Blue Chi’s

I got tagged by Devilish.

Last book you read: Essential ActionScript 2.0
Last phone number you called: Pizza Hut
Last show you watched on TV: Kuwaiti TV series
Last thing you had to drink: Water
Last thing you ate: Pizza
Last time you cried: Can’t remember
Last time you smiled: In the afternoon
Last person you hugged: My little cousin this morning.
Last person you talked to on the phone: The Indian guy at Pizza Hut.
Last thing you smelled: Can’t remember.
Last CD that you bought: Some PS2 games.
Last song you sang: Today, I can’t remember.
Last thing you laughed at: My little cousin.
What’s in your cd player/changer: Amerie, Terri Walker, Mariah Carey, Darren Hayes, Cher, Keisha White, Sugababes.
What time did you wake up today: 11:30 AM!
Current favorite article of clothing: Dishdasha.
Favorite place to be: Can’t think of any!
Least favorite place: Driving School Barrel Yard
Do you believe in an afterlife? Most of the time yes.
In Heaven or Hell: Heaven!
How tall are you: 170cm+
Current favorite word: Niche
Favorite Book: N/A.
Random lyric: “You’re beautiful… in an asymmetric kind of way”.
If I could be doing anything right now, i would be: Just being at university.
Are you a daredevil? I think so.
Have you ever told a secret you swore you’d never tell? I don’t think that I ever swore no to tell something.
Do looks matter? I think that they do, maybe that’s why I need some help!
How do you release your anger? Chatting in MSN.
My second home is: Hmmm… Cardiff?
One thing i have that i wish i didn’t is: Can’t say!
All you need is: A new laptop!
SomethingI want but I don’t really need is: A new PSP?
Something I need but I don’t really want is: Hmmm.. Can’t think of anything.

*do you…*

drink? No.
have a boyfriend/girlfriend? No.
have a dream that keeps coming back? No.
believe there is life on other planets? No.
read the newspaper? Yes.
consider yourself tolerant of others? Yes, I think.
consider police a friend or foe? Friend.

Toni Braxton’s new album is scheduled to be released on the 27th of September. “Libra” is the RnB diva’s first album with her new record label Blackground/Universal Records after her departure in 2003 from Arista right after the release of her previous album “More Than a Woman”, a great album that flopped because of the lack of airplay and promotion. Hopefully the new album would do well, in addition, to the lead single “Please”, I heard the songs “Trippin” (which is going to be the second single) and the song “Take This Ring”, both which sound amazing. Libra sounds like a really promising album, Toni has already started some promotional tours, lets hope people buy it this time! I decided to start my Toni-Braxton-New-Download-Fasting-Session, I am not going to download any new tracks that leak so that I can enjoy the whole thing fully when the new album officially comes out. Toni, Please, don’t let me down.

Here is one suggested tracklisting for Libra, different ones have been floating around the web.

1. Please
2. Finally
3. That’s The Way Love Works (Trippin’)
4. What’s Good
5. I Wanna Be
6. Shadowless
7. Happily Unhappy
8. Midnite
9. Supposed To Be
10. Take This Ring
11. Suddenly
12. Long Way Home

I was discussing this idea with Devilish in the last couple of days and he suggested that I post about it on my blog to get more feedback hoping that we get better results this way.

While I was talking about the “Omani Websites” in some previous blog, I think that it will be great idea to have a special event for the Omani blog community where people can vote for their favourite Omani Blog, it’ll be great to have the best bloggers in Oman get some recognistion for the excellent effort they are putting. The event is not intended to be a huge thing, we can simply start a new blog where people can first post their links, and after some period we mak a poll on the blo and bloggers should start making announcements in ther blogs to ask visitors to vote for them in the competitoin. It’ll be fun because it’ll make people try to post more in their blogs and it’ll also make us know more about the Omani blogs out there.

