Trip Details to Dammam

Posted by rizal on Oct 10, 2009 in Life in Saudia | 1 comment

Start: 2009-10-08 08:01:29
End: 2009-10-08 12:10:09
Total time: 0 days 4 hours 8 minutes 34 seconds
Distance: 417.16km
Average speed: 100.7km/h
Max speed: 164.0km/h
Max altitude: 1151m
Time zone: GMT+03:00
Type: Normal track
————————————————————–
Stop (1):
08:01:30 to 08:06:23
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 4 minutes 53 seconds
Stop (2):
08:07:48 to 08:11:26
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 3 minutes 38 seconds
Stop (3):
08:11:46 to 08:17:11
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 5 minutes 25 seconds
Stop (4):
08:24:03 to 08:25:52
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 1 minutes 49 seconds
Stop (5):
08:27:19 to 08:30:01
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 2 minutes 42 seconds
Stop (6):
09:36:49 to 09:42:04
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 5 minutes 15 seconds
Stop (7):
09:42:05 to 09:53:13
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 11 minutes 8 seconds
Stop (8):
11:54:24 to 11:55:58
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 1 minutes 34 seconds
Stop (9):
11:58:33 to 11:59:37
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 1 minutes 4 seconds
Stop (10):
12:02:26 to 12:04:01
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 1 minutes 35 seconds
Stop (11):
12:05:05 to 12:06:07
Stop for: 0 days 0 hours 1 minutes 2 seconds
End
————————————————————–
Total moving time: 0 days 4 hours 8 minutes 34 second
Total stop time: 0 days 0 hours 40 minutes 5 second
————————————————————–
Speed Category Definition Distance %
————————————————————–
Congestion 0mi[ 0km] —> 6mi[ 10km] 26.56
Slow 6mi[ 10km] —>40mi[ 64km] 16.62
Medium 40mi[ 64km] —>70mi[112km] 07.85
Fast 70mi[112km] —>80mi[128km] 10.87
Excessive 80mi[128km] + 38.10
————————————————————–
Time Category Definition Distance %
————————————————————–
Early Morning 2 am — 6 am 00.00
Morning 6 am —10 am 57.43
Noon 10 am — 2 pm 42.57
Afternoon 2 pm — 6 pm 00.00
Evening 6 pm —10 pm 00.00
Night 10 pm — 2 am 00.00
————————————————————–
Weekday Category Distance %
————————————————————–
Monday 00.00
Tuesday 00.00
Wednesday 00.00
Thursday 100.00
Friday 00.00
Saturday 00.00
Sunday 00.00
————————————————————–
Driving Category Times
————————————————————–
Hard Braking (1sec change < 10mi[16km]/h) 0
Extreme Braking (1sec change < 15mi[24km]/h) 0
Hard Acceleration (1sec change > 10mi[16km]/h) 0
Extreme Acceleration (1sec change > 15mi[24km]/h) 3
————————————————————–
Average Speed (Driving Time) 100.7KPH

Reading Competitive Intelligence

Posted by rizal on Jul 12, 2009 in Life in Saudia | 3 comments

I’ve been busy this year. I had this sudden urge to pursue my dream of having a Master degree — something that have been delayed for so long due to financial reasons+ my lack of confidence of getting the approval from any university due to my poor first degree result. One day in a Malaysian gathering at my aparment, I met this one Prof l. who lived nearby, and he convinced me that I should proceed with it (he was a part time lecturer in OUM) so I was inspired  — not looking back (since I have an extra budget which have a strong possibilities of being used for some unnecessary stuffs in life)  –so  Bismillah .. — and I just applied for a place– first my application was rejected (my fault! I did  submit the required forms properly.. yes I do have this problem with forms..) but later was  accepted by OUM in February  (thanks to the friendly  and helpful staffs!) while I was away in Helsinki. So here it goes.. myself with a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering continuing my studies in a new area System (Master in Information Science) .. ok not so new since I’ve been doing it for work.

I think I was the first long distance student accepted  for this Competitive Intelligence course in OUM. (I have been reading about the course for quite some time but have no courage to pursue it!) I enjoyed the reading but serious reading with an exam  ahead of you is something new — submitted my coursework in the very last minute (hey! Its not easy for a working father with 4 children to do self  study at home!)  so a week before the exam I took a week  leave from work (3 days in Makkah for umrah + 4 days at home)  and later  sat for the exam in the Malaysian Embassy in Riyadh! It was tiring  where at the end of the 2nd day of exam .. my brain almost stop functioning and my hand was crammed for  too much writing.

The result?

Just  got the complete transcript yesterday and Alhamdulillah! I am speechless ..

Dreams

Posted by rizal on May 16, 2009 in Life in Saudia | 0 comments

I think I “dream” a lot – many times that my wife would shout at me asking if  I heard what she just said,  the regular answer would be Err ehh what was that again?  … as I explained to her that it was a genetic thing. I got it from my father and my son Imran now inherit it from me too (at least that’s what most of his teacher said at every Parent’s Day session I attended to ).

Enough said  about my day dreaming– do you know that dream is a serious thing ?  Sigmund Freud wrote a famous book about it more than a century ago and those “neuro” scientist had their idea on where it came from  too though I merely understand what those neuroscientist talked about here is a quote.

Allan Hobson is a retired Harvard psychiatry professor who did a great deal of neurophysiological work on dreaming and is vehemently anti-Freud, suggesting that dreams are just the higher cognitive centres creating a narrative out of essentially random brain stem activation.
[http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/10/the_big_fight_over_t.html]

Being a muslim, we have to refer back to the source — Quran and hadith . Here is an interesting lecture from my favourite  online “teacher”  — Anwar al-Awlaki  about some rules of dream interpretation. Hope we can benefit from it, inshaallah!

