OK, I've just bought the OAK<->SEA plane tickets for RainFurrest, and here's what my schedule looks like:

September 26 2008
       Alaska Airlines 353
       Depart: Oakland, CA at 8:30 AM
       Arrive: Seattle, WA at 10:26 AM

September 28 2008
       Alaska Airlines 356
       Depart: Seattle, WA at 7:45 PM
       Arrive: Oakland, CA at 9:43 PM

Yeah, I'm a little early, what with it being over five months away, but I noticed the prices were starting to go up, so I jumped on it. The final total came to $210, which isn't too bad. Also, since I'll be attending this one properly (rather than attending two cons at once and staying in a hotel 40 minutes away >_>), I'll need a place to sleep, so is anyone looking for a roommate? I don't smoke or drink, shouldn't be bringing more than a backpack, and I'm willing to pay my share in advance, if need be.

To: My ISP
From: Me
Subject: A little warning next time couldn't hurt

Dear Whoever Thought That Changing Customers' Logins From username@2048.stc.net.sa To username@2048.afaqe2e.com Without Notifying Them Beforehand, Causing Them To Wonder Why Their Internet Went Out For No Apparent Reason Last Night, Was A Good Idea,

It's not.

Your Buddy,
                   Mazin

So I picked up Super Smash Brothers Brawl yesterday; here's my friend code: 0430-8308-6354

Leave a comment with yours!

Today's my birthday, so my Dad and I celebrated by eating out at a nice restaurant nearby (I had veal zurichoise, mmm). It was nice to spend some quality time with him instead of holing myself in my room like I do most of the time. :P

Oh! And there was cake!



Overall, a good birthday. :)

t_moss is fucking awesome. :D


That is all. More info later.

OK, time for a more upbeat entry than my last one!

The semester is over, and I'm finally done with exams, so right now I'm enjoying a well-deserved break. I got respectable grades in all my courses (except Religion >_>). Still, my GPA for the semester is 3.27, so I'm happy; just another goal to set myself! In other news I bought myself a new laptop:


Specs!

Dell XPS M1330
CPU: C2D T7500 (2.2 GHz 4 MiB cache)
GPU: 8400 GS (128 MiB of dedicated memory + 767 MiB shared)
Display: 13.3" 1280x800
RAM: 2 GiB
HDD: 250 GB

It's very nice; I've been having lots of fun using it everywhere I can (including a chiropractor appointment I took my sister to :p ) and pretty much just enjoying my new toy. It's not a gaming powerhouse, obviously, but HL2, TF2 and Portal play wonderfully on it, and I love the size of the thing (it has roughly the same footprint as the notebooks and textbooks I use for class. Could be a bit lighter, though).

Next on the gadget list is a new cell phone. My current one is three years old now, and I could really do with one with a better camera for when September rolls around (I borrowed my mom's digicam for the above pics). I've already got a specific model in mind and am just waiting for them to drop in price before I pick one up.

A big birthday shout-out to a very crazy canine, hyperwolf5150! Make sure to send him a message!

Have a good one, man!

I'm a bit late posting this, but I thought I'd mention that I finished the first part of the medical exam last Sunday and Monday (basic vision, hearing and blood tests, chest x-ray, height/weight, that sort of thing) and have scheduled the follow-up appointment with the doctor a little over a week from now. An earlier appointment probably would have been better, but I'm pretty full next week with labs and an important exam I need to study for, so I didn't reschedule it.

Speaking of exams (er, sorta) my uni posted the academic calendar for the spring and summer semesters, so I know when I'll be off next year, and, contrary to what I thought earlier, it looks like I might have some time for conventions! I have the entire month of September off, which I'll be using to take a trip back to California, the tail end of which will likely include a side trip to RainFurrest (although it's going to be during Ramadan next year, which could complicate things, so I'll have to think about it). There's also this little gap between the spring semester and my summer training period:



Gee, I wonder if there's anything going on between the 18^th of June and the 5^th of July? :p

In all seriousness though, airfare to the US is about $2k, and that's fine for a month-long trip, but not so easy to justify for an extended weekend. I did a rough estimate for how much it would cost to go to AC (travel, hotel, food, dealer's den + a little over estimation) and came up with $2800. :(   Couple that with the fact that I still feel a little guilty over what happened last year, and I think it's probably best to wait for some other AC.

