Youssef Ziady's Blog

Greetings again, friends!

Here’s a video of myself playing the solo from The Best of Times by Dream Theater, from their latest album, Black Clouds & Silver Linings. This video is quite old as I recorded it a couple weeks after the album came out, and goes back to last July. The minute I heard the solo on the song, I fell in love with it, this is hands-down one of Petrucci’s greatest guitar solos of all-time, and being on the progressive metal band’s 10th studio record, that’s saying a lot: The solo combines not-so-easy guitar techniques and simultaneously, a heavenly melody that perfectly suits the song’s mood (go here for more info about the song). Anyhoo, this cover as I said goes back to summer of 2009, and I had then the intention of posting it but apparently forgot to and got caught up with other stuff. Note that this is recorded by a phone camera with a basic distortion of a small Marshall amp. Enjoy!

Continue to the video

Warning: Not recommended for iPhone / iPad fanatics with weak hearts!

To all NBA 2K10 diehard fans and players out there!

First of all I am one myself. And, needless to say, you all know by now that 2Ksports published an update for the original version of the game, and thus disabled the internet connectivity option for the old versions of the game, making only the updated version capable of connecting to the internet and updating in-game stats and data. And thousands of people, including myself, ran into a lot of trouble while trying to successfully update the game and reactivate its internet connectivity option. And after finding the perfect combination of  actions to do in a certain order, I managed to make it work again like before, with the update installed and internet connection working altogether. And I decided to share right here for those of you who are still facing problems while trying to update their versions of the game:

1. First of all, download the initial official patch from any of sites it is featured on. Here is one :
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Greetings people!

After a nasty virus struck my website several months ago, it went down and has been that way since then, and the virus seemed too big for me to even consider working on it and cleaning it off totally, until today. For a couple weeks I’ve been considering formatting and restarting from scratch because the site’s case seemed too hopeless to repair, but I went around and about on my files and took the time to clean each of them from malicious code, thus being able to bring back my website as is! Still, despite all that, I’m thinking the site seriously needs a brand new, simpler yet nicer look, and I’m working on that for now, so that after that, I can pick up where I left off on my blog updates. So long till then, friends!

While going through random YouTube videos, I stumbled upon a couple awesome videos (both music-related) definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re a fan of unusual yet genius musical works. So, enjoy!

Additionally, here’s another similar video of an equally awesome “Orchestra”… Enjoy

Hello.

As you may have noticed, my blog updates have been quite slow in the past few weeks, and throughout the previous month, I kept pushing myself not to write this kind of “apology” post because I wanted to update my blog frequently despite the endless daily tasks that have been coming up. But I realized currently that it’s quite hard, more like almost impossible, to post daily articles to my blog with so much to do. So, The updates will probably get even slower in the couple upcoming weeks, or even months, until I have sorted out everything I’ve set to do and accomplish, and then I will get back to updating my beloved website. And, just so you don’t return empty-handed, enjoy listening to Between The Buried And Me’s just-released ballad, entitled Mirrors, from their upcoming record, The Great Misdirect.

Hello.

Our article of the day is going to be really interesting, even though it might seem a bit ordinary and used up. Actually, it isn’t, it can never be. Guess why? Someday, you will leave …it will stay (The subject that is). The very subject of this article pushed me to write about it. In a simpler way, it is Time that forced me to think about writing something new, because it’s Time I updated my blog with a fresh text. Enough with blurry introductions already. While contemplating my near future yesterday night, more precisely my heading back to school in a few days, thoughts led me to think about, more like be reminded of the power of Time. It controls every action we take, every action we do not take (the decision of which being directly affected by it), and even every thought we process. Because, every tiny step you take is dependent of and conform to the measures of Time you have in mind for the day. Hell, you probably kept in count the time you’re going to spend reading this, before moving on to something else, that will consume even more and more time that you have and are spending.
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If you’re a big fan of basketball around the world, you probably watched and followed the FIBA Asia Basketball Championship, through which 3 teams get to qualify to the World Basketball Championship. The Lebanese National Team of course participated in this championship, and showed high quality in technique and sportsmanship. When they qualified to play their second game against China (Previous Asian Basketball Champion countless times), you could see they put their hearts into that game, did more than their best to keep up or even have the lead, while keeping fair play and high sportsmanship. However, looks like it’s already previously decided to not let our NT win, no matter the circumstances. If you watched that game, the last two minutes more precisely, you would notice the extremely obvious bias the referee showed, and unfair Critical judgments he made in order to keep Lebanon from having the slightest chance to win, the last and most critical of which was highlighted and replayed more than a thousand times, due to its high controversy and lack of righteous judgment. You can see this call made by the referee in the video below:

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I can’t remember the last time i stepped into my town without getting an average of ‘hundred camera flashes right in the face per second”…everyone’s so concerned about taking photos wherever they go as if they need a proof that they’ve been there. Everyone seems to let down the real value of using a camera, which is in my opinion (letting aside the fact that there are professional uses of a camera), a very simple way to capture timelessly motionless moments of your life in order to bring back three dimensional frames in your mind whenever you look at them again (in the future) and that’s something YOU only care to do, (ignoring retardation) there’s no interest in showing everyone (disincluding your wife and kids in like 20 years or so ? ) photos that wouldn’t stimulate but fake and impressive three dimensional frames of a memory that belongs to YOU, and that’s how it starts, when you have a zillion mega pixel camera with a blinding flasher and a set of incredible editing abilities, you start taking pictures of the places you go to and the activities you do and post them here and there on social networking websites just so people from the same level of retardation get into your albums and get impressed by how glowing and glamorous you looked on that night and in that place, ignoring the fact that you might only had smiled to the camera when you probably were feeling neutral for being in a place that would make you seem so “neat” just because everyone visits it and just because it helps you seek loads of attention, that’s how people get blindly obsessed with dressing and impressing, wasting hours taking pictures on a machine that we became slaves to while WE made it ONLY to make things easier for us… i think i should be copy pasting the last sentence into another note where i replace the word “machine” by “god”, anyway…
it was really rude how i played the role of a party pooper, screwing up this global photo sharing race using a little feature in a huge social networking illusion that will probably get DDOS’ed (search google for more info) by a group of great people who are TRULY free.

Serouj.

I’ve been struggling with this very problem for a while now, without finding any efficient solution almost about anywhere on the web. Every time I wanted to install a certain software or application on my computer, a small window would turn up at the beginning of the installation, saying : Windows internal error 2203 - C:\windows\installer\xxxxx.ipi,_2147287035 (with the xxx part of the directory being a combination of letters and numbers that changes with each application, or even each time i try to install the same application. After long hours of googling, I found many relevant answers that would almost get to the solution of my problem, but weren’t enough to fix it. My %Temp% folder was locked, and I wasn’t able to change its permissions. They kept coming back to their previous state. So I figured, I can simply make a new Temp folder with a different directory within the same hard drive, the new Temp folder having full permissions and access to be writable, thus be used as a folder for applications to store their temporary files in during the installation (the thing that caused the problem previously). This solution worked perfectly! So, I decided to blog about it for those who might have the same problem, and like me, have been hopelessly dwelling through endless webpages looking for an answer. To create a new efficient Temp folder, follow these simple steps:
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