for the ladies...

For those in Malaysia, if you're interested in buying Tie Rack scarves and tops from Zara, Mango, Bershka and H&M, just click here.

Hurry, stock is limited. Happy browsing!

[Oh btw, if you were wondering, this isn't spam.] :)

age++

In C++, age++ is equivalent to age = age + 1, which just means increase age by 1.

You dah kat ofis ke?

Belum. Tengah siap2 ni.

Boleh tak tolong bukak pintu?

I had a surprise visitor in the morning of my birthday bringing breakfast, flowers and presents! =)

A breakfast of delicious home-baked New York cheesecake and hot white tea. I was given a lovely hand-made card and a nice portrait of myself pencil-drawn by her. Then, after work, there was another present: an iLap! *More smiles.*

Thanks Nina! :)

For dinner, we bought risotto and sushi and ate at home while watching HIMYM.

A couple of days later, had a great time with some friends eating dinner at Nandos.

Thanks Nabilah & Belle and Arin & Amer!

Pretty awesome birthday if you ask me. =)

games

New xbox360 games on different websites:

	Play.com	Amazon
Assassin's Creed II	39.99	35.98
Assassin's Creed II: Black Edition	108.99	-
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2	44.99	40.14
FIFA 10	37.99	29.98
Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City	24.99	17.99
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2	24.99	21.98
PES 2010: Pro Evolution Soccer	34.99	19.99
Tekken 6	29.99	29.99

Lots of good games! Like my friend Hyree mentioned, as students, we used to have lots of time to play games but not enough money to buy them. Now, we have the money but there's not enough time to play them! Haih.

There's an Assassin's Creed II White Edition as well from GAME, currently at £54.99.

There are also more potentially good games coming soon next year like Army Of Two: The 40th Day, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction and Max Payne 3.

If I'm rajin enough, I'll update the price of these games because they do fluctuate. For example, yesterday at Play.com, Pro Evo was £20+ and a few days before that FIFA 10 was £20+ too. I won’t be surprised that by the time you read this, some of the price has changed.

I’ll try to snap one (or more) of them if a very good deal comes across. *smiles*

21 Dec 09 - Updated price and added Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 (don't know why I forgot to put that in before).

28 Dec 09 - Updated price. Don't think I'll buy Modern Warfare 2; I'll just borrow it from my friend Arin. Hehe.

29 Dec 09 - Bought Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City for £17.99 from Amazon.

11 Jan 10 - Bought a new Tekken 6 for £20 from eBay. Yeay! Also, I've played the Army Of Two: The 40th Day demo. It's similar to the first game, but the screen is split right and left instead of top and bottom, which is NOT good for a third-person shooter game. Boo!

wave to google

On Friday night, I opened my email and lo and behold, I had an invitation to preview Google Wave! Never thought I'd received one because I didn't get an invitation when Google first let it out into the world a few weeks ago.

Don't know what the fuss is all about? Well, I'm not gonna explain it to you. Haha. Read about Google Wave here. There's a (really really) long video about it. There's also some stuff written about it in Google's blog here.

Already craving for one? Request an invitation from Google here, or to my friends and family, you can ask me nicely for one. I have a few more invites to give. Taraa for now (wave!).

cobweb

bersawangnya blog ni!

It's been quite a while since I added an entry to this blog. I do have ideas sometimes but just too busy (or too lazy) to construct sentences to release them into the world.

That's all for now. Cheerio!

battlestar galactica is frakkin awesome!

I finished watching the whole series of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica last week. Yup, that’s right, the WHOLE series of four seasons, plus the pilot miniseries and webisodes.

I must say, the series as a whole is quite amazing. They’ve managed to maintain the continuity and avoid major plot holes. Plus fantastic story telling that keeps you at the edge of your seats. Yes, it is science fiction, but it’s so good that you feel like it’s this great drama that just happens to be a science fiction.

The twists and turns, and the ‘what the frak’ moments are really good. Fyi, ‘frak’ is a substitute used in the series for the f word.

Battlestar Galactica was actually a series back in the late 70’s. It was ‘re-imagined’ which meant that the main concept is still there; of humans fleeing their colonies after being attacked by Cylons (AI’s originally invented by the humans but then evolved and rebelled against them). However, the whole storyline differs from the original series.

I would imagine that the original one was also great in its own right, but I’m sure impressed by the new one, which you guys would probably be able to know by now after reading this post.

Even though the ending still left some mysteries unanswered, I still like it. If I’m crazy enough, I’d probably watch the whole series again. Heh.

So say we all!

ramadhan mubarak!

Bagi menyempurnakan titah perintah Her Majesty The Queen, saya dengan ini mengisytiharkan bahawa tarikh permulaan puasa di United Kingdom jatuh pada:

Hari Sabtu 22 Ogos 2009, bersamaan 1 Ramadhan 1430 Hijrah.

