The week in vision

Well of course me and Viveq aced the test this week, the tutor refused to give out the results though...
He keeps rambling on how the weaker students need to get their act together when the XP module starts (yea yea ok get on with it now).

I went out and bought 3 boxes of instant noodles (getting fed up of my sister's cooking to be honest), and bought a nice shiny new Nike football.

Parv is in the US of A, and last night was on MSN to tell me he has parted with $1999 dollars (yes that about 1299 in pounds) for a nice new shiny Macbook Pro 15".

He says its faster than my computer (ok then, but I didn't sure as hell have to pay 1299 pounds for this machine, OR the shuttle PC I made OR the Dell laptop I have NOR for repairing my old Toshiba laptop- in fact combine all the cost together I don't think I even come close to 1299?), not to mention my PC is a 512MB P4 3GHz on a very old motherboard, but at least I can play Pro Evolution Soccer 5 on it?

On that not I decided to take PES5 up again and started playing on-line again, I was formerly at around 100 points (class1 amateur), after 2 days of trying to get used to this crap I am now Class2 with 600 points.

I say this crap because when you play on-line its like you are using a dumbed down version of the game engine, and it stinks to be honest.
Wont stop me playing it though!

Zam (my cousin) is posting me PES manager and Winning Eleven 10, which he is loving every minute of - he says the animations have improved 10 fold.

I am on my own this weekend and am bored out of my brains. Watched Arsenal draw 0-0 with Villareal to reach the Champions League finals (1-0 on agg), joining Barcelona who had the same result. Missed another Middlesborough come back special at the Riverside to beat St. Bucharest 4-2 to go through 4-3 on agg to the UEFA cup final.

Man utd face off against Chelsea today. No one thinks United have a chance at Stanford Bridge, but to be honest this is the deciding factor in our title campaign this season. If we beat Chelsea we will remind them that no matter who they go out and buy this summer we will be there to challenge them for the title next season.
And to beat them at Stanford Bridge would be a major boost for United and United's Fans, it would only be a minor set back for Chelsea's millions and a crushed ego for Jose - the special one - moaning mornino.

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The Test - Tuesday

Well, I spent good part of last night taking the A+ practise test 3 times, only to pass on the final attempt (80%).

I got in today and the test started at 8:45 and was about 20 pages long - the first half all written and the second was multiple choice.

I clocked it all with about 90minutes to go, Viveq (the other decent IT literate guy) was second at about 45 minutes left and everyone else failed to finish in time.

The test ended at 12:30pm! Thank god it was an open book test - so at least I could find something to write in the written test!

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Its like Deja Vu.. Monday

Alvin had given us 5 chapters to cram in during the weekend. Of course that's not going to happen!

On Saturday Umi was back and we had a cracking good game of football - ended up loosing 12-8 but I managed 3 goals and played most of the game as a lone striker - hopefully it wont always be on my own!

We did the gardening - I mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges and washed the car, my sister did the digging up weeds etc etc

We need to sell my Mum's car - a nice 1999 P reg Mazda 626GXi if anyone is interested.

I watched Liverpool beat Chelsea in the FA Cup Semi Final 2 - 1 Goals from Riise and Garcia and a single goal from Drogba - made my day that did to see Chelsea lose the chance of a double.
Watch Henry score another wonder goal for Arsenal as they drew 1 - 1 with Tottenham to end their chances of finishing in 4the place.

I managed to read 3 chapters last night in order to at least look like I have done something. When we got in the teacher surprised us by announcing that there will be a test tomorrow to gauge our performance. Since most of the students are non IT proliferated, they were all in an uproar and this was of course holding up the class in general.

This continued for most of today's session - I was royally pissed off. Rather then make issues about not understanding this and that and asking questions about the exams they should have concentrated on getting through as much as possible in this session and finished revising at home.
I wont be revising because I want to see what score I will get in a real world scenario - when you don't have time to research these things and need to know there and then.

