The end of my thesis

… and the end of my Bachelor’s degree course!

I don’t know if I should feel happy or sad. I do not feel any change, except I am now bored and concerned about the grade (which should be released around end-July). Now starts a completely new chapter in my life – full-time employment with even more serious decisions coming in the way, yet I am puzzled (and also worried) if I should view this chapter as being forty years of repetitive tasks until the day of retirement, or forty years of an even better adventure (take my studies further, new lifestyle, travelling, and perhaps a new family?).

What if it is both? Oh well, enough of this — what I do know right now is I deserve a pint!

THE best draught I've ever tasted.

Uploading pictures for the web?

Last Sunday I was uploading my latest shots taken in the last meeting with my fellow Flickristi friends until I’ve started to notice very disappointing results. I urge you to consider the following points since they helped me overcome the issues:

• Green tint/Inaccurate color representation? Export to JPEG by File>Save for Web & Devices. It’s there for a clear reason!
• My black and white photos were becoming darker than the ones shown in photoshop. Clearly it was caused since they were in Greyscale mode. Convert to RGB (Image>Mode>RGB) to get a better idea of what the jpeg-equivalent will look like.

Flickristi rocks

Bernice Bartolo

I just arrived from the sixth flickristi meeting today – it was a blast. We had a really great model photoshoot of four experienced models – and it rocked, even though we’re starting to become overcrowded for these events.

 

It feels so great sharing experience with these bunch.

 

PS: A great thanks to Mandy Farrugia, an exceptional model stylist who really planned the whole session wonderfully.

My Windows 7 verdict

I’m not in the mood to write a whole testament so I’m going to list what’s in my mind in points:

• Win7’s performance is quite okay … Adobe Lightroom, rFactor and media playback is on par with WinXP SP3 as far as I can notice
• Nice interface although it should take me a while to adjust. No lags during interaction.
• Windows Explorer is slightly different – I can’t figure out how to manually write the dir I want to go into, and it’s annoying!
• Canon’s 14-bit CR2 RAW files can now be viewed from windows explorer
• The new wordpad’s on steriods, with more stuff added to it
• …where’s notepad ?!
• Windows Media player collected all of my music collection neatly – unlike previous versions. Great addition.
• My Logitech Driving Force Pro Steering wheel doesn’t work!
• Windows Live Messenger doesn’t work as great as on WinXP
• Too many drastic changes in the OS, taking lots of time to find some functionality which I could do with WinXP in seconds!
• The registry’s still there

My verdict: WinXP + Google Desktop quick index searching > any OS to date. Except Mac OS X which I can’t really say much about it since I only used it for a few seconds on my bro’s iMac.

My very last exams

Me, studying

These will be my very last exams for this course. I’m in my fourth and last year, resuming work on my thesis right after these exams will be done for. I can’t believe how four years have passed by so quickly and discretely. So happy, yet so sad I’m into my end. Although I am interested in further studies in the near future, only time will tell …

Wish me luck just the same.

When dreams gets shattered in a blink of an eye

Literally! I was involved in a very minor accident just a few minutes after I left work. It was so very sudden and surprising, driving very casually and calm under the slight patches of showers until the car didn’t respond anymore, veering off into another vehicle (which happened to be a Ford Transit). Luckily his damage was minor since the impact was cushioned with the internal hollow structure of my passenger door; but unluckily for me, I have a mudguard, two doors to replace and spray.

Just when I’ve dreamt of going abroad this summer, and making sure my savings are well off to accomodate the expenses, this happened. Could it be my tyres were gone? Or maybe my reflexes were too slow? Or my inability to stabilize the car in time? Well one thing is for certain – it fucked up everything for me!

Frankly, it sucks.

Youtube is for Porn

I’ve had one of those ultra-boring break times at university, with no drive to do anything productive for my thesis. It so started by a very disgusting clip of some female teen eating a praying mantis alive, so I’ve started searching for anyone who ate a cockroach, which led to maltese pastizzi and Dr. Lawrence Gonzi (I have no idea what’s the relation but I bet it was nasty!), which then led to some two foreigners making Maltese pastizzi in lingerie, which led to … other stuff.

From insect eating to adult-related content; What the hell?

Everyone seemed to have known this for quite some time apart from me! So I’ve tried to convince myself even more by starting my search with street racing. I mean let’s face it; Seductive babes would be one of the things which is highly related to street racing. Ironically, it proved to be very difficult to find anything in youtube. But after seemingly-endless amount of clicks, I’ve hit the mother load – from strippers to car wash babes.

Which brought me to think about how YouTube rank video clips; I mean, if one can assume that clips are ranked on the number of hits then, we could disgustingly deduce that a large majority of the end users are a perverted bunch. Either that or the Google ranking system somehow favours lust over more relevant clips.

Two Twenty-Two

Spending a casual night at Two Twenty-Two

I’m still twenty-two and already bored with wild parties. How is it that I become so fond of relaxing venues these days? I fear my sense of being young is startingto fade away at such an early age. It’s just that out usual Paceville night out has become too chaotic for our tastes. Up until two weeks ago we’ve decided to hang out at various wine bars.

