My Friday was a very simple day of relaxing and very little physical activity except for the morning ride which was fantastic, except that it hit 31C at 11:00 am which is too hot for February. Other then that I tried to remain as stationary as possible, the most movement was on the keyboard choosing movies and TV shows, moving to eat food too.
The Day:
- 3.5 Hours of Riding
- 8 Episodes of Anime
- 1 Animated Movie
- 1 Japanese Movie
- 1 Movie
- How I Met Your Mother & Cougar Town sprinkled throughout the day
Its good every once in a while to have days such as these, just entertainment and food. I went out for a bit around 6 pm to change my spot but then went back to watch some TV shows then start the movie.
One of the best GulfRun’s yet all compressed into a few intense minutes, again my hat goes off to NegativEffect for doing such a great job with this video. The best part for me was watching some of those guys drift, the guy with the ISF took his car to the extreme and that car can really drift. The Z4M did an amazing job on the track as well, some interesting surprises there. I really had fun at the autocross but I started drifting instead of trying to get a good time. So much done in an intense few days, I can’t wait for the next one but I need to improve my driving skills to get better on the track. The Vimeo version is the same but in better quality, I tend to like Vimeo more because of the quality but here is both.
Link: GulfRun Blog
I have had the Nexus One for a while now and at the same time I have my Blackberry with so its interesting to have two data intensive phones. Usually I always had one dumb phone, just to make calls and data phone since getting the Blackberry two simple roles but since getting the Nexus One I have been enjoying surfing and the ease of accessing my emails and other Google applications. The Blackberry is a simple smooth operating system which has great data management, keeps everything lite.
Blackberry 8900
- Handles Data Usage Efficiently
- Great Battery Life
- Great Signal
- Applications
- Blackberry Messenger
- Good Sound Quality
- Excellent Speaker
- Durable, has taken some ridiculous falls
Nexus One Android
- Excellent Screen
- Lots of Applications
- Best browsing Capability, works with Flash
- Best Gmail Integration
- Works with Wifi Perfectly
- Touch Screen
- Amazing Sound Quality
- Google Contacts Integrations
- Crappy Batter Life
- Fragile
- Very Customizable Home Screen
- Youtube in Full Screen
I used to fly British Airways a lot a few years ago, but ever since they had their first set of protests back around 2006 things haven’t been going so well for them. British Airways used to be my most preferred airlines to travel on, there is something that I like about them and I always enjoyed walking around Heathrow Terminal 4, maybe it was the bookstore, or HMV, or WH Smith which kept me so entertained over the past years of going through it. I got this downgrade from British Airways from a Gold Member to a Silver, and now from Silver to Blue and I’m not really annoyed with them as much as I am saddened by the state it has reached. Its not what it used to be, and I loved their lounges and I still like their style. Especially recently I remember they have had some insane price increases which has led me to try other airlines such as Lufthansa and Emirates, and I have had some good experiences. Still I don’t feel that I am losing much from the downgrade as I never really felt any benefit from their Mileage program.
There seems to clearly be some details that you are unaware of when you have a data capable phone. With the Blackberry you have packages for data usage in local and roaming networks but that isn’t the case with any data capable phone such as an iPhone or Google phone. In my case the problem happened with my Google Nexus One by the fourth day in Bahrain during GulfRun my cellphone gets disconnected, luckily I have my BB with me so I call in to check whats the reason and they told me I have a bill of over 700 KD with the 700 being just the data bill not the phone bill and I would have to pay the whole thing off to have my phone unlocked. The problem is that a lot of people are unaware of this point, I had to pay right away and check my bill as soon as I got back to Kuwait. It was a ridiculously damaging bill and its a lot more then my usual bill. In this case Zain has no packages for data capable phone, you have to pay 6 fils per Kilobyte or 6.145 KD per 1MB which is extremely high and adds up very quickly. Since my phone was roaming, updating weather data, downloading email headers, syncing my gmail contacts and more over the past 5 days I got smacked with a ridiculous bill. I can’t believe that Zain being in Saudi and Bahrain can’t have an agreement with its own network for a data plan, the users just get destroyed by this pricing. After that mistake I switched off data while roaming and only connects to data when I connect to a wireless access point.
Vodafone has packages for anyone roaming in Europe in its network, and different packages for roaming outside of Europe. At least you are aware of all these details, and if you aren’t subscribed to it then the service isn’t switched on. If Zain switches off the service someone can easily call in to activate it but instead people get caught in this dangerously quiet pricing plan.
I have suffered multiple crashes from my BBM 5.00.55 so I decided to upgrade but something was acting up and then half way thru the update the phone fell and restarted which resulted in BBM disappearing from my screen.
