The God of War ... It will Give you Nightmares

It's been a rough couple of weeks here in Bahrain. Mostly because they are my last two weeks before I head back to Montreal and a few other things like how all my friends are busy with their final exams for the summer semester. So I decided to spend most of my time gaming ... And boy have I been gaming.

I went out and got me 3 new games last week so I could keep busy!!!

1. God of War
2. God of War II
3. Devil May Cry

I only really got Devil may cry because I liked the second and third installments of the game. Obviously I liked the third one better, but I've never played the first one! Sadly though as much as I like the devil may cry series; I lo0o0o0o0o0ve The God of War. Devil may cry just doesn't compare! I can't even bring myself to play it now.

It took me a combined 14~18 hours to finish both games and I love them both. The story and animation are both perfect.

You see when I bought my PS2 I had delusions about great games with in-game graphics that looked like final fantasy 8 FMV videos, but I was sadly disappointed ... not this time ... this is where the game truly delivers. To be honest. The game looked so good it was frightening. I had nightmares that night from all the loud, bloody and fast paced action. Trust me when I say that this game is not for the weak of heart.

With a lot of heart, a lot of blood and a lot of sex the game definitely deserves its mature rating from the ESRB.

PLAY IT!!!!

How about your room??

Ever since I moved out of my parents' house and into my new apartment for college ((which they are paying for btw)) I've been obsessed with how my bedroom should look. At first I thought well ok I'll just wait till they leave and then I'll pick out whatever I really like. After 6 months of procrastination I found out that it doesn't work that way :P and to this day I'm stuck with the really cool bed, but everything else is just bland and ordinary. So for your enjoyment I've posted these photos of some really cool bedrooms that I found on a forum somewhere...

Don't forget to click the "Click to Read Full Post" button below in order to see the pictures

Harry again

This summer seems filled with love for Harry Potter. The movies, the books, the posters, even my little cousin has been pestering me to borrow my copy of the Half Blood Prince.

And although it took me two days to finish the Deathly hallows I have to say it was well worth it. I immensely enjoyed reading this book. Unlike the previous two it didn't feel rushed or uneven. It seems the author finally found a way to get back to her old style which worked for her so well in past; overall a good book and a good ending to a great saga.

The real reason for this post however is not to celebrate finishing the book, but the fact that I finally had the chance to see the new movie that was released last month with my family and I wasn't disappointed.
Because just like the book the movie literally sucked!! ....
Due to the great popularity of the movies here in Bahrain and the incredible advertising campaign that came with the release of the movie I wasn't able to see the film until yesterday. The movie, much like the book was very boring. It did however surpass the book in the fact that it is completely useless. Many of the points the were highly stressed in the book were skipped over by the movie. I came to learn not to expect much when comparing the books to the movies, but this is ridiculous! I spent half the movie trying not to fall asleep and the other half was spent trying to wake up my mother who was sitting beside me.
AND SHE'S AN ENGLISH TEACHER!! (If you've ever read the English compositions written by intermediate public school girls in Bahrain you'd understand that she's not a person who would get bored easily)

That is not to say that the movie did not have its moments. When kingsley said that Dumbeldore had style and the fire snake Voldermort released on Harry and Dumbeldore near the end, both classic moments to be treasured surely. Not to mention a great performance by theater veteran Imelda Stuaunton as senior undersecretary Dolores Umbridge. The hate she makes you feel for her charecter is enough for her to win the academy award as best supporting actress.

Overall the only real enjoyment I had watching this movie was finally learning how to pronounce those pesky defense spells correctly and watching Evanna Lynch Prance around as Luna Lovegood.

In the end I add my voice to friendly blogger بحرينية (Bahrainia) in saying that this movie was a serious disappointment

It's amazing what you'll find while searching...

One of the few things that can brighten one's day is stumbling upon a good website. Something funny, something sweet, something serious and something educational.

So four catagories and four websites for you to enjoy fresh from today's inet expeditions by sam.

Confessions of a Vegas Bathroom Attendant

The Wallet

Protecting the World from Fashion Pirates

Dihydrogen Monoxide the Unknown Killer

Harry

I don't feel like editing the template just yet, but I finally bought a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I've been a fan of Potter ever since I started reading it back in 2000 shortly after the fourth book "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was released.

I first took interest in the book while watching Disney's Hercules on the floor of a children's store in the Satellite terminal in Kuala Lampur International Airport where the Goblet of Fire was displayed in a treasure chest for anyone to see and touch.

After returning to Bahrain and borrowing the first book it only took me 2 weeks to finish reading the entire series till the Goblet of Fire AKA the Mammoth which in my eyes at least is the last real Harry Potter book to be released.

To be honest I was very disappointed in the last two books of the series especially "The order of the Phoenix" and to this day when I talk about harry potter I only mean the first four books. Hopefully this last book will help change my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that people die in both books and I think that it took a lot of courage to break away from the usual
cliché of together and happily ever after, but to me it was a little forced if you know what I mean. I feel that the author tried too hard to force the characters to develop in a certain way.

