This always happen every year I make an upgrade, I went to InfoConnect Expo to see Qnet prices and so decided to upgrade to the 7MB connection. I asked them to do a line test on my connection, turns out my limit is 8MB down and 1 MB down, meaning I have to take something below 8 MB, and 6MB would be playing it safe, I thought I would push it a little with the 7MB.

Same thing happened last year, I upgraded from 2MB to 4MB and the line was down, took them a week to sort it out. I do appreciate that they do have decent prices, and their phone support has improved greatly over the past year. I have called with problems before, and the customer service department were very helpful.

Now my connection dropped from 4MB connection to a 786 Kbps connection. They told me its a port problem, something on their side and so hopefully they can sort it out soon. I told them to note that I already changed the phone cable inside the house, and the one from the exchange to the DB of the house, and this is a direct line. I took all precautions to make sure this line gets as little interference as possible, its a fax line which is used for internet so it doesn’t need to go through a PBX.

Now I have to wait for them to sort things out, I just hope to be able to use the 7MB connection very soon, I’m eager to use it. I keep forgetting that my friend has a 16MB connection in his house for $34, such a difference, but still Kuwait is oddly in a better situation then most countries in the Middle East because of the larger choices we have.

I have been tinkering around with the themes, there are a few that change colors with the time of day and season, and there are some normal color themes, and there are other ones. I tried most of them and I like the graffiti look because it fits the whole them of the computer. I do like when Google makes these small changes to an excellent product and keep improving it, every time I use Gmail I really dislike using Hotmail.

I have been getting emails and phone calls about people having trouble viewing the blog. I didn’t think much about it in the begging, but seeing as that everyone is having the similar problem I just tested it out and it was true. If you are using Internet Explorer then you are going to have a problem, and since it can’t handle an exception it is damn annoying and says that it can’t access the website. If you are using Google Chrome,  Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or pretty much anything else you will be fine. There is a javascript running on one of the posts and that is causing a problem with Internet Explorer, it will just take a couple of days and the post will be gone so then people will not have problems viewing it.

The one thing or really one of the things that people complain about the iPhone is the camera and how crappy it is. But this guy took some interesting pictures and manually stitched them together to create these patchwork panoramas. I would try taking shots like these but it would be really tough to stitch them together to get the creative image because I am horrible at photoshop.

Link: Flickr

Continue Reading…

This video was shot with a pre-production Canon EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR. The files used to create this video were not manipulated in any way, only re-compressed for ¼ resolution display on our website. To view Vincent Laforet’s comments and behind-the-scenes video on the making of REVERIE, please visit his blog

With the release of the new Canon 5D Mark II it seems people are making a flurry of videos, but nothing compares to the work of art that Vincent Laforet has made. Words can’t really describe the quality of the short film or the beauty of it. After watching this amazing short film check out the behind-the-scenes video.

Link: Canon
Link: VincentLaforetBlog

I have been downloading some movies recently and a lot of anime. And now I’m just remembering all the shows and movies that I haven’t downloaded them and adding them to the list, the best part is finding the good old school movies. I don’t know why I have the sudden urge to watch all the Harry Potter movies at one go, but that would require a lot of time.

Movies

• Made of Honor 720p
• Jerry Maguire 720p
• Secret 720p
• Blade Runner Final Cut 1080p
• You Don’t Mess With The Zohan
• Speed Race
• The Happening
• Columbus Day 2008 720p
• Hancock

TV

• Birds of Prey (Complete)
• Long Way Round (Complete)
• Fifth Gear
• Gossip Girl (S2E01)
• Burn Notice
• Prison Break (S4E1/2)

Anime:

• Requiem from the Darkness
• Vandread First and Second Stage

My network consolidation steps have failed as I post about this earlier. My main problem was that I have multiple machines and multiple storage machines, so for the longest time I  had a lot of items spread out in different locations.

I have two separate networks since I have two ISPs coming in and I want to combine there speeds which is possible with the right setup but it didn’t work out for me and I’m not up for testing all over again. I’m thinking about trying a piece of equipment later, but I don’t want to purchase a load balancer.

I tried something different this time around, I connected both network cables to the two ethernet ports on the back of my power house PC. Its an Nvidia motherboard with two ethernet ports and I wasn’t sure how it was going to be if I plugged them both in, but as soon as I did it accepted the second IP Address. At that point I was able to see both networks and so for the past week I have been shifting data to my Windows Home Server (Bunker-Server).

Data:

• TV Shows (Done)
• Anime (Done)
• Movie (Done)
• Photos (TBD)
• Music (TDB)
• Other Files (TBD)

But the drawback is that the transfer has to go through the main PC but luckly the main PC is powerful enough to handle the huge transfers while doing other tasks and I have delegated downloads to the two other PCs.

Every once in awhile I go through a huge downloading phase and I am at one of them. Most of these files range from 4 GB to 8 BG, and some a little more. I like having all the movies I do enjoy in 1080p, they are very clear and crisp, there just isn’t anything to substitute high quality movies. Now there is the issue of bandwidth and having enough to get all the material you want at one go.

Movies:

• Never Back Down DVDSCR
• Casino Royal 1080p
• Jumper 1080p
• 10,000 BC 1080p
• Stealth 1080p
• Big Trouble in Little China
• Diary of the Dead 720p
• Sex And Death 101 720p
• Cassandras Dream 720p
• Drillbit Taylor 720p
• College Road Trip 720p
• Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow 1080p
• Step Up 2 The Streets 1080p
• Casino Royale 1080p
• Get Smarts Bruce And Lloyd Out Of Control 720p

Anime:

• Soul Eater
• D.GrayMan 52-90

I feels like early 2007 when I would get on the block list of some of the banks in Kuwait. It seems that some IT guys in the banks are getting too trigger happy with their content filtering hardware/software. I have clue what reason they would block a blog, I don’t think the content is offensive to anyone, but I do find it is a bit entertaining that they would even be bothered by my blog. Well, we shall see how long it takes to unblock my blog.

Thank you sender

After two months of trying I have to find a solution to the issues I’m facing at this point. I have to ISPs coming into two different networks, one servicing my day to day downloads, and surfing, the other network serves the gaming and more downloads.

The point of was to combine the network, set the parameters so that I can download, connect my server, and run a few other services that I wanted. After connecting the first ISP I was running into problems, I wasn’t able to connect to certain sites, I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on. I thought it was a DNS problem so I manually entered the DNS and that helped a bit but still running into issues. Even after plugging in the 2nd ISP I thought it would resolve itself, but that didn’t help either. After thorough testing, the ISPs weren’t the issue, it was the Netgear FVS336G Load Balancer.

I’m disappointed since even after updating the firmware, nonstop testing with both Cisco DSL Routers, I couldn’t figure out the problem with the Load Balancer. So at this point, it was a complete failure. Now I have to figure out a different solution, I was very happy with the features of the FVS336G and how user friendly it was with all the advanced features, so if I’m going to look for another hardware solution its not going to be on par for sure.