Versailles, France and now the US

We went to Versailles on Wednesday, 21st Jul. We had breakfast of kabab sandwiches at a nearby Turkish restaurant, then left at around noon. It was way later than than we wanted to, so we could visit just one of the two Chateaus' minus most of the gardens. We left via train, it took around 45 min to get there from Parir. We toured the bigger Chateau though, couldnt go to the Queen's smaller one nor the gardens in between. Tickets were free for all kids below 18. Instead of providing groups of people with guides, they had handed out every single person small audio devices around the size of a large cellphone with on-demand commentary on it. Out of 7/8 languages we could select whatever language we wanted. Codes were written at different places, enter the code into the device, and the commentary would start. The Chateau was adorned with numerous paintings all over the walls and the roofs were entirely painted with a single continuous painting. There were a lot of stculptures too, but most of them were along the corridors and in the atria. Taking photographs was kinda difficult there, the rooms were too crowded with tourists pushing around and almost all windows were open, so the sunlight was falling right on top of the paintings. The paintings were very well detailed, and so was the whole palace, attention was paid to the most intricate of details. The gardens (as much we saw at least) were really grand with statues on both sides of the path. All this also makes us think "no wonder the people were so pissed at these royals back then!". The closing time was around 6:30 pm, we left around 6, since we getting to the other Chateau would have been useless then. We took the train back to Paris, then had dinner at the Ind-Pak (tasted more Pak than Indo) restaurant as the last time. After getting back to the hotel, i discovered that the electricity sockets in our rooms were not working and nor was the TV, dont care about the TV, but the laptop required charging. I uploaded the pics on facebook, but while i was fixing them (rotating/captioning) the battery died, so couldnt blog that day either.

The next day we had to leave for the US. We had already ordered a large 7 seater taxi. The taxi was on time, 8 am, we werent. Left around 8:20, got to the airport before 9, and then waited in the really really long queue. It was an American Airlines flight, a Boeing 777. The flight departed at 11:45 am. It was supposed to be a 10-hour long fligh really comfortable though. The shawls and cushions were already on the seats, the tvs had a selection of movies. I couldnt sleep much, around 2 hours only, wasnt feeling sleepy at all. Watched three movies, Edge of Darkness, The Bounty Hunter and Clash Of The Titans. The lunch was good, included some pasta. Drinks were provided around many times, snacks maybe two times, some crackers, a chocolate and some biscuits. The next meal was sort of horrible though (we had taken vegetarian, since non-veg wouldnt be halal). Couldnt eat much in that one. We landed at Dallas-Fort Worth airport at around 2:45 pm, local time. Its the first time I have traveled 10 hours in just 3. The queue for immigration was long, but not too long at the airport, could've been coz we had hurried after we landed though. Didnt encounter any sort of problems there. The baggage claim was over soon, it seemed that we were among the last ones to pick up, the conveyor belt had stopped and our luggage was waiting for us. My cousin, Zubair and a relative received us. Currently we're staying at a relative's place. Its in Richardson, a little far of from Dallas, or I think a part of it. The geography here is really weird. Zubair was with us the whole day then, he had a day off. Then yesterday too, after the Juma prayer he spent the day with us. We got a Toyota Camry on rent for two weeks via Enterpise. We tried Hertz and Budget first, but Hertz was out of cars, even for the next few days, Budget could provide one but the next day, and it had a really high cost for insurance too. So we finally got one from Enterpise, we went in 5 min before their closing time, but had the car within around 15 min. Then we went over to Fry's Electronics and got a GPS device, a Garmin Nuvi 1300. Then after midnight, I went out with Zubair, first we went around to a Walmart Superstore. I had Dr. Pepper for the first time, kinda liked it too. Then we went to his university. It was around 2 am, most of it was closed, but he showed me most of the campus. Gotta say, its wonderful. By the time I returned, almost everyone was asleep. I too slept soon after, but unfortunately, woke up around 8 am. Donno why, but I couldnt sleep.

The weather here is hot. Apparently it stays aaround 35°C, sometimes around 40°C too. Plus there's a lot of humidity. Getting awesome internet speed here, around 30 mbps ^_^

Havent taken many pics (or even any I think).