In the meantime I completed Metal Gear Solid 2, and must admit that it is the biggest waste of Konami's money I have ever seen.
A shame no one looks at the storyline and game play these days and just looks at graphics and design!

technorati tags: mcse, training, football, umair, gardening, washing, car, mazda, 626, sell

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Borrringggg...

Day 2 of the lecturing and I am slowly starting to fall off the pace - due to boredom.

Well I did get some questions wrong so its not all bad, I took a mock 70 question exam and scored 675 points out of 1000, the pass mark is 800 so not too bad on my 1st attempt - these are A+ exam questions!

Went to lunch with Parv, did some HTML work with him to introduce his Flickr Bridge into his blog's sidebar.

Also beat him 3-2 in games of Pro evo 4 (WE8), and 3-0 in games of Tekken 5 (Law - me vs Xaiyou -him).

Watched M'Boro get beat by a very nice goal from S' Bucharest in the UEFA Cup S. Finals 1st Leg.

technorati tags: mcse, exams, a+, parv, html, flickr, blog, pes4, we8, tekken5, boro, uefa

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My name's Alvin

Today our teacher got the course really started, his name was Alvin something...

He seems to have been in IT a good 20 years, so best not to be cheeky or anything.

We started off brushing over the basics - not before each of us introduced ourselves, then we went through the A+ hardware objectives and discussed them.

He wants us to read the first 4 chapters at home - BORRING!

I mean I cannot stand the A+ book I already have at home - because it is mindless reading stuff I have done sooo many times and is so borring!

Well at least we wont be covering A+ in detail - but we can take the exam after, so that is something to thing about.

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And so it begins...

Today was the day it starts - my MCSE course that is.

I arrived well too early at James Thorton, 8:35 to be exact, after waiting till 9:20 we got called into a room full of new monitors, keyboards and mice etc.

We were handed out travel forms for applying for student discount on travel and also told we can reclaim any travel cost at the end of the month.

What I didnt like was the fact once you get your MSCA and go on a outplacement, in the evenings you have to do E-Learining, I thought it was all instructor led! Not nice. Although the labs are open and instructors are present - so I can easily pop down here to get some help.

Also I didnt like was that the hours for training in the MSCA module is going to stay at 9-1pm, which is alot different for 9-5pm!

I did like the fact you get student discount and an ID card, you also get A+ training material for which you are encouraged to go for the A+ exam which is not included and therefor not paid for by JTG (James Thornton Group).

We finished early (10am) and I headed to HSBC and then home. Started job hunting (now I can look for afternoon jobs as well as evening ones).

technorati tags: a+, mcse, mcsa, JTG, james, thorton, group, training

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The Easter Weekend

Had a right royal laff with my cousins over the weekend.

Saturday night we had a Monopoly Finale - My sisters were eager to take revenge for the beating handed out by my older cousin sister.

Some how I must have had bad luck - I was in jail for most of the start - so I only bought Mayfair and Vine Street.

I some how wheeled and dealed to get Park lane too - completing that set. And paid 1500Pound for all 4 Stations.

From then on I blew everyone away! Good fun!

Monday we had a game of Football at Vale Farm - 12PM till 3PM. We had a 6vs6 match up which saw us fall behind 6-1 in the first hour.

We managed to turn the game around and won 10-9 with me bagging a goal for myself.

Some how I wasnt too effected by the football - no injuries and so forth. I had a nap and then had a shower and I was still OK.

Went downstairs and then all of a sudden my left knee just gave in! Like it had been sprained or bruised or something.

Strange, the effects started to wear out by the evening - but this has me worried that my knee can just play up like this.

I will have to keep an eye on it in future.

I start my MCSE Training tomorrow at James Thorton Group in Hammersmith - I hope its good, I have had bad training experiences in my time trust me!

I took a mock exam on a MCSE exam site and only got 3 wrong! Not bad.

technorati tags: football, monoploy, knee, injury, mcse, training

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Im in Luck - Saturdays

Canon Europe Web Self-Service

My Canon Ixus 400 has started acting up more and more - there is a "cf card error" which is now not going away.

