My Life

So around 3 or so months ago I purchased a set of Vsonic R02Pro2 canalphones. I had been using my Yuin PK3 earphones for a while before that with my 80Gb iPod and was very happy with the great sound they produced. But the problem came when I started work in the city and had to travel via train everyday.

I had noticed that I had to turn up the volume on my iPod to nearly 80% to receive a fairly descent sound due to the loud noise caused by the train and the people in it. And even then I could still hear everything around me. There was only one thing to do… purchase a set of canalphones.

Now I know some of you may think, “why not noise canceling earphones/headphones?”. Well I’ll tell you why or better yet I’ll point you to a great blog post from Marcus of Headphonic.

Did you know that Noise Isolating products work a lot better than Noise Cancelling products do?
For example: The Etymotic ER-6i offers up to 35dB of reduction of ambient noise levels, whereas the best Active models offer up to 20dB. Furthermore, noise Isolation blocks all kinds of sounds across a wide frequency range, whereas Active headphones only cancel out regular recurring background sound, like engine noise. ~ Extract from the blog

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After watching yesterdays episode (Season 7, episode 11 – Not All Dogs Go to Heaven) I was again for the third week running incredibly disappointed by the quality of the episode the makers of Family Guy are churning out.

Family Guy, a cartoon that for so many years was one of the funniest, most random and most enjoyable to watch looks like it has run out of ideas. The characters don’t seem like themselves anymore. In the latest episode Peter tells the audience something along the lines of “this is going to be a Meg episode, here’s the clicker, no one will blame you”. I mean seriously? A colleague told me something last week that I believe is 100% true, Family Guy these past couple of episodes seems to be written by someone who is bagging Family Guy.

Even reading the posts TV.com’s Family Guy forum you can see that Family Guy isn’t what it use to be.

- episode sucks so far
- So far it’s not going too well. only laughed at doggy Brian. Let’s wait and see if something exciting happens
- yes it was pretty good but really, they gotta get rid of that “Cool Hwip” joke, they’ve recycled it like 5 times and it wasn’t even a great joke to begin with.
- I thought this episode was great. It was the first episode in a long time that i actually laughed at for an elongated period of time.

Even though the episode was pretty bad, people still thought it was the best this season. How bad do the other episodes have to be for this to be the best of the season?

As mentioned above, Family Guy is reusing old jokes, but over using them and ruining their original charm.

I don’t totally agree with most of the people, I think some of the first episodes this season were pretty good, but the last three (The Juice Is Loose, FOX-y Lady & Not All Dogs Go to Heaven) are just not up to par with their older episodes.

For Family Guy’s sake, I hope their pick up their game or I suspect they are going to lose a lot of dedicated fans, myself included.
Thanks,

Marat

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Today is the day I start packing for my month of training up in Sydney. I know there are still three days left and all but since I’m going to be living there for a whole month I need to make sure I pack everything I would ever need… I guess.

Packing is never an easy job, you have to think about every situation you may be in. Since this isn’t a holiday and I’m going to be living there I can’t just wear the same t-shirt and shorts for 3 days at a time like you would on a holiday.

The business clothing is easy to pack. Three pairs of business pants, one jacket, seven shirts and some cuff links, two or three pairs of shoes and we’re done. The casual clothing gets a bit harder. I need casual bumming around clothing for the hotel, smart casual for the weekends, clubbing and nice dinner clothing for the nights and then there’s gym clothing which is basically a bonds t-shirt, a pair of shorts and some Asics cross-trainers

Then I think there is the matter of how much to pack. How man t-shirts, shorts, pants, shoes. And lets not forget the toiletries. Aww man I’m going to have a pain in the ass time getting ready for this trip.

Thanks,

Marat

Well it’s nearly here. Four more days and I start work at IBM.

I received the job in May 2008 and have been waiting for this the whole year. On Tuesday 13th January I will be leaving Melbourne for Sydney. IBM is sending me to Sydney for four weeks of training after which I will be placed into one of three sections (Web Portals, Enterprise Integration, Enterprise Application Development).

I’m excited to be starting work at IBM, but I must admit I’m very excited about traveling to Sydney and living there by myself for the next four weeks. It should be a great experience and one that I will remember for the rest of my life.

I’ll try to update my blog while I’m up there to share my thoughts and daily activities.

Wish me luck.