End of Academic Year 2009-'10

My grade 11th finally ended a few days back when i received the results for the finals. 75.8%. Thats the result. A drop of around 10% from the last year. The year was an academic disaster for me. But was awesome in many other ways. The summer vacation as a whole was really memorable. First was a month in India. Had a really great time, thanks a lot especially to my dear cousins. Then there was a Riyadh-Dammam-Jubail trip. Went all the from the west here to the east of Saudi Arabia there. Had a great time. Made good friends.


People say that living virtually a lot, on Facebook and all, breaks away real life friendships, or at least ruins them, and similar crap, but currently all my friendships have started from facebook. My best buddy right now is the guy I irritated perhaps the most on facebook, and all other good friends became good friends someway or the other via Facebook.


I have started listening to a lot of new music these days. Earlier it was more or less just Linkin Park, but now there's a lot of Simple Plan, 30 Seconds To Mars and some Green Day too, in addition to loads of single tracks from various bands. And I have started using a new, free, legal music service called Grooveshark. Love their radio feature which pulls similar new tracks off the cloud.


Dad bought a new Dell laptop this year, Dell Inspiron 1545. Its got great features, 4GB DDRII RAM, an Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 2.2GHz processor, 64-Bit Windows 7, and so, I use it way more than my dad. Basically I love its speed, our home PC, is a 6 year old Dell Optiplex GX260 with 32-Bit Windows XP 1.25GB DDR RAM and 2.6 Pentium IV processor. It used to be awesome once upon a time ago, but now it kinda sucks. I cant even play any new games on it, so, I just use this laptop instead.


We bought a 37-inch FullHD Panasonic Viera too. Its used as a monitor with the PC because a PC can support more codecs than any player ever may, and, since something's wrong with our satellite dish, we were watching all the shows, news and movies on the PC anyways. Only problem is that the PC has an old graphics card, no HDMI, so we can just use it via the VGA port, which I dont think gives the full experience. But its great anyway.


We had applied and got the US Visa too. Planning on a summer vacation there this year since this is my last year here and then our schedules may not sync. That also means not going to India this year.


Nowadays, Im spending time mostly facebooking, playing around in Photoshop, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. This type of schedule will linger till the new academic year starts, i.e. till Monday. 

Expectations, Studies and Internet woes

I got my half yearly exams’ results last week. I had hoped to get better results than in the quarterly exams. Bu it wasn't so. It was the worst result of my life, at least until now and hopefully it will always be. I got 80%. I had got 81% in the first term, and it was also the worst till this term. Now I am spending most of my time studying. I have been doing only maths because at present it requires the most time. I have 15 chapters in total. I think I have done about 4-5 so far. I am doing the tough ones first. 

Until now I am working more than I have ever worked. I usually started studying for exams about a week before they started and got around 90%, usually above it. But this time I started studying about a month before. The entire syllabus has been completed in advance. The only days I have to go to school now are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, as I have my practicals on those days. This week I went on Saturday too, just to check it out. I may have to go on the coming Saturday. I have geography only on Saturdays and Mondays, as its one of the two subjects in which the portion has not been completed. The other is history. Our history teacher will be back by Saturday. He was in India, I think.

Nowadays I am sitting on the PC only on weekends. During weekdays, I am watching an hour of television each day. Just a series call Kyle XY on FOX Series from 11 to 12 at night. All other time I am studying. I have never ever studied so much and it feels extremely strange doing it.

The internet connection is not too well these days. Sometimes there's no connectivity at all. It’s been happening since Friday. On Friday, I had come to the PC for the first time in a week. And the internet was down. Completely down. 0 kbps. I was feeling extremely frustrated. First of all I cleaned off the temporary internet files, all of them using CCleaner . It’s the best cleaner I have found so far. Still the connection was down. Then I turned off other unnecessary apps like Google Desktop , OpenVPN , Yahoo Messenger , HP Printer Alerts etc. Nothing worked. Finally I restarted my PC after almost about 2-3 days of uptime. Still there was no connectivity. I now checked the router for problems. But there weren’t any problems I could see. I gave up. I checked it again in the evening. I was able to connect but there wasn't much speed. Just about 3-4 kBps instead of the usual 28-30 kBps. On Sunday a newspaper report came, saying that some cables have been cut in some sea possibly due to some seismic activity in that area. I really hate it when the internet is not working. I t makes me feel............disconnected and highly irritated. Although I am browsing the net at regular speed now, it’s not always possible. Just a few hours ago the internet was completely down, then it came back. I don't know how long it will last now.