The card is fine - I tested it in my Ixus V3.

By chance I found this page on Canon's site - there seems to be something wrong with the communication with the Compact Flash Cards.

I had to cancel football today - since Daniel, Thomas and Courts are at a easter mass/vigil no one wants to turn up.

Rescheduled it for Monday instead (when the Sports centre is closed so we can use the Astro Pitch for free!).

Started playing with Yahoo Widgets - formally known as Komfonbulator or something. Kinda handy if you know what kind of widgets you would like to have.

Bought TaxCalc 2006 Lite - I will submit a self assement next year to try and reclaim the PAYE tax I have paid this year, which is a incomplete tax year.

technorati tags: tax, canon, ixus, v3, warranty, repair

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Good Fridays..

Went to Friday prayer with Parv - only when he dragged me out at the last minute since I wasnt feeling well.

They had to do a 3rd prayer because there was so many people this Good Friday - suprisingly most of the extra people are Pakistanis - Where are these guys at normal every weekly Friday prayers? Every week the African Muslim minority outweigh the Asian Muslim "majority" and it is only on Eid or during the Holiday season you will see all these asian Muslims crawl out from under their hiding places...

Went to Dallas Chicken shop afterwards and felt I have been eating too much - linked up with old folks Adil and Rizwan.

Aunty came down from Manchester today with Sofia and Sofina - up all night talking about everything basically.

technorati tags: easter, good, friday, holidays, religon, prayer, muslim

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Wednesdays...

Yesterday Me and Parv left early to go to Adecco.

The woman there was quite rude and stuck up, claiming Parv's G5 Mac Mini was too slow to handle Adecco's website.
He eventually conceded and used their PCs to register.

She was rude to me too when I wanted to search their vacancies with someone. I eventually got seen to by Alex he spent an hour getting my file sorted out, I had to take a typing test and a general work ethic questionnaire!

After that me and Parv had some Greggs (nice sandwiches there) here at a clearing by a Church off Chiwick High Road.

After I got home I left straight for a game of football. Somehow we managed a 4 hour game!

I was tired after that, missed Karate and watched Middlesborough make the FA Cup semi final by beating Charlton FC 4-2 in a exciting game.

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Thursday and Google Calendar

Google Calendar

Google released an online Ajax and RSS/iCal compatible Calendar.

Me and Parv spent the good part of 3 hours trying to see if it work directly with either iCal (OSX) or Sunbird (XP) .

Didnt work with either, for some silly reason you need to export your calendar and import it into the other application and visa versa.

I mean didnt anyone ever heard of Sync'ing? I want a calendar I can work on with my desktop, and then sync it so I have it when I log into someelse's machine.

I give this a 3 out of 5 since it is a nice app, and it works well - just not with everything else - except RSS and iCal READERS - not much good with iCal Apps.

Me and Parv went up to Taste today and had a pizza lunch - Must make a mental note not to order more then 1 9" pizza...

Uploaded some pictures to my Flickr account and used Picasa to touch up the mobile phone pictures - very good work too!

technorati tags: google, calendar, ical, software

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Hamachi

Hamachi : Stay Connected

Something I stumbled into today was this software I had tried out at work last year.

It is a sort of private encrypted VPN/network connection, which is easy to configure and easy to maintain. I would like to use this with other people I know its a shame no one I know uses it.

technorati tags: vpn, encryption, network, software

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A possible temp job @ Adecco?

www.adecco.co.uk - Branch - UK's leader in temporary, permanent and specialist recruitment, filling hundreds of jobs each day

Seems I might have some work on - Adecco are a recruitment consultancy that specialise in having staff on standby to start temp jobs ASAP.