OK, up until now I've only posted about personal stuff on here and have avoided news, but this one hits a little close to home. Apparently, Jeff Gerstmann has been fired from GameSpot for giving Kane & Lynch a bad review. Kotaku reported on it, and you can watch his video review here (the video was pulled from GameSpot, although his written review is still up there), but the essentials of it are that Eidos paid a lot of money to have GameSpot run advertisements, promotions, Kane & Lynch skins for the site, and so on. They weren't too pleased with Gerstmann's review, and something like this went down.

Now, the reason this pisses me off so much and I'm writing about it here is because, in addition to being someone who cares about video gaming more than your average Joe, I used to be a regular visitor of Gamespot, from the PSX/N64 to DC/PS2/Xbox/GC eras. I even had a paying membership from 2002 to 2006 and was fairly active on the forums there, with 3000+ posts. I trusted their reviews and could count on them for informative, funny, and accurate articles. Over the past year or so, however (which coincides with my entry into the Furry fandom, interestingly enough), I became less active on the forums (too much blind fanboyism), and started visting the site less often. The resignation of Greg Kasavin, another long-time editor, to leave for an opportunity to work in the games industry on the creation side of things didn't help much either, since I loved his writing style and found his taste in games closest to mine. It really wasn't the same without him. At the same time, it seemed that there was a lot more bias to their reviews than before (Xbox 360 games were "yay!" and Wii games were "meh" a lot of the time. One particular set of articles that got me was when they had an in-depth comparison between the graphics of multi-platform games for the PS3 and Xbox 360, where the 360 edged out. Later, when they found out some 360 games like Halo 3 and PGR ran below 720p and were just upscaled, they brushed it off in a small news article, saying that such small graphical defects weren't important. Right), and I found myself disagreeing with more and more of their review scores. At first I thought it was just my taste in games changing as I got older, but now I really think they've put their advertisers ahead of their ethics, and they simply aren't a reliable news source anymore.

It probably comes off as self-important to say that I don't plan on visiting GameSpot ever again over this, but a quick skim of their forums showed me that I'm not the only one. It's a sad feeling to have to throw away a group of people you've trusted for a long time (my first visit to their site was over ten years ago; that's nearly half my life), but if that's the way they want to do business, I don't want anything to do with them.

Sorry for not posting anything for the last three weeks, but I was in a funk during my vacation, and for the past week I've been hastily writing the lab reports I should have written during the vacation but didn't due to said funk. It wasn't a bad vacation by any means, I'm just a little on edge for reasons I will explain in a bit. But first, a little bit about my vacation:

As a vacation, it was pretty good. First of all, my dad and I picked my mom and sister up from the airport on the 8th. They had a safe trip, and on the way were able to spend a week with an old friend of ours in Cambridge. My mom was also very nice and inquired about my lost luggage at Heathrow (thanks Mom!). They weren't able to find it, but she was able to give the staff there more details about my bag and a copy of one of the stickers on it, so hopefully they'll be able to locate it soon. I could just ask BA to compensate me for the value of the luggage at this point, but then I'd have to repurchase everything I had taken with me (assuming I can still find some of that stuff), which would be a huge hassle. Besides, my RainFurrest T-shirt was in there! I gotta get that back! :P

Aside from that, I didn't do much else besides play Half-Life 2 and Portal. Not very productive, but quite fun! Oh, and I got a little gift from one of my cousins:


And now on to the reason why I've been on edge for the last three weeks.

As I mentioned before, last summer I signed up for the Aramco sponsorship program. If accepted, I'll be hired, given a salary, and assigned to a department within the company which I'd start working in as soon as I graduate. Crucially, I was told that they're going to tell me whether they've accepted me or not this October or November, so I've been watching my e-mail inbox like a hawk. I'm fairly confident that they'll accept me, since my grades are quite good, but still, the uncertainty's killing me! This is a huge deal for me. I mean, my educational career has basically been one big build-up towards becoming an engineer, and the outcome of this is going to determine where I'll be and what I'll be doing for the next few years.

I don't know, maybe I'm worrying too much about this, but on the other hand, I'm really excited about it as well. Just a few short years earlier I wondered how I could ever mature in time to branch out on my own and enter the workforce, but I feel I'm ready now, and I can't wait to get out in the real world, start my career, and start "the rest of my life", as it were. I just hope they reply soon!

