with a Mac I decided to buy one of those new Apple TV's with the 160GB hard drives.

Syncing the Apple TV with my iTunes library took about 4 days straight of syncing as my iTunes library is about 100GB (music and podcasts) and transferring all that over a wireless 802.11g connection was very slow (it is a lot quicker to use an Ethernet cable but I did not have one to connect my MacBook to my Apple TV). Although at first it took a long time to copy all my library over to my Apple TV now whenever I rip a new CD or download a new podcast it takes a few minutes for the data to be copied to across, I think this is because there is not as much data as there was the first time around.

My original plan was to rip all my music CDs in an Apple Lossless format and to hook up my Apple TV up to my AV receiver. I found the audio quality of my music albums not too my as good as listening to my CDs from my CD player but the audio quality is still good.

I found the best thing about having an Apple TV was the ability to sync all my Podcasts and watch them on my TV.

So far the Apple TV has been a good purchase but like my other Apple products it gets stupidly hot.

Making the Switch

2007-08-12T18:21:00.000+01:00

For the past few weeks I switched over from PCs to Macs.

I bought a refurbished MacBook and a 23" Apple Cinema Display as a desktop replacement.

Previously I had never used OS X before but so far I have found it to be very easy to use. The learning curve is very low for what I use it for. It syncs in perfectly with my iPod (I would have been very surprised if it didn't) and I was able to transfer over all my old files. I ripped all my CDs to iTunes and I just started using iPhoto to edit my photos. I managed to synced my phone with iCal and Address Book. I also found install and uninstalling applications to be very easy.

I liked my MacBook so much I bought a MacBook Pro too.

I have not totally switched over as I running Windows (for applications such as Visual Studio) under VMWare Fusion. I had originally planned to use boot camp but I found running Windows virtually to be a better solution as I can use both operating systems at the same time and with the Unity feature I can run Windows applications inside the OS X desktop environment. Installing operating systems virtually is very useful as I don't need to partition my hard drive and I can just delete the OS when I don't need it anymore. Creating virtual machines allowed me to install and try out a few Linux operating systems under VMWare. Currently I have Ubuntu 7.04 and Kubuntu 7.04 installed and I am trying them out.

Both Mac's I bought came with the standard amount of RAM (1GB for the MacBook and 2GB for the MacBook Pro) as Apple charge stupid prices for RAM upgrades so I bought extra RAM from Crucial and fitted them myself (very easy to do as long as you have the correct screwdriver).

All in all I found Macs to be great to use for every day tasks but the only downside is that both my MacBook and MacBook Pro generate more heat than a radiator!

Won't Someone Please Think Of The Panels!

2007-06-09T08:20:00.000+01:00

I was walking through the electrical section in Tesco yesterday and the more I walked around looking at their TV's and Hi-Fi equipment I could not help but think that none of the LCDs and Plasmas were setup they all looked to have been taken out of the box and plunked onto the shelves.

I have noticed this in a lot of electrical retail stores and for some reason this sort of makes me a little upset as it only takes around 10 minutes to do a few basic optimisations and tweaks and this generally makes the panels look better.

I can't enjoy the HD goodness....

2007-03-15T16:25:00.000Z

I just got a new Toshiba HD-XE1 HD DVD player and a Sky HD box but I have not found the time to watch any HD DVD’s or watch a lot of HD TV.

The HD DVD player arrived last week but I have not had a chance to watch any discs yet. Sky HD got installed last Sunday but sadly I had to work.

I really wanted to watch the Chelsea vs Tottenham Hotspur game being shown on BBC HD as I heard their HD picture quality is the best and I thought Spurs could beat Chelski. Sadly I couldn’t find the time to watch the game and by the sounds of it I missed an absolute cracker. Oh well never mind we will have to beat Chelsea at White Hart Lane again!

I however did mange to see the end of a Kaiser Chiefs concert on BBC HD and the picture quality for a TV broadcast was great the colours were sharp and the crowd was very detailed. I also managed to watch part of the Blackburn vs Man City game being broadcast on Sky Sports HD. The Sky Sports HD picture was far better than the SD version but I think the picture quality on BBC HD was better, although it’s not fair to compare a fast paced football match played under floodlights with a concert in a dark location.

Running hot then catching a cold.

2007-03-15T16:22:00.000Z

I having been putting in a few extra hours this month and as soon as I had some spare time a caught a cold. Why is it that when you work hard you are fine but as soon as it’s all over you don’t feel well?

Sadly this downtime is only going to last a few days, so hopefully I will be OK before I start putting in more hours.

I guess I should have expected a cold as I have had a few good months without any illness, which is rather good for me.

Training and Travel in London

2007-02-24T21:38:00.000Z

I have spent the majority of this month on training courses in London learning about .NET 2.0 and I am so glad it’s finally over.