I had to remove the software through the desktop manager and then reinstalled BBM 5.00.57 from the phone. The best and only way to really restore all contacts and groups is through your email. Back Up to your email consistently to make sure that you have the latest contacts and groups.
One I asked to restore from email it took about 20 minutes to verify the email which freaked me out a bit, then it took about 10 minutes to restore all my contacts and several hours to restore the groups which some how came through successfully. So Blackberry has a clear and good working process for restoring the contacts and groups.
After having some time aside I have taken to completing the WHS server, and as well as taking a few things apart I decided to continue the build on my Intel Extreme Dual Processor Motherboard. I decided to use the spare parts that I had from all the different machines, as well as a few parts that are laying around. I used the Thermaltake Kandalf case from my old WHS Server since its such an excellent case, fits the huge motherboard perfectly, and its a very solid case.
Parts List:
- Intel DX5400XS – Skulltrail (Dual Processor)
- 8 GB DDR2 800 Ram
- 80 GB SSD Drive
- DVD-Writer
- HIS ATI Radeon 4870
- Backplane (Space for 5 Drives)
- Corsair 1000W Power Supply
Putting this system together I decided to put Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit on the machine, and I’m assuming its going to run blazing fast with this specifications. This will be my honest try using Windows 7 this time around. Finishing projects and getting up and running is a very good feeling, now I just have to clean up all the electrical parts that are laying around all over the place.
I think I’m always doing something or busy but I haven’t been able to do the normal things that I do recently, just too busy with work and GulfRun that I haven’t had a chance to breath but now the dust is settling and it has been a hell of a lot of fun but I want to catch up to my usual activities. My Google Reader has been piling up to over a thousand, it has been like this for days even though I have been slowly chipping at all the articles, I have to see or read all the articles, I just can’t hit Mark All As Read.
Simple Tasks:
- Rebuilding WHS Server (Been on hold for months)
- Riding
- Watching Anime and Movies
- Cleaning up my Room(You know you have to clean up when your navigating around books, electronics and other items in the room)
- Video Games
- Reorganizing all my Photography Equipment
The Great
- Android 2.1 is more refined, works smoothly
- Amazing 3.7inch OLED Screen
- Powerful CPU, the Nexus One is a fast phone
- Excellent quality sound
- Fantastic 5.1 Megapixel Camera
- Interaction with all Google Services (Gmail, Latitude, Google Voice, Google Reader, Picasa, and others) is fantastic, its smooth and updates right away.
The Good
- Android Market Applications have built up over the past year and a bit, even though some need some more refining before hitting the market
- Very Good Quality Build
- Smooth design, and relatively thin, fits nicely in your hands but I keep hearing that it doesn’t take kindly to drops
- Decent phone signal
The Crap:
- Battery doesn’t even last the whole day, it makes it 75% through the day I use the phone a lot
- No Multitouch
- No Arabic Support, expecting it soon
- Speaker is ridiculously low and the ringer speaker is on the low side too, but you can hear the ringer clearly, I still have to get used to the new ringer
- Slow charging Battery
Overall
I think they have made great progress with all the Google Phones and I am enjoying using it. So much you can do with the data and configure this phone, this phone is for people who really like customizing how their phone works and how it presents the data to you. The interaction between all the programs with data being downloaded to the phone is very fast and smooth, I have 3G switched off and its still very smooth. The best part is surfing online with Flash working perfectly, it presents websites very well and smooth. All this information can be customized, the home screen can be customized, I like how much you can tweak it and move things around, the different widgets, and how easy it is to get to the settings page and tweak it.
Zain APN Settings:
My luck with phones for the past few days have been a bit off but this is a bit of a simpler problem. My trackball stopped scrolling down, I didn’t think much of it, I would just cause a lot of friction and it would go back to normal and never thought much about it until today. It really didn’t want to go down, I could go up, left, right but not down so it was annoying. I decided to try to take it apart myself, when I started doing that, it turns out there are more parts connected then I knew so I put it back together. So the next step was to take a very thin flat screw driver to the area around the trackball and insert, but that get the results I expected, instead I destroyed all functionality left in the ball.
Called my phone guy, asked him to replace the trackball section asap, and he hasn’t failed me yet.
25 KD for an original trackball piece with the area around it, 5 hours later the whole thing is done and fixed, good as new. I just can’t seem to change to another Blackberry, if I’m comfortable with a phone I won’t be changing it anytime and soon and switching to the Bold 9700 isn’t on the map for me right now, the 8900 does everything I need perfectly.