I don’t think that great efforts are required to do this, but it’ll be great if a couple of people would like to volunteer to arrange this, and we need you people to contribute with your ideas on how to make this a successful event. Nobody is losing anything, so come on, get involved! We want the OBA’s to go on for real!

I am serving my atom feed through feedburner for Law & Music from now on, my statistics show that some people have been reading my blog through some RSS reader, please point your aggregator to this link so that I can have better statistics for my content. I might alter the original feed url so that it can no longer be served the old way. I really think that bloggers should espcially use this to see how well their feeds are doing.

Please use this as the source of Law & Music atom feed.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/LawMusic

Every time I read a stupid article of this sort, I become more convinced that there is no way I would have become a Muslim if I wasn’t born as one. It really irritates me to realise that the stupidity and hallucinations of people that work at such publications is spreading across the whole country, it is extremely sad to see that nobody seems to have a functional brain in this country.

I feel ashamed to realise that there is no such thing as the Omani website for music reviews, the Omani website for movie news, the Omani website for videogames, the Omani website for anything. Is our Internet culture still so undeveloped for me to be asking for too much to want to see Omani websites that have ‘content? We now have everything we need to create the Online Omani Empire, why can’t we see it yet? The internet boom has already started in Oman, there is an unlimited number of Arabic Omani forums and more are created every single day: the Omani Wa7a, the Omani Majlis, the Omani Coffeeshop, the Omani Farm, the Omani Put-Your-Random-Word-Here forum phenomena is crazy, people start forums for no reasons other than the ‘me-too’/'I-want-to-have-one-as-well’ factor. There is no doubt that we have a great number of individuals out there that are interested in the web and do have the will and the time to create something, but as you can see, each one of these is wasting so much time, effort, and money making random online forums that have no identity and serve completely no purpose.

I do not suggest that anybody shuts down his forum, the fact that we have something online is better than nothing, but I don’t think that anyone should go and open a new random general Arabic Omani forum, not only that new websites have nothing new at all, but all their categories of topics are all identical. The majority of all Arabic forums are nothing but ‘manqool’(copied) articles, silly fifth-grade word games, and ugly photoshop ‘I love you’ cards.

There is no doubt that we all like posting in a general online forum, but can’t we have complimentary Omani websites on other topics as well? How many Omani websites out there that are NOT forums? How many websites Omani websites out there that could be categorised under ‘a topic’? Four? Five?!

Does anybody else think that the beauty of the internet is in its variation, and that there is an issue in the online Omani community that needs to be solved?

We are throwing out an iPod mini for the person that can write us the coolest tutorial on Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, or Macromedia Flash. No registration is required and you can participate from whatever country you live in. The details are here.

It’s been sometime since I’ve written something about a music album, this is one that I randomly downloaded (Shame on me). I really have not heard much about Terri before, but I assume that this is her second album, she is a British singer. Her soul/RnB L.O.V.E. album is not too bad, as I said, I downloaded it randomly, and I didn’t like it at the start but later it grew on me, Keisha White still kicks her ass any time of the day, but L.O.V.E. does feature nice memorable moments such as the tracks, Slow It Up, The One That Got Away, Whoopsie Daisy, and L.O.V.E. of course. Track 1 features the same loop that was used in Brooke Valentine’s song Long As You Come Home.

1. This Is My Time
2. L.O.V.E
3. Whoopsie Daisy
4. Hurt By Love
5. What The Hell
6. Slow It Up
7. Star
8. Ain’t No Love
9. The Woman You Want
10. The One That Got Away
11. Feel Love
12. Yes I Do

I am extremely picky about my email, and I seriously ‘HATE’ spam, I am not sure if people realise that it is a CRIME in so many countries to send unsolicited emails and that you are VICTIM of a crime when you receive one. I am doing everything I can to reduce the chances of me receiving spam, my email client is configured to automatically delete emails flagged as Spam by the server email filter, I always report spam to http://ww.spamcop.com, and in addition, I complained to web hosting companies a couple of times of the spam messages sent by their clients. I think that I am somewhat successful in fighting spam for I no longer receive much of it in my primary email addresses.