The weather is also changing a lot. Nowadays when I set out of my home at 6:30 in the morning there is bearly any sunlight.Sometimes its also cold, but not usually. Jeddah is a bit hotter tham Makkah though.

Updated Google Chrome

From the last time I had seen Chrome seems to have had some udates which have helped a lot. Now all the sites I open come up extremely fast (including Facebook which was having problems earlier). But still there are no add-ons or user-scripts though I have read that newer versions of Chrome will have them with less instability problems as compared to Firefox. And I no longer care about the fact that there is no website-loading-status-bar (showing how much of the site has loaded) as the pages load up pretty fast which could also be because I have a nice internet connection. Though I am completely using Chrome now there still is no proper bookmarks organizing tools. 

Some Internet Speed Incresing Tweaks

The below compilation is solely my own work and I hope ayone utilising it to put it on their blogs, e-mails etc. mention me as it is a result of some serous time-wasting browsing to increse the internet speed and I hope this who find more, better and free ways (but legal) to speed up the net give me some links to whatever they have got.

I don't exactly know why but I was having some problems with my internet speed so I started searching for ways to speed it up. In a post I published some time back (Windows XP Tricks) there was a method to increase the bandwidth by about 20% and now I have come across more methods to increase the speed and am willing to share it about now.

First of all ditch Internet Explorer. Now choose a fast browser, preferable Firefox (latest version) or maybe Safari. I prefer Firefox as all the images always load in it (there isn't a cross like in IE or a question mark as in Safari) and moreover Firefox's download file (7.8 MB) is much smaller as compared to that of Safari(18.6 MB). This will bring about some change in speed. Don't use Opera as it is a bit slow and moreover I don't like the fact that in it for a few seconds the page (which you are visiting) seems unresponsive and then suddenly everything appears.

Next increase the cache size of your browser. In Firefox navigate to Tools, then Options. Now go to Advanced. There will be a box in which the default cache size is given. Increase it. I keep it at 1024 MB. This lets the pages you have visited some time earlier (or maybe longer than some) load faster. Also remove all unnecessary add-ons as this may slow down your browsing speed.

Now download a file by googling it called TCP/IP Configurations or by clicking here as after I got the file the first time I couldn't find it later.

Now download a Firefox extension called Fasterfox. This is similar to Google Web accelerator but is specific to Firefox and updated to the latest version of Firefox.

All these features help in increasing the browsing speed (except the the TCP/IP Configurations I think). In order to increase download speed of file use Download Accelerator. This has free and paid-for versions. The free version is more than enough but if you are still hungry for more speed you can download the premium version as it has some features as well as it is add-free. This one of the few free download accelerators present (or maybe the only one) and I always use it. It integrates into most of the major browsers. To increase the video buffering speed you can use SpeedBit Video Accelerator. This speeds up buffering from all the major sites you are likely to visit in this lifetime and removes those annoying freezes.
Both the above accelerators increase speed by increasing connections to the associated site.

So there's as much I could find. If someone has more please tell me by atleast commenting on this post or mailing me at hazmahsa@gmail.com.

Firefox 3 Beta 5

I have been following all versions of Firefox from 2.0.0.11 and have found the lates i.e. 3 Beta 5 to be the best. The previous beta versions had some problem with the Back button which for some reason sometimes did not work properly and all the RAM was sucked out from your PC but the latest version has it all fixed and I am completely using.

The only problem I have with it is I can use the Real Player Video Download Plug-in with it for which I have to use Firefox 2.

I don't exactly have the knowledge of the bugs and their fixes but a list of it all and the download is available at http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Main_Page