This is the 2nd time they have rang me about vacancies and I am pleased with their response. I should be popping over there at 11am just enough time to head there and back intime for football at 12:30pm (hopefully if I get enough people).

technorati tags: recruitment, jobs

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Build a better mousetrap - Incredible Machine 01

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JD8P4fE8Yn0

Someone has a lot of time on his hands to build these. You only see these in cartoons or something.

Well worth a watch.

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My del.icio.us account

del.icio.us/theskillster

I finally got this nailed, and I am impressed.

I have started importing all my old favourites and tagging them all to make for easy access and sharing.

Added the RSS feed into my netvibes.net homepage and I now have my bookmarks on the go where ever I am.

A great feature of del.icio.us is the ability to "subscribe" to a certain tag - so anyone else's bookmarks with this tag will arrive in your inbox for you to view and save to your own.

This allows you to "bypass" search engines and find sites related to what you want found by other people - sort of like a people's web index/ search engine.

technorati tags: del.icio.us, bookmarks, review

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First Nintendo Revolution shots surface

PS2-Scene

Someone managed to get scans of shots from an upcoming game for the N Revolution.

Looks good, and explains abit about moving around in a FPS shooter.

technorati tags: gaming, nintendo, revolution

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Bush administration looks in danger

Top News Article | Reuters.com

I have my own personal opinion about Bush and his Anti-Terror antics, but there is no need for my words.

Almost the entire US population know there is something wrong there.

Face it - he didnt find those weapons of mass destruction, and in getting rid of the dictator of Iraq he has led Iraq into what some Iraqis call "a civil war".

Hopefully someone at the top faces up to the reality that USA can be a dangerous superpower.

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Rotary Engines - like the one in Mazda RX8s

Howstuffworks "How Rotary Engines Work"

Took me till the end of this article to understand how they work - after they showed a visual diagram.

Please have a read.

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Boot Camp voids your warranty!

DiggLicious.com - a cool blend of digg.com and del.icio.us

If you read a few posts down there is someone who points out that in the terms of use for bootcamp any problems (hardware) arising from it will not be covered in warranty.

Thats gotta be a joke right? If I format my DELL PC and put windows 2003 on it that wont void my warranty, DELL will just ask me to use a recovery disc to restore it to XP - but I have never had that raised to me in my 2 years of working with 50 Dell PCs 15 Dell Laptops and 10 Dell Servers.

How strange that apple are dangling a poisonous cherry for all apple owners!

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Flock Browser for Windows and del.icio.us Bookmark Sharing service

Flock is a new flavour of Mozilla browser (www.flock.com) it has some nice features, like a "write blog" option that lets you type up a piece like this one and post it straight from the browsers own page.

Also has a built in Flickr browser and "upload" drop zone (though it doesnt work yet - much like the "blog it" drop zone), and features the ability to sync your bookmarks (after it smartly imports all your history and favs from Internet Explorer on first run) with online services like del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us).

I had to delete my del.icio.us account 3 times trying to get "just" my bookmarks uploaded and not history and other rubbish - there isnt a setting that controls this it seems.

And more often then not the browser tends to fall over and not do anything, or in my case break completely (had to reinput my blogger details into it).

This browser is only at beta stage but is nearing completion, so I would wait awhile to pick this up - but it is alot of fun - and has a built in RSS aggregator (scans all your bookmarks for RSS leads and collects all the news into one webpage!).

I would give this a 3 out of 5, and del.icio.us will get a 3 also - as it seems adding tags are useless unless you have a nice search option somewhere, and also a batch editing and tagging options (as well as a delete one would be nice)!.

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The Day after Apple's Bootcamp

http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/06/boot-camp-the-day-after/

It was going to happen wasn’t it?

Using Apple’s BootCamp program to boot XP from a intel Mac.
People can now load the likes of XP, Media Centre 2005,VISTA and Linux onto their Macs.

Only issue I have with bootcamp is that they should make their OSX able to read NTFS.
Since making users install XP in FAT32 is a serious mistake – every BSOD will cause loads of disk errors.