For the past few days I've been trying to buy Orange Box, but have been unable to due to Steam not accepting my credit card. However, after a message to their support department, everything's been sorted:



I didn't get Half-Life 2 when it came out, and loads of my friends are already playing TF2 online, so this was one heck of a good deal for me. Also, my two week long vacation for Eid Al-Fitr starts tomorrow, so the timing couldn't have been better! :D

I apologize in advance if this entry seems to ramble a bit, but I'm seriously jet-lagged. (I started getting tired around 4 in the afternoon, and now it's close to 5:30)

I'm back in Saudi Arabia now (both of my flights went well, however BA seems to have misplaced a piece of my luggage...AGAIN), and have finished my first day of classes for the year, so I suppose this means the summer is officially over. I've had loads of fun over the past two months, but now it's time to get back into gear and make with the learnin'.

My course load is really light this semester, since there weren't many open sections when I registered last spring, so I should have plenty of free time, with the downside being that I'm going to have to take an extra semester to get the required credits for graduation. It's not that bad though, considering that the standard curriculum for my university takes five years to complete, and with the extra semester I'll be done in four and a half. In related news, the job application I sent in before I left on vacation seems to have been taken very well, and by October I should know if I've been accepted.

Well that's it for now. I wanted to write more, but the little faeries in my head that make the gears spin are telling me to go to bed.

That was the craziest weekend ever. It was crazy, creepy and cute, all rolled into one.


The only things I regret about the experience were missing the fursuit performance panel on the first day, and trying to cram two conventions at once. I tried to keep things fluid, rather than stick rigidly to my schedule (I would have had to have taken the bus eight times to see everything I had planned! Luckily, I ended up only using it four times), but that still had me missing a LOT from both cons. Hopefully, future RainFurrests and PAXs won't fall on the same dates again. All in all though, I had a great time, and I can't wait until my next con!

Had some time yesterday and today to hang out with t_moss. I wish it could have been longer, since I won't be able to see him again for at least two years, but we had fun, played some video games and walked around town for a bit. I'm just glad I got to see him this summer.

Right now I'm headed out to the Amtrak station on my way to Seattle, PAX and RainFurrest, but I've started uploading some of the pics we took during our trip to Santa Cruz. I don't have time right now to set up a fancy gallery to show them off with, so for now here they are in a plain directory-style format. When I get back I'll make them all spiffy and resized. We aren't bringing a laptop with us, so aside from public computers, we'll be without internet while we're there.

See you guys in a week!

Man that was fun!

I've just gotten back from the SF furry party, and, after a little awkwardness in the beginning since I didn't know anybody there, I had a pretty good time. I went there with the furry friend I've mentioned earlier and another friend who, up until now, I didn't think was furry at all (up until about a month ago, he hadn't heard of furries, and when I showed him some of the art, he didn't seem interested). He really enjoyed the party though, and now he wants to watch some of the fursuit clips I have on my computer! :D

So yeah, pretty much the standard thing everyone's gone through with something new: was really nervous before hand, had fun, met some cool people, and now wish I had done this a whole lot sooner. I also wish I could have stayed longer, but the last BART train was at 12:09AM, the trains wouldn't start up again until 6AM, and we had parked our car in a location at the other station that's permit-only from 4-10AM. Although, come to think of it, I don't think that applies on Saturdays. Oh well, I need to do stuff tomorrow anyway.

The only disappointment was that no one was fursuiting, and I was kinda hoping someone would be... >.>

Wow, it's been nearly a month since my last entry! Time's going by so fast, and I've just been too busy to sit down and write out an entry until now. What usually happens is that I'll do stuff in the evening, and by the time I get back I'm too tired to post anything. Then I'll forget to do it the next morning, and by the time I remember, I figure it's too late to post about it. I want to keep this journal up though, so I've just gotta force myself to write!

So what follows is a general update on what I'm doing this summer:

Mostly, I've been spending time with my friends from high school, since I won't be able to come back next year due to the summer co-op session I'll be doing for my university next summer. It's been pretty good for the most part: just chilling out and relaxing, with really only one bad night, which wasn't as bad as it was worrying. I don't want to go into it right now, but it was basically something stupid that a friend of mine did, and it requires some background info.