Selamat berpuasa muslimin dan muslimat sekalian!

http://www.iccuk.org/downloads/LMF2009%20Ramadan.pdf

kite runner

I finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini more than a week ago. It’s a rather good book. To be honest, it started a bit slow. Usually, when I read a book, it would be difficult for me to stop reading, but with The Kite Runner, that didn’t happen until I got through more than half of the book. I was thinking to myself, hmm.. how come many people seem to like this book, because it wasn’t that interesting to me.

Halfway through however, it got a lot more interesting and towards the end, the pace did seem to be a lot quicker. I even slept late on a couple of weekdays just so that I can read what happens next.

I guess the slow part of the book was important to setup the story. I can’t expect every book I read to be action-packed. Nearer the end, the story seems to be concluding, but they were still many pages left. I thought, oh no.. oh no.. this seems like a good ending.. but the book’s not finished yet.. is something bad gonna happen. Full of suspense. If you wanna know what happens, why don’t you read it? Or if you’re not too bothered, just wiki it.

I even watched the movie version of the book, but it was a bit disappointing. Yes, I can understand that some parts of the book couldn’t be included so that it wouldn’t be too long. However, there were some parts of the movie that didn’t do justice to the intensity of the book. For example, **SPOILERS AHEAD!**, when Amir jan is calling Soraya about the marriage proposal. She was telling him about her past which she wasn’t very proud of and if Amir would still want to marry her now that he knew. When he said yes, I imagined them to be really high with emotions, but the way it was portrayed in the movie.. *sigh*. Nasib baik the actress who played Soraya boleh tahan jugak la cute dia. Hehe.

Oh and the next project is Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

prince of persia

So… I’ve completed my first project. I actually completed the game last week or was that the week before? Well, it’s not important anyway. Before I go on, I need to warn you that this is quite a long post, so if you have no interest in video games whatsoever or if you actually hate them, then just stop reading. That's right, just stop, close this browser, turn off the computer, and go to bed. Now.

Okay, now that we've got rid of those people, let me tell you a brief history of Prince of Persia (PoP). The first PoP was developed by Brøderbund in 1989. It was a 2D game (of course la kan) where the Prince ran and jumped to avoid deadly traps, fought the bad guys with swords and solved puzzles. I think I did play it when I was small, on a DOS computer. That seems to be a long time ago now. In 1994, Brøderbund released PoP 2: The Shadow and the Flame. The Prince marries the daughter of the Sultan of Persia, hence becoming the Prince of Persia. Then in 1999, PoP 3D was released by Red Orb Entertainment. This was the first PoP game that incorporated 3D graphics.

Ubisoft then took over and developed a PoP trilogy (The Sands of Time, Warrior Within, The Two Thrones) much loved by many people. The story is different from the first trilogy. The Prince is actually the prince of Persia (duh!) and he still runs and jumps to avoid traps and fight the bad guys, but this time he’s more acrobatic and the games are all in 3D. The puzzles are really good as well. The main theme of the whole trilogy was about the sands of time, including the implications of altering/slowing/travelling through time. I enjoyed playing them (although I haven’t actually finished playing the third one).

Because I enjoyed playing the trilogy, I was really enthusiastic about the new PoP, which prompted me to buy the PoP Collector’s Edition. The black case is nice but the CD case is just the normal green plastic one, so it was a bit of a disappointment for me. My Gears of War 2 Limited Edition set is much much better, with a metal CD case *big smile*. Ok, back to PoP. Ubisoft released a new PoP game last year, which unlike the previous trilogies doesn’t even mention the words Prince and Persia in the game! The word of is mentioned plenty of time however.

The so-called ‘prince’ is a thief who, while looking for his donkey, gets lost in a sandstorm and meets up with Elika, a princess of a mysterious land. Together, they have to cleanse the land from the ‘corruption’ of the dark god Ahriman. I agree with Hyree that the game is quite easy compared to the Sands of Time trilogy. You’ll see marks on the wall where you’re supposed to jump and the screen becomes pale when you need to call Elika to help you jump. And you can’t even die in the game, which is a good thing I guess, because it will avoid you from being frustated if you just die all the time. The puzzles are simple and easy to solve. I wish they’d be more challenging so that I’ll get that satisfied feeling of completing a difficult puzzle. Also, I miss the running-up-the-wall-and-then-jumping-over-the-opponent-and-then-striking-with-a-sword move from the previous trilogy. But most of the jumping and Elika fight moves are rather cool as well.

Even though it’s ‘consumer friendly’ as mentioned by my good friend Hyree, it was rather enjoyable playing the game, mostly due to its wonderful graphics. It has a water-colour-ish style, but in a 3-dimensional way. And the view after the land is healed is beautiful. There are even Assassin View and Titanic View achievements on the Xbox360. You can also change the skins of the Prince and Elika. The other skins for the Prince are Altaïr from Assassin’s Creed, the Prince from Sands of Time and the prototype Prince, while Elika’s other skins are Farah from Sands of Time, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil and the prototype Elika. Talking about Assassin’s Creed, the trailer of Assassin’s Creed 2 is super cool! Can’t wait to play that later. Oh and don’t ask me about Beyond Good and Evil because I’ve never heard of that game before.

