Recently I was at Zaki's place for some free food (his sister's b'day actually). As usual, meeting the sucker will always involve him telling me WoW rox and asking me to join. Anyway, during our conversation he mentioned the following which made me double-up in laughter! :D
"Amir, I've created a new guild! Name of guild - DownDiagonalFront Punch. Name of guildmaster - Hadouken. It rocks, man! Hahahaha!"
PS: Only people who played Street Fighter will understand this one. ;)
Yup, it's been a while since I typed my blog. Various reasons for this really, but among other things, it's been a quite hectic life for me.
What can I say? At the start of October, I'm fully involved with a project to build up the entire backbone for a new mobile service provider. It's a rather massive job which I'm doing together with an expert from Australia. Now let me say again that it's been an absolute pleasure working in my present company. Ericsson has some of the finest engineers around and it's been an absolute privilege and honour to work with them. I think I can consider myself very lucky since I'm learning a lot of things that I can't get anywhere else by talking and discussing stuff with them. I'm sure you all already know. The best way to learn is not from books or classes, but from the people who has actually done it.
The first stage of the backbone was completed after 3 days, first circuit call (voice & video) after 7 days and first packet call (data transfer & web browsing) after 8 days. Imagine, all that accomplished in a total of 8 days! Until now, I'm still amazed at how we managed to accomplish all that. Keep in mind, we started the implementation with unconfigured hardwares and softwares and after 8 days, the core network was essentially completed. What was missing are external connectivities such as connections to other mobile networks (Celcom, etc) and to the international gateway. I love working with amazing people! :D
Right now I'm still involved with the project but now it's mainly integrating the core network with VAS (value added services) nodes such as SMS, MMS and WAP. I think I'd be quite busy all the way until the end of January. It can get tiring and there are plenty of challenges but on the bright side, at least I'm not bored. Besides, building up a network from scratch and integrating it with various components certainly looks good on my resume! :)
On non-work related matters, I'm now a proud owner of a 20" widescreen LCD monitor. The monitor is simply beautiful. I plan to do a marathon session of anime and tv-series one of these days. I've just got my hands on "Ghost In The Shell 2nd Gig" and "Lost" season 1. Ahh...perfect timing.
After spending a lot of my time on Neverwinter Nights online play, I'm now taking a break from it and am now enjoying "X3 - Reunion". The game is simply beautiful and space has never looked so pretty! I love the feeling of vastness that is present in "X3 - Reunion" and it's wonderful to go exploring the various space sectors in the game. Sure, it's a single player game but it rocks! Check it out at http://www.egosoft.com/games/x3/info_en.php
Ahh...I'm finally back to the gym. Was insanely busy during April, was insanely sick 2 weeks ago and was insanely busy again last week. Hopefully now I'm back to my normal routine. I still plan to get my baywatch body before I go for my island holiday! Heh heh!
Y'know, going to gym is good. You sweat like hell and get tired like hell but at the end of it, you really do feel refreshed. With my current work schedule, I'm thinking of going to the gym in the morning rather than the evening. Of course, know my usual laziness, this plan will remain in the drawing board for a long time...
I also did something else that haven't done for a long time. I took my bro's amp (I know, I keep planning to buy my own but keep on postponing that), dusted of my extremely nice ESP custom guitar and played it for a bit. Ahh...the pleasure. Reminds me why I learned guitar in the first place (well...besides trying to impress some chick, I mean!). I jammed a bit with some bluesy pentatonic scales. Tried some major scale too but sadly I'm way rusty. I think I need to re-read my bloody scales book! Pentatonic is easy. 2 notes per string! The other scales is a little bit more complicated. Heh!
My guitar is simply amazing when it comes to rock sounds. Wonderful, wonderful pickups! Fat and chunky when doing power chords yet with a flick of a switch, pure clean sounds for those bluesy bits. I really need to buy some new equipment for my guitar. It deserves better! Hmm...a new 50 watt amp and a Zoom multi-effects board should do the trick! Oh wait, I need new cables too. I probably need to cut down on my spending for clubbing (hell, probably skip clubbing for a month or two!) but it's for a worthy cause. Next, I need to get the band back together. Mus, Ahmed, expect a call soon! Eh you guys, do we even have a bassist yet?
Lately, I've been playing Neverwinter Nights a lot. Heh, it's about the only way I can get my fix for D&D. Even after 4 years, that game is still amazing. Once you're done with all the official campaign (3 in total, including all the expansions), there are literaly THOUSANDS of user-created adventures available for free online. Some of the user-created adventures rival the official campaigns in terms of quality! I generally play as a sorcerer in the game but lately I've been playing as a weapon master. Heh, I simply love the blademaster concept by Robert Jordan in his Wheel of Time series. My current character now is this kickass greatsword specialist, a direct inspiration from the character Lan Mandragoran, the uncrowned King of Malkier, warder to Moiraine Damodred. Yes, I know. I'm a Wheel of Time fanboy. Heh!