Thanks,

Marat

The day had finally arrived. On Saturday the 28th of June 2008 I had closed Captains of Crush (COC) No2 hand gripper. I had been training with No. 1 & 2 for over a month now and have finally managed to close it.

COC hand grippers are world renowned for being the best and hardest hand grippers. The table below lists all the COC hand grippers with the strengths needed to close them.

I had started my COC journey with the Trainer and the No. 1 hand gripper. It had taken me some time to close No. 1 and then after being able to close No. 1 around 3 – 5 times in a row I had purchased No. 2.

IronMind actually offers 5 levels of grippers – the Trainer, the #1, #2, #3, and #4. It’s also not a given that “just any strong guy” can close a #3 gripper as evidenced a couple years ago when a gripster decided to test some well known bodybuilders and powerlifters at the Arnold Classic. Everyone who tried the #2 failed, with the exception of Manfred Hoeberl (who is a COC), failed to close a #2. ~ Cyberpump

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Having only three exams this semester La Trobe University still managed to screw me over by giving me two in one day and my last one two days before the final exam date.

Today I sat my International Trade exam. Coming into the exam I didn’t feel very confident, this was mainly due to the fact that I had first thought my exams was on the 25th… I was wrong, and secondly I had worked all weekend which gave me 3 – 4 hours per night to study for it. I had never bought the allocated book so I had to refer to lecture notes but the lectures weren’t full, you had to fill them out during the lectures (can’t get better then that).

I had attended 90% of the lectures, but I had never printed off the lecture notes. All in all I thought I did pretty well on the exam and only didn’t know about 3 questions. Hopefully everything ends well and I’ll only have two subjects left to complete next semester.

Thanks,

Marat

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I have finally brought myself to order two geeky cool t-shirts from Explosm. Both t-shirts are of the Cyanide and Happiness comic which I find incredibly funny. After slaving away at my part-time job for nearly two years, and making five Flexirent transactions I had finally ordered my first Flexirent Visa card with $165 AUD on it.

See how it works is, every time a salesman puts through a sale using Flexirent, Flexirent pays you a SPIV (a small bonus) depending on the price of the transaction. Once you’ve received over $100 in bonuses you can order yourself a Visa card with your designated amount on it.

$50 have already been spend on these shirts

The shirts can be found on SplitReason.com. I had purchased the following two t-shirts.

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Just before I begin, in-case you were wondering what a HTPC was, it stands for Home Theatre Personal Computer.

Okay, now we can move on. It must have been a few days ago now when I really felt like watching a movie I had downloaded obtained with my father. Now although I have the movie on my computer, I would have liked to watch the movie on our 42″ Plasma TV instead. In order for me to have done this I would need to have taken the family laptop, unplugged the VGA cable from my current set top box, and used that cable to plug my laptop so that my movie would play on the Plamsa. Now don’t get me wrong, the setup doesn’t take long, but it is a pain in the arse when you want to play a movie through the plasma and then at the same time my mother sometimes uses the laptop to browse some Russian social sites

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Last week I got fed up of Twitter being constantly down so I decided to seek alternative services. I knew of Pownce when I just started using Twitter but I thought I’d stick with Twitter just for the sake of using the pioneer of micro-blogging.

I would notice Twitter would be down around once a week and that wouldn’t really bother me, but it had started getting worse, plus the one big problem I’ve always had with Twitter was the lack of an official Twitter desktop application. Yes you could download a 3rd party program to use with Twitter but they would never be as good as an application Twitter themselves could make.

Pownce on the other hand has it’s own desktop application made using Adobe AIR and it’s absolutely beautiful. I also like a few features that Pownce has introduced to differentiate them from other micro-blogging websites, these include link sharing, file sharing (files up to 100MB) and events.

I’ve switched to Pownce and haven’t looked back thus far. If you wish you can check out my Pownce or even add me as a friend.

Thanks,

Marat

P.S. If you use Pownce or Twitter and at the same time have a Facebook account you can use applications like rePownce or TwitterSync to synchronise your Pownce/Twitter messages with your Facebook status.

Yes… yes it it. And I bet you we’re all excited right? After three years I’m pretty tired of it.

But I guess there’s not much any of us can do about it. Three exams this semester and two exams next semester and I will be over and done with university for good.

Don’t like the fact that on the 12th of June I have two of my three exams, but again… that’s just how life goes (never your way).

To all those whom are currently stuyding or will be studying for your upcoming exams, I wish you all the best and good luck.

Thanks,

Marat