Today is the first day of Ramadan – the holy month for Muslims all over the world. During this month, Muslims fast throughout the day time, avoiding water and food in an effort to spiritually cleanse themselves. As a practicing Muslim, I am currently fasting, and intend to each day for the rest of Ramadan. Today, the fasting started at 5:40am and is scheduled to end around 7:52pm.
First Day of Ramadan
September 13th, 2007Wii Console Number (aka Friend Code)
September 4th, 2007For those of you who have a Wii, my Wii console number is 7743 3800 4271 4766. I have also placed this in my “About Me” page. If you add me, please comment on this page with your code so I can add you back. Thanks!
Get Off The Road, Dumbass!
September 3rd, 2007As I was filling up gas in my car today at one of the local Chevron gas stations, I noticed that something was different. It wasn’t a new shop, a change in gas prices, or a new cashier inside the gas station. It was the amount of stupid drivers on the road. In the 3 minute period it took to fill up my gas, I witnessed almost 4 different accidents. That’s right – 4. More than one a minute, within 200 feet of where I was standing.
People these days need to get off the road and go back to driving school. Why? No one knows how to drive anymore! I remember when I was a kid riding with my parents, I would hardly hear someone honking as a sign of aggravation. Usually it was just a “Hey, I’m trying to catch your attention for something” type of honk. Simply trying to tell them you can get in front of me to avoid that slow lane of traffic.
Today, in this relatively small suburb of Dallas called Plano, I hear at least 5-6 aggravated drivers honking.
I don’t have a problem with honking, its mainly a problem with dumb drivers on the road. Someone cuts off another guy and slams their brakes, and the person that was cut off has no option left except to swerve and hit the car beside it, or go the other way and wrap themselves around a telephone pole.
Next thing you know, people will be intentionally hitting people’s cars to get them off the road. The daily commute will become a destruction derby and a race to the death.
Personally speaking, there should be more cops on the road. Not to catch speeders (since I’m guilty of that every day 
), but to catch stupid drivers that drive 25mph on the highway and change lanes to get in front of the car thats coming up the fastest. Or the idiots who pull out in front of you from picking up that Big Mac, super-sized fries and small diet coke from the nearby McDonald’s and are paying more attention to the food than the road.
These dumb drivers need a wake up call, and quick, before a lot of innocent people get hurt by their stupid tactics.
Windows Mobile 6 Themes
September 3rd, 2007Browsing around on the web, I found a great place to get Windows Mobile themes. Originally designed for the Motorola Q, these themes work on most other smart phones, including the T-Mobile Dash. Website address: http://www.kooldezine.com/Q.htm
I am currently using the Carbon Fiber Tabs theme with Facade and Fizz Weather… I have modified the background image and removed the Motorola Q text and it works great!
Removing Windows Live E-mail on WM6
August 25th, 2007With Windows Mobile 6, you have the option of using the built in MSN messenger to talk to your buddies. A lot of people, including myself, don’t use Hotmail based e-mail services, and an unfortunate side effect of even trying out the built in MSN messenger is the addition of “Windows Live E-mail” in the messaging application. On the T-Mobile Dash, when you use the right softkey to pull up options such as “Settings” and “Delete”, the “Delete” option is grayed out, so its almost as if you’re stuck with that.
Thankfully, deleting a registry key fixes the “issue” some of us face and removes the Windows Live E-mail option from the messaging application.
Using Total Commander (or any other registry editor), find the following key:
\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Inbox\Svc\Windows Live
Note: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE may show up as HKLM on some devices, like the Dash.
Delete the key, and restart the messaging application. The “Windows Live E-mail” option should now be gone. Note that it will return once you try using MSN Messenger again (or any other Windows Live service built in), so I recommend using something like Shape Services IM+ for an IM client instead.
iPod giving you disk use problems?
August 24th, 2007For a while, I had a problem using my iPod Video 80 GB as a hard drive on my laptop. At first, it worked perfectly fine, but after I hooked it up to a friend’s computer to share some files (not music, and he runs Windows 2000), I couldn’t seem to access it again on my laptop. I run Windows XP Home on the laptop. Keep in mind that I could still access my songs using iTunes, I just could not use the iPod as an external hard drive (disk use, as Apple calls it). I kept getting “E:/ Access is Denied” when trying to view using My Computer.
I could, however, access the iPod as a hard drive on my PC. My PC was using Windows XP Professional edition, so I wasn’t really sure what the issue was. I decided to call Apple’s tech support, and after spending a half hour on the phone with them they told me that the issue was with my computer. Funny, seeing as how I could use my friend’s iPod as a hard drive just fine on my laptop, I just could not use my own. After coming to the conclusion that Apple’s tech support sucks, I decided to find another solution.
At this point, my PC was starting to exhibit the same problems as my laptop did in the beginning – at first, the iPod would be seen as a hard drive, but then it could not be accessed. I could still bypass it by a simple trick using Windows Explorer, which I won’t go into detail with (unless someone wants me to). Now it was really getting to my nerves, as I had files on there that I really needed. Using my Windows Explorer trick I backed up those files, however another issue popped up – what about my music?
Now I was really frustrated, as I have over 30 GB of music on my iPod, and although I had most of it backed up on my computer I wasn’t completely sure I had it all. Thankfully, after a little bit of research, I found YamiPod – Yet Another iPod Manager. Using this simple (but spectacular) program, I was able to back up all my music to my computer.
After completing the backup (which took a little while, about 45 minutes to an hour), I restored the iPod to factory condition using the latest iPod firmware available through iTunes. I decided to restore it using my PC and test it on my laptop to see if it now worked as a portable hard drive again. And it did! I was extremely excited that it started working at this point, so I loaded up all my music back onto the iPod and all the backed up files. Several weeks later, its still running great with no problems.
Looks like I won’t be hooking up this iPod to any computer other than mine again (or call Apple’s tech support again)