Why not install Windows 98 or something like windows server 2003 onto a Mac mini to make it Extra special!

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Google's Picasa

picasa,
originally uploaded by The Skillster.

This is Picasa 2 from Google.
Its a nice picture managment and touch up program and has a nice gui.
You can do many things from backing up your photos to a picture DVD to ordering prints online and blogging about your pictures.
I give it a 4 out of 5, since it lacks batch tag processing/grouping and ability to upload to sites like Flickr. Get more info picasa.google.com

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Silverstone Accountancy

silverstone,
originally uploaded by The Skillster.

This is the flop that was Silverstone accountancy.
Me, Parv and Monika worked in this tiny back room office doing crazy amounts of work on shit pay.

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Silvershield's ill fated EPOS flop

Silvershield's ill fated EPOS flop,
originally uploaded by The Skillster.

You want me to explain this? Asif came up with some dream that all fast food outlets need to have a touch screen cash register/EPOS. We got all the hardware sorted, but the software to this day was never finished.
And in addition the marketing - led by my mate Parv - was a real flop.

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Another reason to use Linux for commercial apps

Not a good sign if you are at the arrivals waiting for a flight to arrive.
The screen in the middle has a windows 95/98 boot up error! 

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Ah, My first night at Old Trafford, Manchester

Manchester United 6 - 3 Fenerbache
Great night for my first European match at Old Trafford - Wayne Rooney's Debut game too. He sparked his start to a great United career with a Champion's League Hat-trick! 

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This is Noden & Co Solicitors - or was!

I should have read the warning signs and got myself another job while I still had money coming in! This is a picture of the waiting area at Noden & Co Solicitors - based in London W10. The tables were there for a training session, which I recorded on DV camera and published to our intranet and internet site via Windows Media Server and Windows Media Encoder. 

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Parv in Blackpool

Oh this is a classic, Parvez at Blackpool. He (well I did too for a while) got roped into working in a small shitty news an booze shop in Blackpool - many miles north of London - and his expression sums it all up, simply he has had enough of this bullsh*t. 

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Got You!

I said I would get him back!This is an early shot of when I first took my Canon Ixus to work when I was still working for Ahsan at Silverstone. 

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Serious Man

My good friend posted this from my Flickr site:

http://parvez-halim.demonweb.co.uk/?p=49

Fact is, when my wife took this pic I wasn't in a mood for photos.
But in actual fact thats just how I feel at the moment.

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The Redmond Boot Camp now invites intel Macs to join in the fun...

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

Well, you know. This would kill the PC market - thats the reason Apple did it.
Why I would love a mac, but having two computers in the same room is a no go.
But say, having a mac mini plugged in and being able to have windows on it, means I can migrate from my PC to a Mac mini AND get rid of (sell on eBay) my current PC - which is getting old (2years old).

So effectively this will move droves of people over to Macs, because retailers can setup Macs to boot windows too. This will mean theres now no reason NOT to own a mac (until Vista comes out anyway).

You don't think that project with that big prize was secretly funded by apple?

technorati tags: apple, osx, boot, camp, xp, intel, mac, mini

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Life has never been this bad...

Well, I decided its time to start maining about life.

It sucks - period.

Well back in Feburary, the company/individual I worked for unexpectedly announced that the company will cease trading and would be closing their offices that very same day!

Nothing too bad, but then that leaves me and 30 others instantly unemployed.

That isnt how it should be done, staff should have been given a reasonable amount of time to look for a new job before their employment was terminated.

Now almost 2 months on, bills and debts are mounting up and I have not been able to get a new job.

I decided last month I will start a Computer training course, (hopefully the last) which should leave me as a MSCE engineer, but this course starts later this month.

Lately I have had the chance to play Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 which I had never played properly.

I have finished 3, and must say it is a good game, but lacks replay factor (like having weapons etc left over from your first play).

2 is a bit of a mish mash, as far as the plot is concerned. Of course it is a major drag that you are not playing as Solid Snake for 95% of the game.

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