***

I still haven't been to any furmeets. There are parties in SF every other Friday: I missed the July 20th one because I didn't think my friend was free that night and I didn't want to go alone, and the August 3rd one was canceled because everyone was going to be at the FC campout/picnic, which I also didn't attend because I thought it would be awkward to go when I'm not attending FC 2008. There are supposed to be weekly meets in Fremont and Sunnyvale, but I don't know who organizes them or if they even still happen. Essentially, there are loads of furries in the area, but they're not that organized, so if I want to meet some I guess I have to curb my shyness, stick my head out and actively look for them, but I'm still nervous about it. That, and driving forty minutes to Fremont at night, only to find that whatever group that used to meet there no longer does isn't exactly my idea of fun...

***

My friend who was going with me to RainFurrest, then unable to, then able to again, is now, once again, unsure if he will be able to make it. The problem seems to come from the fact that his classes start on the 27th, and RainFurrest is the 24th-26th. He should be able to make them on time if he takes the plane back, but his mother still has reservations about it. She's also worried about how "safe" the trip will be (he tells me she wanted to make sure the hotel had locks on the doors and windows...). I'm going to have to sit down with her and discuss our plans. I mean, not only is he going with a friend, but my sister and even my mom will be with us!

***

Tomorrow, our family leaves for a short trip to Santa Cruz (there will be lots of pics!). It's got redwoods, streams, and all that good out-of-the-way foresty stuff like Yosemite, but is a lot closer and not actually out of the way (if we get bored, the boardwalk* is less than 30 minutes away). Gotta love the coastal ranges. :)

We should be back on the 16th, and then on the 20th we leave for Seattle, won't be back 'till the 28th, and on the 1st of September I leave for Saudi Arabia. These last few weeks of summer are going to be awesome, but the sooner they happen, the sooner it's over. :(


*No pun intended. Seriously. My intended puns are much more painful.

Yesterday, I picked up a friend of mine at the airport who will be staying with us until he can find an apartment, and as a token of appreciation, he gave me the coolest gift I've ever received:



It's a real Chinese sword he got while he was in Beijing! OMG awesome! Check out the blade too:


The first two characters spell out the name of Qianlong, a famous Emperor from the Qing dynasty, and the last character is the word for sword (he doesn't know what the third one is). It looks a little dirty in the pictures, but that's just because it has oil on it to prevent the blade from rusting. He also gave my parents a huge ~3 ft wide folding fan, which is very beautiful, and another, shorter sword to another friend of mine. Now I know why he had such huge luggage! :D

First off, to all my LJ friends who just got back from Anthrocon: welcome back!

I may not have been able to go myself, but reading your con reports (plus a couple of touching personal stories) and seeing all the pictures you guys took was still loads of fun. AC seems like a very special convention, and not just because it's the biggest of its kind. From what I've read over the past week, the city of Pittsburgh appreciates their furry guests, and when you combine that with an opportunity to meet so many nice people, well, it sounds like magic to me, and I'm determined to make it to one in the future! 2008 is out of the picture due to a co-op period I'll be doing that summer for my engineering degree, but '09 or '10 should be doable, as long as I make my plans a little more ahead of time! ^_^;

Now, onto some Serious Furry Business (SFB).

I've noticed that, as members of the Furry Fandom, we find it very hard to tell others about our passion, even our close friends. Now, I know that, for some people, Furry is more than just a hobby, and as such it takes longer to explain and is harder for others to accept, but what about those of us for whom it is just a hobby? Why do I quickly switch away from Furtoptia when my sister (who already knows I'm a furry anyway and has no problem with it) comes into the room? Why do I worry that someone will walk in on me as I watch videos of people fursuiting?

I suppose I'm supposed to be worrying that they'll think I'm a freak (for liking...costuming?), but my close friends and family know me better than that. Hell, when one of my friends came out and told us he was gay, we didn't ostracize or make fun of him: he's still our brother, after all. Incidentally, that's been one of the main reasons why I didn't want to "come out" and make being a furry a bigger deal than it actually is. I feel that would belittle the struggle my friend had to go through coming out to his friends and family.