Melita (next to San Anton Gardens, and very close to Zmerc Bar/Pub) was our first wine bar ever. It was okay-ish; The food was okay, wine was okay (although I am not very fond of drinking wine… a pint of Guiness would make me a happy chap though). Unfortunately I couldn’t say the same for the environment and service. We were absolutely feeling like a fish out of the water with everyone staring straight at us while we were being seated. It’s so mafia like; Everyone relaxed on the couch, having some wine, a cigarette and a serious look of a killer. It was particularly uncomfortable (figuratively and literally, as the seats were so a pain in the back). I wished the service was better tho; They were okay, but too slow to serve anything from menus to bills.

This week happened to be my girlfriend’s 21st birthday so we went to Two Twenty-Two, located inside the bastions of Valletta. Very a nice atmoshpere with moody lighting, music and custom. I really liked it. The food was great (except for the Hummus Dip which tasted like cigarettes), custom was great, and overall it was cheaper (although still pricy) than Melita!

I’m starting to like Wine Bars…

My Xbox 360 has arrived!

Xbox 360

Update: It turns out I came across another irritating issue with PAL games under 50hz. Very few games (mainly Xbox Live Arcade ones) do not support 50hz PAL display output. Unfortunately, my Dell 24″ monitor only supports 1080p at 50hz. I’ve only encountered Feeding Frenzy which suffers from this issue up to now – so … yeah;

You’ve been warned!

I now have my very personal Xbox 360 console after my brother sold his a few months ago (and a couple of price cuts!). It looks awesome with my latest Dell S2409W 24″ monitor with HDMI connectivity. It’s great, until I’ve started to encounter several issues which Microsoft might deliberately implied for marketing purposes (see below).

HDMI + Optical Audio?

Since my monitor does not have any speakers and already own a cheap 5.1 surround with optical input, I naturally wanted the audio to be redirected from some sort of optical out. And while that is possible, you can’t REALLY do it without breaking one of the wire casings included in the package (see here for more info). However this craeted another issue which I was left without a choice but to buy one of Microsoft’s money-stealing HDMI AV cable off ebay; I use my Dell monitor for both my Xbox and my PC, and switching from one to the other is a breeze. Well, not really; My Xbox has been restarting everytime I switch my monitor to it’s output which was apparently being caused by the small hack I addressed above (HDMI cable alone does not have this kind of side-effect so it’s got to be it!). Screw it!

PS: The new HDMI AV cable has arrived and it works fine…

And for those who do not have direct access to the internet…

You could either:

• Buy an Xbox-authentic wireless adapter, provided you have a wireless router connected to the internet modem (and an extra 56 quid for the adapter – thank you Microsoft for being such a rip-off),
• Use Microsoft Internet Connection Sharing (which works if you’re okay with having your complete network being down every five minutes or so and uses 192.168.0.1 which is most of the routers standard IP address … out of all IPs! meh… ), or
• Use your own goddamn manual configuration (and network bridging) which I will be more than happy to explain how to do it below.

The rest of this article will be a (hopefully) simple and straightforward explanation of how you could connect your Xbox 360 console with your PC which has internet connectivity. Additionally, it might be discriminatory enough to reflect only my situation which I had, but it shouldn’t be much of a problem if your network architecture is a bit different.

PS: This type of configuration is also applicable to any other network device (laptops, ps3, wii and so on…)!

That being said, I’ll be assuming the following devices:

• Xbox 360 or any other target device (duh!)
• Cross-over ethernet cable (Xbox 360 console specifically requires a cross-over such as the one given with the console itself, other devices might not)
• An ordinary PC/Mac (this article with be windows-based; But if you know how to bridge two connections through the OS than that’s fine!)
• Router (in this example, 192.168.1.1)
• Internet Modem
• All three devices (PC/Mac, router and modem) are already pre-configured with a working internet connection

My network architecture (more or less)

So, follow these steps (not necessarily in order):

Figure 1: Creating a new connection bridge between my Wi-Fi USB dongle and my network card

1. Go to your Network Connections window and select your two connections (one which already has the internet connection + the xbox connection). Right-click and bridge both connections as shown in Figure 1. Macs might have the same feature but I have no clue how to set it up.
2. Set your Xbox with the following settings:

IP Address: anything which your router allows (My LinkSys allows from 192.168.0.2 up to .254)

Subnet Mask: usually 255.255.255.0

Gateway: you’re router IP (In my case: 192.168.1.1)

DNS 1: Your ISP 1st DNS IP

DNS 2: Your ISP 2nd DNS IP

And that’s it! I would be happy to reply to any of your issues with regards to this.

Malta Intl Airshow ‘08

Red Arrows on Bugibba, Malta. All rights reserved.

There’s not much to say except it was a pretty good show overall. I went to Bugibba last Saturday afternoon with a very relaxing and (surprisingly enough) no traffic, until a Eurofighter Typhoon blew it’s way past the coast. My car was literally shaking. That was awesome!

My luck ran out before I parked and prepared my camera gear – the typhoons were already on their way to Barcelona . That is, until Red Arrows gave their excellent performance, despite the crappy weather throughout the afternoon. They’re unbelievably good. Synchronized flying from start to finish.

Static viewing was a bit disappointing the other day, with nothing much to see except for some Harriers, US Air Force tanker, and the very brief static of Red Arrows until they flew for another performance.

I’m still pissed I haven’t taken one single shot of the Eurofighter Typhoons.