If you want to get Xbox360 achievement points easily, then this is the game to play. You can get at least 700 points by just finishing the game, but you’ll probably get 800+. There are only 4 achievements that I didn’t get (yet?), which are Light Seeds Accumulator, Light Seeds Protector and Light Seeds master, which involve collecting many light seeds, and the Combo Specialist, where I need to have performed all the combos in the game, which I’m not too bothered to do.

In February, a downloadable content (DLC) was released. For those of you who don’t know what a DLC is, it’s just something that the developers of the game make you pay for to play extra hours on an extension to the game. It’s called PoP Epilogue and it continues after the ending of the game. It costs 800 Microsoft points on the Xbox360 which is £6.80 and not something I’d pay to play. So I just youtubed it to know its story. Basically its ending is *SPOILER AHEAD* as bad as the original game, because the developers want to make a sequel to this game so that they can further cash in on our money and I will most probably fall victim to their evil scheme.

All in all, PoP is an enjoyable game and I recommend you to play it, especially if you’re new to gaming. So that’s my first project completed. My side project of sorting out Easter roadtrip photos is also done. I currently have another side project, which is playing Gears of War 2. Why is it a side project? Well, it’s because I only play it on Friday nights with Amir Soldier. It’s not as enjoyable when played alone. Now, my next main project will be…

Reading The Kite Runner!

my projects

Nope, I’m not gonna write about projects at work, or the ones at uni for that matter. It’s a little bit different. Since I have some spare time and I’ve also bought stuff but haven’t used them yet or rarely used them, I decided that I’m going to commit to certain projects in my life.

nope, not this type of project

What is a project? From the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a project is a specific plan or design, similar to a scheme. And what is a scheme? It’s a plan of program of action. Both of them have plan in them. So what is a plan? It’s just a method for achieving an end, or a detailed program. Okay, I think I should stop giving endless meanings of words now.

Basically, by having a project or a few projects, I’ll keep myself occupied and not get bored. So, if I suddenly don’t know what to do, I can just continue with one of my projects. You can also think of it as a to-do list, but that’s a bit boring isn’t it? I’ll have this and that to do, then after doing them, I’ll just tick some boxes indicating that they’re done. However, for a project, I’ll ideally put more effort into doing something, no matter what it is.

Okay, enough gibberish. So my first project will be… wait for it… wait for it… playing the Prince of Persia. You may disagree with me and laugh this project off, or belittle my enthusiasm for these projects of mine. If so…

Pedulik hapa aku.

prince of persia, with its wonderful water-colour-ish animation

Anyway, one of the reasons I thought about this project thing is that I’ve actually bought the game in November or December last year but had only started really playing it a couple of weeks ago. That’s a long time isn’t it. I guess I was preoccupied with other stuff.

Also, it’s something that I enjoy doing, so I think it’s rather a cool project to commit myself to. And I do a little bit of research as well on how to get certain achievements in the game so that I’ll certainly maximise the time spent on playing the game. If you’re thinking ‘Ak ela, semangat gila mamat nih,’ then please refer to the quotation above the Prince of Persia picture.

Another project that I’m currently doing is to sort out the photos from my Easter roadtrip. I went to Bath, Bristol, Tintagel Castle, Lands End, Eden Project and Stonehenge with some friends a month ago and I still haven’t sorted out all the photos from other people’s cameras. We went to a lot of places so you can imagine how many photos there are, hence many unnecessary photos will have to be deleted.

us at tintagel castle, cornwall

Other projects in the backlog, in no particular order, are as follows:

1. Read The Kite Runner (which I bought last summer)
2. Read The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad (which was also bought last summer)
3. Play Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (which was bought last year)
4. Play Kungfu Panda (hmm.. I seem to have bought a lot of stuff last year)
5. Study some engineering stuff related to work
6. Study history (interesting ones of course)
7. Read and understand the tafsir
8. Watch every f1 race this season if possible
   
9. Cook stuff from the recipe books that I also bought last year
10. Go back home for Raya!
11. Go travelling somewhere
12. Movie or series marathon?
    
13. More exercises and workout maybe?
14. Learn a new skill and/or polish up existing ones
15. Volunteering

See, it’s not just fun and games. You need to develop your skills not only at work but also for yourself, your life. I won’t need to draw up Gantt charts for my projects or do proper and detailed planning, but I’ll have things to do that I hopefully will enjoy. Oh there’s a Batman: Arkham Asylum game coming out and I am so gonna play it, so that should be on my project list I guess. If you’re thinking ‘Geek gila mamat nih,’ again, please refer to the quotation somewhere in the middle of this post..!