Sumaiya (my sis): Do you know anyone who is almost/totally perfect?
Me: Yeah, I think I know a guy or two
Sumaiya: Dont you JUST HATE THAT KINDA PEOPLE?????
Me: :))

Boulevard Of Broken Dreams by Green Day. 

This one’s an all time classic, totally love this song

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. 

First Cellphone, Speaking Up and a Titan

In the past week a lot has happened for me. On last Friday night, between midnight and 1 am, I got a new cellphone. My parents gifted it to me for getting the marks I got in the 10th CBSE Exams. Its Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. It was my choice. My parents told me I could have anything. I would at first interested have been interested in the iPhone. I loved the fact that it had a touchscreen so did the 5800. But there were a few thing I didn't like about the iPhone, like it been SIM-Card locked which means I could only use it with the SIM I had bought it with and unlocking it would remove the gurantee/warranty, a 2 megapixel camera with no flash and inability to take video, the weight and the cost. I liked the 5800 because, first of all it negated all the points I have written above and also because it's from Nokia. It even has GPS, which I may never use, but still IT HAS IT! Its got a 3.2 megapixel camera, full QWERTY keyboard (on-screen touch) but there are other modes too, like a mini QWERTY keyboard, regular phone keypad and also handwriting recognition, resposiveness seems fast enough. I have installed a few apps there. I will give full list of features and apps I am using at my tech blog soon, Inshallah.

Here is/are a few pic/pics of my cell model I got from the net:
This week, in class we had to talk (just self) about a topic. Its part of some Listening & Speaking skills, for which are (hopefully) awarded 10 marks in the term exam. 5 marks listening and 5 marks speaking. It was supposed to be on tuesday only, but owing to the number of students in class (now 50), it continued on Wednesday. But only 4-5 boys had to do it. The remaing from Saturday onwards. I spoke on the topic, 'Are We Addicted To The Internet?'. I made my point that we are not addicted to it, unless you call yourself being addicted to electricity too. Its just that useful that you seem addicted to it. This is the third time since I came to this school that I spoke in front of the whole class. First time was in 8th standard, we had to explain the basics of a drama given in the course book. Second was in the beginning of this term, had to give a factual description of the place we are from. And now any topic. Alhamdulillah it went well. At first I was a bit nervous, voice was not coming out right, hands were shaking too much. Bu thanks to Allah and the supportive nature of my class, I did it well. Something I said made the whole class laught and then, all nervousness fell out.

Then on Wednesday, one of our family friends (originally my mother's) came here. They actually had come to do something call Gulpashi or Gulpushi, or something like that, again for the 10th marks. It is some type of drama done in India. They got dinner of chicken as well as mutton kababs, biryani, two types of sweets. They also gifted me a watch. A Titan watch. I liked it a lot. The only problem is tat I won't get to wear it much as, its very formal.

Here are are a few pics of it too



So thats it for this week.

First Round Tests From Tomorrow

Its been exactly a month since my last post [I don't know why I always tell the last time I posted]. Its been getting busier by the day. I didn’t hope this would happen so fast. Bu the only reason I haven’t posted so far is because I am not easily self-motivated.

Chemistry has been by far the toughest. The first chapter was full of formulae but most of the second one went over my head. The second chapter’s name is Structure of Atom. We were introduced to the quantum structure of atom, which I don't know how the person who modeled it understood. There are many theorems on how it is formed, many principles and much more crap. In math the first two chapters we were taught, Sets and Complex Numbers were very easy. They were like the fun part of math. Now we are in Trigonometric Functions. I prefer the trigonometry which has values [because I can do it], not the innumerable question in which I have to prove that crap and trash are equal, mathematically,

Crap = Trash

Physics isn’t much of a hassle. The problem is just with the derivations. I hate deriving an equation that's already given. The good part is it will be only for this year as in the CBSE Board Exams (X and XII) we don't have these. But the bad part is that the whole of this year is remaining.

The easy subjects are English and Computer Science. Alhamdulillah I have never had a problem with English, because, well its English, what can be the problem there? As for Computer Science, it’s computer science. That’s the subject I can do best at (and Inshallah will).

