When I signed up for the Crazy Cycle with Families Relief I knew it would be an event to remember, and thanks to all of you I was able to raise over £2200 towards the orphanage! Don’t believe that we did it? Check out the full gallery here!

If you have pledged money towards the cause, or are yet to sponsor, the justgiving page will be online for a few more weeks so please do get me to my fifth and final target of £2500! J http://justgiving.com/usayd/

And once again thank you to all of you for your support and encouragement – financial and otherwise!

Read the story about how a world of warcraft geek got a taste of being a Muslim on an Aeroplane here! – Thanks Tibault.

Yeah my site got hacked, wowza those guys are so great I mean if guessing if my password was the name of the site (usayd) isn’t bad enough, they even managed to optimise their cheesy owned page for the amazing browser – Internet Explorer! Oh well I’m not complaining at least they were nice enough to leave most of my data untouched.

Basically all they did was replace all of the index pages on this site (both php and html) with their own gangsta version! Meh its my fault, I mean if the creator of WordPress’s site can get hacked then I probably should’ve thought about changing my password. Oh well everything is okay now – thanks to Tibault who notified me via skype’s texting service.

Wales

Yeah I’ve been in Wales (that sheep country next to England) with Hamza since last Thursday, it has been quite an interesting experience, hopefully returning to England after the YM Coreworkers camp this weekend which is in Snowdonia, Wales (and yes Hamza AKA Sheepo is coming). So what have we done so far?

• Camping/sleeping in a tent next to the river since Sunday – Yep it is quite fun and in the night the weather is just perfect at around 2AM when the moon is out (don’t even start with that homo stuff).
• Constructed a WiFi satellite transmitter – We attempted to make the huge satellite dish into a directional antenna for the WiFi so that we could get Internet access at the river. Following a few Internet tutorials we were largely successful but due to the awkward location of the tent we were unable to project it in such a direction. Still, it was fun and very interesting. We also tried using the TV aerial which actually worked quite well.
• Water and BB gun fights – It is actually boiling over here (although today we did feel a touch of rain for about 5 seconds) so water fights are always great fun. Hamza has some great BB guns (an automatic M4 and a single shot MP5) so we had a few battles with them too.
• Filums galore – Yeah we watched some good films and others not so good, in this order we Goodfellas (good), Eddie Murphy – RAW (very good), The Green Mile (weird/okay), Rainman (random/okay) and How to kill the neighbours dog (okay/random).
• Sports – Good ole football with some of hamzas spak friends (actual spaks) which was ok, some more football every day and some cool games to do with the trampoline? (I know how it sounds man stop thinking like that!!).
• Helicopter – I bought a remote control syma copter off Aria just before my exams and it was great so I got Hamzas little brother to buy one. We’ve been flying that quite a lot and today we’re hoping to make a recording using a wireless camera we’ve fitted to it. Keep your eyes peeled!

So overall we’ve had a pretty cool time (don’t ask why i’ve started using lists on my website), I’ve spent so much money on ebay lately (we bought some really good walkie talkies!), hopefully I’m starting work on the 31st so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Anyways I’ve had my rant – signing off from Wales (with Hamza playing Wolfenstein next to me).

EDIT 3rd July 06

Haha, title edited to ‘M$ FAIL to Strike Back! From that you can probably work out what happened. No one was having it, sorry this topic really amuses me for some reason (i.e. the ideologies behind this ridiculous idea).

If you don’t know what was going on, basically M$ come out saying they’re going to change their WGA (windows genuine advantage) tool in the next release so that it checks if your using a legal version of windows and sends that back to them, and then shuts you out after a period of time. As if this wouldn’t be cracked? Anyway the point, especially after reading the comments on slashdot – is that this idea would only disadvantage Microsoft who might not realise just how many people are using illegal versions of their operating system. Not only that, people were going as far as saying that people would, logically, switch to open source alternatives (LINUX). Well, even though Microsoft have ‘dropped its pirate checks‘ I still hope that there is an awakening towards open source alternatives which I am certainly making a move towards.

Update: I just watched Loose Change 2nd Edition, if you want to know the truth about what happend on 911, I highly recommend it. Oh and its sunny outside (in Manchester!)

Ever since the first details of the Xbox 360 hit the web, gamers have drawn comparisons to Sega’s ill-fated (yet still highly regarded) Dreamcast console. There are the obvious examples – the timing of the launches or the color of the hardware – but then there are a lot of not so obvious ones, too.Read the Dreamcast-xbox360 comparison article at 1Up.com

And I must say, there are A LOT of similarities. It’s actually quite frightening to see how much the Xbox 360 and Sega Dreamcast look alike, even the logo is practically the same!
But not to worry, after going through the similarities, you get another list, but this time with 10 reasons why the Xbox360 will not fail.
It’s a must read, well actually more of a must see (there isn’t much to read) even if you aren’t in to xbox or dreamcast.

I myself have an Xbox, but I’m not thinking of getting a 360 just yet. I mean, €300 for the cheapest model?! That’s way too much, especially if you know that they’re bound to lower their prices once the PS3 and Nintendo Revolution are released. That’s what MS did before, and I’m sure they’ll do it again.

Test Facts:

The average score for the gals is 38, while the guy average is 56.

Of the Computer Geek Quiz Takers:

• 17% are scared of links
• 17% of Windows users curse it – Yes, I admit I am of this 17%
• 4% of Linux users selected Bill Gates as their hero

I am a Low-Rank Computer Geek

Yeah I know its prettey sad but element took it so I thought I might’swell. Crap i’m more geek then element! I knew I shouldn’t have lied on the test!

Go on Tibault, you know you want to!

Which File Extension are You?

Yeah I know, they’re prettey stupid but its kinda funny.

Also, which Nigerian Spammer are you?

Which Nigerian spammer are You?

Okay I did the OS one again, last time I was windows 98, now i’m:

Which OS are You?

You could spend your life on that site