27th Feb 2012

Sitting in front of the PC at home; alone; listening to what some calls noise, but I call music..

Sitting here on the eve of my 27th birthday.

It has been a big big year between 28.02.2011 to 27.02.2012. A lot of things to be thankful for. A lot of thing to remind me to keep pushing on and keep striving.

A big thank you to everyone who has impacted my life this past year. It has truly been a blast.

I am now, a man, a husband and a father.

I thought getting married was a big step. We barely had time to adjust before being blessed with the gift of life. But it has been a wonderful 9 month ride.

Now the real challange begins. I hope I won't screw up. I hope I can provide what she needs to grow up. I hope I have all of you to "have my back" in this new adventure.

Everyone. meet Ayra Fazlin Binti Faizal

29th May 2010

So, my last update was sometime in january? new year's post.
well, lots of thing have happened between then and now. big ones are :
1. office trip to perhentian
2. getting my raise
and probably the most important one :
3. been nicotine free since 22nd may 2010

so yeah, i guess that is big enough to push me to write something about it.

so, lets recap. i first started smoking in 2003. my first ever stick was in march i think. then it was nothing till maybe june that year. it was during my first semester in uitm. peer pressure and boredome got the better of me i guess. i still remember the line Adly said to me when i wanted to buy my first box. "jangan beli, nanti terus sangkut." to which i answered "takde la, aku beli nak ganti yang aku pau korang punya. tak isap banyak pun". so funny. fast forward 6 years later, i was steadily puffing down 1 pack a day. sometimes more.

so finally, i stopped. its been a week. so far its been ok. sometimes the urge becomes strong. usually its bearable. i do notice i am more easily annoyed by little things and my driving habit is changing. i drive faster than i usually do, and i tend to use the horn more. also, i eat a lot more. so i guess what they say is true.


well, i hope i can ride this storm out and come out unscathed on the other side.

Happy new year!

now its really been a while..last post was sometime back in october...
lots of things to write..if i can remember them..
lets see, some 2009 highlights..
1. got confirmed as permanent at mesiniaga.
2. Android!
3. No Use For A Name "Feel good tour of the year"
4. MXPX All Stars in Malaysia

Those are some of the good events in 2009.. i hope 2010 will be filled with more punk rock shows :D

anyway, the transition from 2009 to 2010 was a roller coaster. first was the never ending year end closing for mesiniaga. i still can't believe after all these years, they still are n00bs at that. come on, its new year's eve, people have plans, and there is a time limit on when you can do transactions, don't fucking decide to implement a new process at 4pm, when you could have decided the same fucking thing 3 months earlier. it would have saved a lot of people a lot of time.
what a bunch of morons..

anyways, managed to get off work at 8pm that day, rush to KJ LRT to pick up Zura then went straight to the barber. had planned to cut my hair and remove my beard and mustache for a while now, and 31 dec was the day to do it. i look so different. last time i went clean shaven was probably in 2003.

then it was home for a quick shower then off to Hana's. the usual uno, pizza, lepak, fireworks, lepak again, borak session.

after that, came the long weekend. took extra time off from work, so i had a total of 5 days to laze around.

spent the last 2 days of my break re-living my post-spm days. went to the curve on monday and ikea+curve+ou on tuesday. walking around aimlessly in shopping malls. heh. wonder why i did it that much then.

anyways, its 12:30am, 6th of jan 2010, which translates to 8:20am 5th Jan 2010 in California. More importantly, San Francisco, CA. at 10am, Google will be making an announcement on the Nexus One. Should be interesting to see what that will bring. what, i wonder, will be the official price for that piece of tech. 1ghz proc, 512mb of ram, 512mb of rom, 3.7in OLED capacitive touch screen, 5mp camera with LED flash, gps, magenometer (aka digital compass), bluetooth, wifi, proximity sensor and light sensor, for a phone. mmm. best of all, it will be running android 2.1. i wish i can get my hands on that.

someone donate me a Nexus One please :D. rumor says 530USD. which translates to RM1900++ . which isn't bad at all considering what other models with lesser capabilities are being sold for here. but there are rumors that it will be available in europe for 199 euros (RM970) later in q1. which is even cheaper. so i hope that is true. time to fire up my credit card again :p

well, i guess the world will find out in a few hours. waking up will be fun with me trying to catch up with all the news.

looking forward to the cameron highlands trip with the usuals on 16th-17th jan, followed by the genting trip with the purchasers and their families on 23rd-24th jan. going to be so broke.

what a (insert appropriate reference to time here)....

been really really busy.. barely have time to sit down and think (it doesn't help that the free time i have i will spend it doing things to avoid thinking).. and when i say busy, i mean busy. to the point of ignoring TLK. how do you like that?

its really been a while since i wrote here..
raya has passed and it was a great one. off to the real world again. as usual, with raya coming and going, so did my plan to quit. but then again it was never a real conviction to actually do it.

tried something new. twice. but i guess i should not be writing it here.