In any case I am still a Potter Fan and will remain one until the end no matter what happens.

A Full Recovery

When I first came back to Bahrain I made the stupid mistake of overestimating the professionalism of our beloved power company. One small outage was all it took to lose 3 years worth of assignments, notes and projects from my flash USB drive, but like I always say: Where there's a will there's a way. So one month and 500 Megabytes later I finally found a program that showed me the way.

This wonderful little creation is Cgsecurity's Photorec which you can download here.
Now make sure you download the windows version because for some reason I kept downloading the Dos version by mistake.

Running the program is simplicity itself
After you extract the folder go to the win directory and run PhotoRec.

Don't be scared by the lack of GUI ... trust me it is a lot easier to understand than some of the other recovery software I've seen out there. Now you get to choose the drive you want to recover, usually it is one of the drives at the end since the software shows installed drives first, but check the size to make sure although if you fried your drive like I did the size may be different than the whats really available. 2 gigs were somehow reduced to 80 megs for some reason...

Now you provide your Partition information.
DO NOT CHOOSE NONE even if you have one partition. Most likely you have an Intel/PC FAT 32 partition. so choose these two options when asked.

Now you're asked where you want to store the recovered data. Just press "Y" here as its too much of a hassle otherwise and its as good a place as any. Data will be recovered to the PhotoRec directory (Remember where you went to run the program? )

I think thats about it. Now enjoy quick, easy and most importantly free recovery of your lost data.

Hopefully you're smarter than me and had all your files organized in *.zip format. Its going to take me days to sort all my recovered files :(

RSS and Me. Episode 2

As soon as I published the first RSS post I knew it wouldn't be the last. I love me some RSS I'll tell you what... (Sorry for the King of the Hill pun)
Anyway finding new ways to improve the way I view my feeds has become somewhat of an obsession. This is because - and you can ask anyone about this - I have the worst memory in the world and I spend way too much time trying to remember to check everything when I log on to the net. So wouldn't it be wonderful to have something that does this automatically for me ... Of course it would.

So today boys and girls we will learn create a gmail filter (I loooove gmail filters) and forward our forum updates to our favorite RSS aggrogator ....

In my search for the mayfly known as love I've stumbled across many sites and forums with mail subscriptions. Unfortunately as much I love reading new mail, I despise seeing forum spam in my inbox. Thankfully mailbucket.org came to my rescue. Mailbucket is a temporary email that is good for one thing. Forwarding to RSS.
All you have to do is create a gmail filter that archives messages and automatically forward them to any mailbucket address you choose e.g. example@mailbucket.org. as long as the address is not already in use. Messages will then automatically be forwarded to the RSS feed with the same username e.g. http://mailbucket.org/example.xml for your viewing pleasure.

EB - Cataloguing Adlya

Well here it is My first EB post. I thought I'd go classic at first. Locations in Adlya. This one of the first places a young man (or woman) will go when they first get their driver's license. Not that its easy to drive there, but it is THE restaurant capital of Bahrain in addition to several other attractions that you will notice when you get there .... wink wink ;)

1. Baan Saeng Thai
2. Maggies
3. Krumz
4. Zoe
5. Coco's
6. Bohemia
7. Minos
8. Saby's
9. Casa Mexicana
10. Elbarh
11. Candles
12. Bam Bu
13. Extrovert
14. Chaise

P.S. This is in no way a complete list, but its a good enough start ... trust me

Project 1 - Enjoying Bahrain

Hopefully this will be the first of a series of posts of ways to enjoy your stay in Bahrain. I've actually started this series as a reply to a Facebook group claiming that Bahrain is the most boring country in the "cosmoz". I simply cannot accept that. In fact, I think that most of us simply choose to live in boredom than attempt to try something new.

The project will be divided into three main categories

Food, Activities and Relaxation

So sit back, enjoy and when you next say no to an activity ask yourself one question:
Am I ignoring this because its stupid or am I too afraid to try?

The RSS and Me

I've been a fan of RSS ever since I found out what that little orange square meant back in 2005. After a while though it started bothering me how much junk I was seeing on my favorite rss feeds. It was worse than my spam folder on gmail. So much information that I don't really need. So I decided to see what I could do about it...

Enter FeedRinse.com This amazing site allows you to set word filters for your favorite feeds making it much easier to find the information you want. You can set the filters to allow content or block it depending on your needs. The site then Exports the filtered feeds in an OPML file that you can import to your favorite Rss reader or Even your mobile phone!
Unfortunately you can only filter 5 feeds at a time, but have no fear because Sam is here...all you have to do is mix your feeds (feed parsing as its called) using sites like Rss Mix that combine your favorite feeds into one and you'll never have to be bothered by the feed limit again.

I've been trying to find a way to embed these filtered feeds into my desktop, but since I have no idea how to work an OPML file I guess I'll have to wait. So until I figure that out I found a decent substitute. NewsBliss is a very nifty little piece of software which displays your Rss feeds in a nice news band format that can even stick to your desktop.

Now if only I could find a black toolbar Jet Audio skin that matches....