However, it's still not a good idea to hide things from your friends. The reason I say this has to do with the trip to RainFurrest and PAX I'm making this August. I had asked some of my friends if they were interested in the trip, and while most of them wanted to go, only one was free on August 24-26. Now, at this point I had only mentioned the PAX part of the trip, because I was still nervous about telling my friends I was into furry stuff, but since I couldn't just leave my friend at PAX while I popped off to RainFurrest, I mustered up my courage and asked him if he had heard of furries.

Turns out he's one too. He was just, you guessed it, too scared to tell me about it.

So not only is he more than willing to go to RainFurrest with me, but I won't have to go to my first furmeet alone, either! He's even newer to the fandom than I am (he first started looking into it in late April) and, like me, thinks that fursuiting looks like a lot of fun, although he didn't know where people were getting the costumes. So, after showing him latinvixen02 and lacy's websites, I showed him a clip of the Funday Pawpet Show, some of the furry art I'd saved, the conbadge I commissioned from mitsu_chan, and together we watched the entire 2-hour video bigbluefox made for Anthrocon '06. Tomorrow we're going to watch the video for Further Confusion '07, and I'm going to set him up with his own LiveJournal and an account at Furtopia, so be sure to give him a warm welcome! :)

Overall, it was a great night, and it never would have happened if I hadn't mentioned Furry to him. So let this be a lesson to you all! Ask your friends about Furry today! Oh, and don't assume they're going to think it's weird (even if you do sometimes :P ). Assume they're going to think it's totally awesome and present it as such. Maybe a friend of yours is a fellow fur, but you just don't know it yet. Maybe even they don't know it yet!

Whoa, crazy week.

First off, my original flight to San Francisco via British Airways was canceled, and I was transferred to a Gulf Air flight to Frankfurt, and then a Lufthansa flight to SFO. The flights left Bahrain and arrived in SFO around the same time, my luggage came through just fine, and the in-flight entertainment was pretty good, too (I watched an overview of the 1972 Grand Prix season and The BMW Story on the Gulf Air flight), so aside from a little confusion and extra waiting during check-in, everything actually went very smoothly.

I got into San Francisco around noon, and had a little Q&A with a TSA official after baggage claim. This was my first time entering the US on my own, so I was a little nervous, and it's kind of annoying to be interrogated every time you enter the US, but at least this time they didn't rummage through all my bags, and the guy was friendly enough and pretty much just asked for contact details and the reason for my trip. Oh, and he asked the question everyone asks me, including my fellow students at KFUPM: "Why are you going to college in Saudi Arabia?" It's getting a bit old, having to answer that every time I tell someone where I go for college, but I guess that's what I get for not going to a US  university like most of the people I went to high school with did.

Anyways, after that was over with, I found my mom and sister waiting for me in the arrivals hall, and after a bunch of hugs we headed over to my grandma's house, as we had invited her to stay at our house for the next couple of days (she's 91 and lives alone, so we like to spend as much time with her as possible). My mom had also taken delivery of a brand new Honda Fit just a couple days before I had arrived, so on Wednesday I took it for a little spin through some twisty roads in the Oakland Hills. >:3


It was very good fun. The car was very nimble, it had plenty of grip, and since we got the Sport model, even though it was an automatic it had a semi-manual mode with flappy paddle shifting, which was fun to try out. At its heart it's still an automatic, however, so it doesn't have the same engine-directly-connected-to-the-wheels feeling that a proper manual has, and, contrary to what Honda claims, the transmission will change gears on you, even in semi-manual mode. Still, it was a great way to spend a summer morning.

Since then, I've been helping my mom move some furniture around and prepare a room for a friend of mine who'll be staying with us for a bit while he looks for an apartment for him and his parents to use during the summer, and trying to meet up with some old friends, so it's been anything but boring so far. I just hope things slow down soon, because I feel like I just got here yesterday, but it's already been five days!

While I may not be going to AC this year, I still went ahead and commissioned a conbadge from mitsu_chan, which I'll take with me to RainFurrest. I really liked the other art she's done, but since it was the first time I've had something commissioned and it would be the first finished drawing of my fursona, I was a little nervous as to how it would look. I think it came out great, though!



Thanks Mitsu!

...and in other news, I'm busy packing for my trip (one of the upsides of not going to AC is that I'll be in California two weeks earlier).