anyways as been the theme with what i have wrote here these past few months,
android updates :)
1.6 aka donut is offically here. we are all longing for the wonders of 2.0 aka eclair.
currently using CM 4.1.9999. waiting for the 4.2.0 to drop, which should be this weekend. wonder what changes will be made since he is dropping BFS for another "trick".

on the personal life side, have been moving about a lot. 2 weeks ago i went up to seri iskandar and bota. attended a friends wedding there. so had the opportunity to drive around my old campus. which is great. the place has changed so much since i was there. beautiful. brings back loads of memories.

last weekend again headed up to ipoh. this time for a small gathering for my late pak long.
they changed the highway layout! was weird. almost missed the exit.

the next day was the long awaited "No Use For A Name's "The Feel Good Concert Of The year". and man did it feel good. haven't had that much fun in a long time. opening acts Plague Of Happiness kicked ass and so did NUFAN. my body still aches a little for the day. but fun it was.

the following day, monday, i went to shah alam for lya's convocation. congrats to her. on with the next step. good luck.

other than that, everything have pretty much stayed the same.

oh yeah, waiting for december now. MxPx All-Stars headed to KL. should be fun also. another session of sakit badan.

off to maulana.

mmm...donut...

its been 2 weeks+ since trying CM 4.0.2. That build has progressed to CM 4.1.10.1 (Link) currently.
Which is totally based on the Donut code with addition of BFS(Link).

Donut basically rocks. since using this ROM, i do notice that the overall experiance and interface is a lot smoother and a lot faster. but with the addition on BFS, everything has been moving a lot faster. Boot times slash, initial setup halved. things like the phone locking onto the Maxis signal has also improved. I am loving it.

Other notable improvements is the global search function. it is so good to finally be able to do that.

other than that, there are some nice upgrade on the way things look. but overall, it remains the same.

A couple of days back i managed to spoof the network setting thanks to Market Enabler(Link). now i can view and purchase paid apps. yeay! and no!
so far gotten for myself :
1. Abduction : World Attack
2. Android IRC
3. Album Art Grabber
4. Twidroid Pro

Anyways, Ramadhan is almost over. So I wanna say sorry to all those i have hurt. I hope i can get your forgiveness. i forgive anything that has happen. Let bygone be bygone.

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri,
Maaf Zahir Dan Batin.

impromptu project

so, yesterday i woke up late, 8:30 am to be precise, instead of 7:30 am which i normally would.
so naturally, i ended up not going to work. i figured it was not worth the trouble going through the traffic, reach work late and get a crappy parking spot thats too far away from the office, and also in a less secure area, i might as well stay at home and burn 1 more day off my annual leave (i got a some left over still anyways.

so after the usual TLK(link) and Earth:2025(link) sessions, i wondered my way to XDA-Devs(link).
after reading up there and some discussion with myself, i decided to reflash my phone ROM to a new one. the current one is "daldroid Rogers ROM", the new one i decided to flash onto my phone is the stable branch of Cyanogenmod 4.0.2 for 32A Magic.

the process went on smoothly, i have been using it for close to 24 hours, and so far have not encountered any problems.

so, the pros of the upgrade :
1. the rom is fast, very responsive.
2. i have 5 screens instead of 3 (yeay!)
3. the new donut power control widget!
4. the music player widget is much better now. (no more playlist empty displaying)
5. voice dialler and voice search
6. some subtle but spiffy visual upgrades all over the place

the cons:
1. i lost all my words in my dictionary, so i need to reenter it again
2. the phone book/contact management is a bit iffy, it does not recognise numbers like normal phones do. ex, 01261xxxxx and +601261xxxxx is not recosnised under the same contact. other phones would have recognised that its the same number. but small fix for that.
3 . the very functional HTC dialer is gone. but hey, i'll survive..


also, i got a cool program for the PC/android based phone that allows you to tether your phone as a modem. priced at USD29, but after the trial is over, you can still used the program, but are limited to http connections. so its essentially free to use for browsing.

the program is called PDAnet for android(link).

so i tested out the PDAnet. and i gotta say it rocks. speed test i made proved it all. screen shot of it is at home. i will post it later if i remember. but here is what i did :
downloaded a 90Mb file via rapidshare premium. normal speed for that (on streamyx 512kbps) is 60-65kbps. using PDAnet and maxis 3G (note that i wasnt even connected at HSDPA speed), i managed to blazing average of 250kbps, with the max topping out at around 290kbps.(click on the image for a better view)

so thats all for this round of updates. :)

been a while..

the last time i updated anything here is a few days after layla was born. tomorrow she will be 1 month old. time do fly by. She is growing quick. sooo chubby now. i might update this post with some pictures later. need to take new ones of her. i guess she take a little from me, with the non stop eating.

EDIT: here is the promised Picture.

anyways, its ramadhan again. wishing all muslim a wonderful ramadhan ahead. have a great one.

Oh and on another note,

HTC will probably upgrade the Magic user to HTC Sense UI.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/16/htc-to-offer-sense-upgrade-for-magic-in-october-wont-be-free/