So about the tests now. My first test is tomorrow, Sunday 17 May. Its Physics and Computer Science. Second on Tuesday, Chemistry. And the last ones of Thursday, Math and English. The Thursday will be the first one I will be going this academic year. Alhamdulillah the timetable is well designed (for the students) if you consider the number of days its pushed into. Until VIIIth standard, there is about 1 test a week. That totally rocks!! Too bad it doesn't totally rock for me.

I have written this post using Windows Live Writer. I wanted to try it because it seemed one of the things Microsoft made nicely. I am saying that because I read about other bloggers using it, others like, I think Lifehacker, Life Rocks 2.0, Rarst, Killer Tech tips, How-to-Geek, AskVG etc. So far its not been bad. I will publish a review soon. So until then.

Goodbye

The Week in 11th So Far

My new academic year started this week. I am in 11th now. I got the science stream, which means my core subjects are English, Physics and Chemistry with the two optionals as Maths and Computer Science. The options work like this: the first option is a choice between Maths and Bilogy and the second option needs to be chosen from Language, Computer Science, Physical Education and Bilogy (i.e., if its not already choesn in the first option. The other streams are Commerce and Humanities. My optionals are Maths and Computer Science. There are about 90 students in the Science Stream divided into two classrooms, around 45 each in the Commerce and Humanities with their own classes. I am in the section XI-B-1. The other science section is B-2, B-3 for commerce and B-4 for Humanities.  I am sitting on the first seat, just in front of the teacher, because my friend, Fahd is sitting there. One of my friends, Haroon is now in the commerce stream, one, Saif is going to India for good, and my other two good friends, those were the only 100% non-crazy friends of mine, Arbaz and Ayaz are too in other classes. This time I got all good teachers. This wasn't so since the last two years.

Now about the syllabus. I have two thick enough texbooks for both Physics and Chemistry, three small ones for English, one fat (like always) for Maths and a pretty fat one for Computer Science. Most of everything seems tough so far (far here stands for just a week). English, Maths and Computer Science seem easy. English always has been. The Complex Numbers stuff seems funny to me, because our teacher told us that these numbers don't actually exist but are imaginary. And I don't understand why we have to study something that isn't even Real. Computer Science have been updated a lot. I can say so because

1. No more exclamation marks after writing that a CD had hold upto 650 MB of data. But they haven't changed it to 700 yet.

2. No more articles on Zip Drives or Trackballs.

3. They know what a Blu-Ray Disc is.

We also start with C++ programming this year which seems interesting. But the only Operating Sytem (OS) they have is Windows.  I was expecting atleast LINUX or maybe UNIX. And the Linux part isn't much too. I ave been donloading some Live-CDs of some Linux based OSes. I now have Ubuntu 8.10, 8.04, BackTrack 3 and CrunchBang 8.10.02. I haven't tried any of them but maybe I will today.

I had school today too but as usual I didn't go. I am anti-more-than-five-days-school and pro-two-day-weekend. My sister went but found out that it sucks. 

The End of 10th Standard

Its been more than a week since my exams were over. Since then I have unsuccess fully wasted a lot of my time, which means I didnt waste it properly. The Arabic and English exams were extremely easy. Alhamdulillah English has never been much of a difficult for me. I expected Arabic to be tougher than it was. But Alhamdulillah I didn't meet my expectations. It was an extremely easy paper. I must have got an average of two marks for every line I wrote. It was a hundred marks paper. I pity those who took the other languages. They had to write a few lines to get a mark. The science paper was a bit difficult but it went well too, so did the Science Practical Skills Paper, which basically is a Multiple Choice Questions' paper with questions relating to the practicals we did during the year.

After that I haven't been doing much except watching JUST one movie a day. I wanted to watch at least three. I also had to get my registration for next year, 11th standard done. Alhamdulillah it was easily done. I went to school yesterday with my father for completing the formalities, which included paying some money for it at the Fee Couunter. This is the task that took the longest. I was given the token number 145 when 100 was going on. After an hour it was at 120. Some friend/relative of my father works in the school's computer department. He went into the fee room and had the task done quickly. After that I had to submit the registration papers to a teacher who was at the upper floor. That took about 3 minutes at the most. While I was doing all this my father went in to buy our new textbooks. This was a slow procedure too. But it was done. After that I went to my aunt's home in Jeddah. I had fun there too. So much for this week, my school will be starting on Saturday.