Beautiful video of Prophet Muhammad pbuh

Posted by rizal on May 15, 2009 in Life in Saudia | 0 comments

Berakhir sudah Ramadhan..

Posted by rizal on Oct 1, 2008 in Autism, Current Affairs, Life in Saudia, Web/Tech | 5 comments

Selamat tinggal Ramadhan .. sedih jugak sebenarnya meninggalkan Ramadhan kali ini — mungkin sebab Ramadhan kali ini lebih bermakna dari yang dulu2– OK I have to admit I was not terawih regular before..selalu skip especially yang hujung2 tu.. Tiap2 hari kami yang dok di Apartment “Sri Wangi” Riyadh , berbuka bersama kemudian terawih pun bersama beramai2 ke surau di hadapan rumah. Imamnya al-hafiz so solat terawih kami memang lengkap 30 juzuk bacaannya sepanjang Ramadhan– terbayang2 angan2 suatu hari nanti anak2 menjadi hafiz dan hafizah walaupun perjalanan masih jauh — Imran dan Sabrina akan masuk ke sekolah Arab 11 hari lagi (Imran keluar dari Multinational School — he told his teacher that he moved because he wanted to be a good Muslim! That was exactly what I repeatedly told him — explaining about the move to the new school to get him mentally prepared for the new school) — after a year of soul searching+ fact finding we decided they better off going for “a classical education” (hey! they like watching The Smurf too!) and science + math and english can always be homeschooled .. Dah terbayang masalah yang akan kami hadapi di sekolah baru memandangkan ilmu agama kami yang cetek ditambahkan lagi dengan “arabic vocabulary” kami yang masih “limited”. Tapi kami percaya dalam perjalanan menuntut ilmu ni — yang penting usaha dan banyak berserah kepada Allah insyaallah akan ditunjukkan jalan

Sambung cerita puasa , anak2 makin membesar — Imran , 7 tahun Oktober 18 ni buat kali pertama puasa dan cukup sebulan! Seronok agaknya bersama rakan2 sebaya walaupun liat nak bangun untuk sahur dan solat subuh. Ammar skipped few days of school because abahnya liat nak bangun 7am untuk hantar ke sekolah (Saudi working hours untuk Ramadhan pukul 10am – 4pm! ) Sabrina pun sibuk ke hulu hilir dengan 2 rakan sebaya main bersama dengan adiknya Alysha.

Aktiviti Ramadhan yang lain? Seperti biasa resipi.net hosting overloaded! Kami berpindah lagi buat ke sekian kalinya –trafik naik 4 kali ganda! Leceh sebenarnya kerja pindah hosting ni — ended up all other (at least 5!) websites have to be moved too..
Other than that I got back into old hobbies — electronics but this time its more serious — bought few books from Amazon dan other gadgets like multimeter, oscilloscopes, Arduino microcontroller and the mission– to learn building a robot! . Cisco CCIE project also still ongoing now I have 5 routers with NM-4A/S as frame relay switch + the NM16/A as the terminal server — maybe considering CCNP first to force myself get into it seriously.

Raya? Today is the first day!
Akhir kata Salam Hari Raya dari kami sekeluarga di Riyadh -Maaf Zahir dan Batin !
Some pictures here .

Hacking the Weather II

Posted by rizal on Aug 25, 2008 in MyLab | 3 comments

I was in “hacking mood” yesterday so I pulled off some old hardware from my messy rack and follow the instructions here to produce the following graphs of my room temperature.

For those who don’t understand the picture above — it is actually the graph of temperature against time (in Celcius) of my study room at home in Riyadh.
Outside temperature is 40++ Celcius during the day (yes it is summer in Riyadh)  but getting cooler as Ramadhan is approaching .Do you know that the temperature would reach below 10 Celcius during the winter here?

So to recall — the idea of  starting this project goes back ages ago but was delayed due to many undisclosed reasons — you know it’s not easy being a father of 4, living in Riyadh bla bla bla .
How it works? You can build your own 1-wire temperature sensor (search for DS1820 with google and you’ll find many related projects) or you can buy a ready made kit or the one that I am using here is TAI8520 if you are too lazy to  like me.

Build/assemble your own

Or just follow this easy step-by-step instruction by Instructables .

The USB interface that I am using is DS9490R and  connected to my EEEPC which is running Ubuntu with Digitemp and rrdtool applications. The graph was later ftp’ed to my blog every 5 minutes via crontab. Insyaallah I will try to install another sensor outside my house so that we can see the temperature difference in and out of the house!

The blue USB on the right is the DS9490R .

On vacation

Posted by rizal on Jul 27, 2008 in being a father | 2 comments

I am in the final week of my 30 days vacation in Malaysia now. Perhaps it is the busiest days for me in my home country — everyday,  every minutes  (I am exaggerating here!) was carefully spent — I was in Melaka ->Batu Pahat ->Gunung Ledang->KL->Muar->Bukit Merah->Taiping->KL->BP and back here in KL now to do my packing. Due to budget constraint (we went back to Malaysia twice this year + abah just have to buy more routers to pursue his CCIE dreams) we have to limit our visits around Malaysia. But, you know being in Malaysia — I just realized how beautiful Malaysia is and everything is fun compared to the  hot 50 degree Celcius, sandy and dry  Riyadh .
Imagine  30 days of waking up late, spent quality time with your family and eating out everyday ! You can read about the adventure at my wife’s blog as I am too busy to write! Photos here