However, on the 8th of August, I received an unsolicited email from an Omani tourism company (I’m not even going to link to their site so that they don’t get any traffic through me!), I got pissed, I mean, after all the precautions that I’m doing to fight spam, I now get one from Oman?! I replied to their email saying:

Please remove my email from your spam list, I am not interested in a holiday
in Oman, because I am already there!!!

Unbelievably, shamelessly, they REPLIED:

Dear Mr Riyadh, Thanks for your email. Our original contact was sent to you as
you were at University in Britain and perhaps had non Oman friends who wished
to visit Oman having heard about it from you.

We will not contact you again.

I couldn’t believe this, I was targeted PERSONALLY for this advertisement, they knew that I was a student in the UK (I am not sure if they knew my name beforehand, because my name is set as the sender), however to make it worse, they believed that because I seemed like a possible client, or that I could have lead a client to them, they had the right to spam me. I got the impression that they THOUGHT that they were doing me A FAVOUR by sending me advertisements that I never asked for. I am sure that these are people that don’t use their emails professionally, they don’t use it as a real method of communications for otherwise they would have realised how irritating it is for one to receive 100s of random email advertisements that they never asked for and can’t ever get rid of. I did spam a couple of times when I was in high school, but then again, I was only a school kid and I do not consider it as an option, even though I do have in possession huge mailing lists of two Omani forums, I just do not think that this is the right thing to do, because I would not like to see anybody do it to me.

Anyway, were you people spammed by the Omani tourism company? Do you mind receiving spam? Do you take any measures to reduce the spam you receive?

Finally… well, not that we knew about it before, but the application was made all the way in 2003 as stated at the bottom of the announcement. Even though I have studied quite a bit about Trade Marks but I have minimum knoweldge of how the application is made in practice.

Anyway, it is quite pleasing to see that we do exist on the scene and that for whatever reason, Square-Enix believes that they could guarantee, or hope to guarantee, their intellectual property in Oman via TM registeration, this means that they do consider it as a possible market for their products. For those that do not know, Square-Enix is the company formed upon the merger of Squaresoft (the makers of the flagship RPG series Final Fantasy) and Enix (the makers of Final Fantay’s greatest opponent: the Dragon Quest series). Though more people in our area might know about Final Fantasy, or might’ve at least heard the name somewhere, Dragon Quest is actually more successful series in Japan, that game is phenomenal in the East, the governemt had to pass a law in Japan to prohibit the release of this game on a working day because the whole of Japanese nation will leave their offices, miss school, and just do anything to get their hands on this game on the first day it gets released… (The Japanese take their videogames quite seriesly!)

I have no idea if Squaresoft or Enix had their TMs registered in Oman before the merger, however, registering their TMs does not mean that we are going to get an Arabic version of any of their games any time soon, but who knows, can’t we dream of Arabic manuals at least, please! Sqeenix, please, if you believe that there is a market for you over here, and I know you do because you did register your TM here, can’t you release something in here officially? We can start slowely, lets just get a game with an Arabic manual, and then maybe you can release your DVDs here, and if you can, we would love to have OSTs, and mice mattresses, other electronic devices, parts and peripherals, sun glasses and other glasses, electronic circuts, magnetics tapes, magnetic disks, optical disks, cartidges of read-only memory, and other forms of memory on which home videogames are recorded, and just the whole list of category 9 merchandise/services that you have required to have a trade mark on, come on! Otherwise, if you are not planning to officially release anything here then don’t you come sue other people that copy your products, because you never wished to give us anything, and we hate you for this, yes we do! *breaks down crying…*

I am surprised that this actually took all this time, I remember that I saw the approved TM application for the Sony PSP when I came back for Christmas, and the Sony PSP was officially announced years after 2003, wasn’t it?