Blue Chi’s

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Song writer and producer William Orbit will release his second music album on the 20th of February this year. Though I never listened to a ‘music’ CD – i.e. one without singing – in the past, it was very hard for me not to get interested in Orbit’s work. I found Hello Waveforms breathtaking and totally amusing, several track in the album made a beautiful reminiscent echo of Madonna’s Ray of Light album and All Saints Pure Shores – both of which he produced. His music is so descriptive without the use of words, it is music that flows along your skin and gets you really deep inside. I am officially a fan.

1. Sea Green
2. Humming Chorus
3. Surfin’
4. You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers
5. Spiral – Featuring Sugababes
6. Who Owns The Octopus
7. Bubble Universe
8. Fragamosia
9. Firebrand
10. They Live In The Sky
11. Colours From Nowhere

I recently came upon this little invention, it is a VGA to Video connector which makes it possible for you to view your computer screen on a TV set. It supports resolution up to 1024×768 and has some controls on the thing, it is powered through USB. Has anybody ever tried something like this before? I already have a DivX DVD player, but it doesn’t play everything and people are coming with new formats everyday (H.264 anyone?). The best method to view your computer on a TV is using a TV-OUT graphics card, but my current laptop does not have one, does anybody know if there I can find anything to plug to my PCI express slot that would make me view my laptop on TV? Help!

PC to TV Convertor Details

Kiley Dean is a very talented RnB singer that was previously signed to Timbaland’s record label ‘Beat Club Records’. She has released two singles and recorded an album that was supposed to be released in 2003 but never made it out due to the bad sales of her singles. I have always thought of Kiley as the new Aaliyah and I was very disappointed to see her name fade away. She has previously collaborated with Bubba Sparxxx, Petey Pablo and Utada Hikaru. However, Kiley has finally moved to another record label and is expected to release her new debut album ‘Changes’ this March. I wish her the best of luck!

Her new official website has only the image you see at the post above, http://www.kileydean.com while her fansite http://www.kileyfan.com seems to be quite outdated. You can learn more about Kiley from her page on Wikipedia.

Oman Web Awards 2005 was held on December 28th – No, wait a second, their website actually had the date wrong, the event was in fact held on the 30th of December and nobody ever changed, or even noticed, the error on their schedule page. Add to that the fact that they never replied to the email I sent them to confirm the date.

Contestants had to pay 40 Omani Riyals (Around $100) just to enter the competition. Unfortunate people that applied to a category that did not receive another two entrants would have had their application scrapped and nobody knows what happens to the money. The whole thing is now finished and we do not know if there is anyone that actually had this happen to him/her. Nobody knows ‘WHY’ applicants had to pay the entry fee, and nobody knows what actually what it was used for. The event was sponsored by some of the biggest corporates in Oman including Omantel, Bank Muscat, PDO, Oman Newspaper, Bank Dofar, NBO, MHD, Oman Cables and Fincorp. There were NO PRIZES for the winners of the event other than a 30 cm trophy – the one we got (Silver Award) was broken.

Each contestant was given ONE SINGLE TICKET to the dinner event at the Al-Bustan Palace. I think that almost every single applicant called back asking if more than one person could attend the event, the organisers replied saying no, we offered to pay the fees for another application just to get another ticket, and they said no. We still decided to go as a duo, with or without tickets, the ticket we had did not have a seat number, there was no visible serial number on it either, and just as expected, nobody checked for tickets.

There were about 70 contestants divided into 16 categories, some of which made sense, and many other did not. The funnies of all was the ‘entertainment category’ which featured the websites of the restaurant ‘Golden Oryx‘ competing against Oman’s sports portal ‘Sports Oman‘! That’s exactly what I call relevant comparison.

The most horrible of errors was the replacement of the website’s name with that of the person that filled the form – we experienced this personally as our website’s name was never mentioned ANYWHERE as it was replaced with the name of the website member that went to fill in the forms. His name has been cited as the website’s name everywhere, even on the trophy itself. This happened to the majority of the non-corporate applicants, the worst that I can think of is the website of some school that was labeled as ‘Khadeja Khalfan Al-Harthy’. Well, at least Khadeja had here name spelt properly, our website had the the wrong spelling for both the FIRST and the LAST name of the person that filled it.

The error I highlighted earlier might sound like a silly error that I am bitching about for no good reason, but it is not. This was a FATAL error for those of us that only contributed in this for the sake of having some publicity for our websites. The fact that we did not have our website ‘named’ has almost made our participation in this thing almost completely pointless. Our website name was never ‘mentioned’ in the celebration and was never written in the newspapers that wrote something about the event as our website’s name was replaced with the name of the person that filled the application. Nobody knows if the website of the awards will ever be updated with ‘LINKS’ the websites of the winners. We do not know if we gained a single extra visit as a result of winning (?) an award at the Oman Web Awards. We did not get any monetary prize. If you think about it, it is actually sad.

I am not really sure if I could say anything more about this ‘event’. The show was lame, seriously. The presenter did not know how to pronounce the word ‘category’ (Catigri?). And worst of all, the judgment process had no sense of transparency. There were ‘claimed’ criteria for picking up the winners, but nobody knows anything about these. During the event, the presentation of the winners was just like a quick break of the food and the dancing, the winners were just announced in order, without any explanation on what makes these website better than everybody else. NOT EVEN THE TOP WINNER. Seriously, there was NOTHING in the show, other than just this person won the 3rd place, the other person the 2nd place, and the first place went to this person. Category after another and the prizes went down. The fact that the audience rarely clapped made it even worse. I cannot believe that one of the opening speeches actually mentioned the word ‘Oscar’ in it.

We hope that our qualification for the PAN awards would actually be worth something.

Update: The Oman Web Awards 2006