Prior to going on the course I was looking forward to it as I saw it as a way to dos around London and I would finally get a chance to use the Out Of Office notification I have seen so many other people use.

The first few days of the course were very simple I spent most of the time just creating HTML tables and doing simple coding. I spent the majority of the course just following instructions out of a book. I was expecting more theory and to learn more new skills and ideas instead I did a few simple tasks. I didn’t get much time to fully look into or understand the tasks that were new to me I didn’t spend much time as I had to do the tasks.

My advice to anyone going on a Microsoft programming course is to find out what the course covers first and then to decide if you really need to learn that stuff, if you already know it then maybe think about skipping it or if you don’t get a book and read it first so you can grasp the concepts before attending the course.

All in all the courses weren’t too bad and I can see why people go on them, but what I really hated was the travel. I hated having to leave home really early in the morning and then getting a train into London and then having to ride the tube in rush hour.

I lived in London for the majority of my life and use to take the tube to school every now and then but for some reason it really seemed worse now. The tubes were packed there was very little room to move and getting out off was a huge problem as people just kept getting onto the tube without letting everyone off, it reminded me of an episode of The Simpsons were Homer and Apu are riding a train in India that is so packed that they were having to hang onto the outside of a moving carriage.

I think from now on I am going to avoid going on training courses in London. Maybe by that time I go on my next one (hopefully it will be a long time before I go on another) people north of Northampton will have broadband and I could go for a course there. :)

My Likeness Is Finally Out On The Net!

2007-01-27T19:13:00.001Z

After being a net user for years pictures of me are finally on the net and amazingly no one has reported their screens blowing!

I added a few pictures onto my MySpace account and one onto my blog profile.

Winter Holiday

2006-12-26T20:02:00.000Z

I have been on holiday for over two weeks now and I have achieved nothing. I have been so bored I can’t remember doing much for the past two weeks.

The only thing I have managed to do is beat my ten year old cousin’s gamer score on my Xbox 360.

I was so bored I went back into work for a day!

360 HD DVD

2006-12-02T22:24:00.000Z

After a few months of collecting HD DVD discs I finally got my 360 HD DVD add-on drive for my Xbox 360 (last Thursday).

The picture is great. Contrary to what some think I didn't watch any special HD "movies", the first film I watched was Batman Begins and some of the scenes looked stunning.

Since watching Batman Begins I have watched Serenity and I have got a few more films to watch over this weekend.

I know a few people have reported that films like Batman Begins had sound sync problems but I have not yet noticed any problems like that myself with my setup.

I pre-ordered this item in several places to make sure I got one as soon as possible. Sadly 2 of my orders were posted around the same time so now I have two! Does anyone out there want to buy a 360 HD DVD add-on?

Adeel returns to Coventry

2006-11-24T14:49:00.000Z

I returned to Coventry University last Thursday to visit some of my old University friends who just graduated (congrats T, Imran, Nav, Ifty and Shaz) along with a few other mates.

While they were in their graduation ceremony and having their picture taken in their gowns and hats I walked around the city of Coventry by myself like a sad old man.

I walked round taking photo's of old University buildings, mainly an ugly old 1970's building called Priory Hall (where I use to live).

I did the really sad old man thing and visited the Coventry Transport Museum! Although saying that the museum was not that bad, in fact I kind of liked it!

After my visit to a museum I rejoined my friends and we journeyed on a long trek to Leicester in search of food.

After getting lost in Leicester we enlisted the help of T’s younger brother who goes to University in Leicester, this meant squeezing 6 people into a small 3 door Corsa and I am no small man! We drove around looking for somewhere to eat and finally ended up at an Indian restaurant called iFriends, the restaurant might of started with a lowercase “i” but sadly there was nowhere for me to plug in my iPod. The meal was rather nice.

After all that I managed to get home to Milton Keynes to watch the Spurs UEFA Cup highlights.

All in all it was a good day. I did the geeky, lonely, nerdy and sad museum visit that I secretly like, I got to see a few friends and Spurs won in Europe.

On the job hunt.

2006-10-31T09:15:00.000Z

I am trying to find a part time weekend job in the retail industry but it is proving to be harder to find than getting a full time job. I would of thought with Christmas coming soon stores would want to get more staff in now and train them but no one seems to be hiring (if they are hiring they don’t seem to be interested in me).

I have worked part time in the electrical retail sector for years, it was great working in those environments as those jobs gave me extra income when I was in school, helped pay my way through University and I got to test out and play around with the latest technology.

Oh well I guess I better keep looking……..

I finally joined the bloggers revolution.

2006-10-30T12:21:00.002Z

Everyone seems to have blogs and MySpace accounts so I thought I better sign up and record my thoughts on the Internet like:

“Why is the sky blue?”

“What came first the chicken or the egg?”

“I like eggs!”……… (they’re not all winners)