So what have I been up to lately?

• Well, the last couple of weeks has been extremely busy at work; trying to order the stuff we need and get everything in our warehouse on time, dealing with some complaints, a lot of sick colleagues (including me for over a week and half!) and much more!
• As you perhaps recall, I’m going to back to “school”. So I spend several hours a week to my study and preparing myself for my first exam which will be in the end of January.
• Designing a new theme for this blog… Yeah I’m working on a very new cool theme for this blog but it doesn’t go as fast as I would like to.. Lack of time!
• Doing a lot of things in/around the house.

• Getting ready for the Christmas time, setting up the Christmas tree.



• And much more… but don’t want to give you a headache!

More then enough reason to take a few days off at work and just relax and enjoy the holidays! And that’s exactly what I’m going to do! So for the next couple of days (long weekend) Jannie and me have planned a lot of cool stuff to do!

Will keep you updated!

After backing up the important files and folders I formatted my HD and started to install Windows 7 x64 bits. I don’t know why but I had never installed a x64bits OS on my PC before so with Windows 7 I thought… Why not give x64bit a try? I mean I do have the hardware parts for it! So the installation started and I must say that the installation only took about 30 minutes which is really fast!

Once the setup was done and Windows 7 was loaded I noticed that all of the drivers of my CPU chipset, video drivers etc was already installed! I mean I was able to work with Windows 7 Ultimate almost immediately. Here below a screenshot of Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

With Windows 7 some small things have changes.. One of the good changes is that you can re-arrange every system try icons. Just drag and drop them into the order you like! This is definitely one of the things which I’ve missed in the past Windows versions…

My first impression of Windows 7 is that it’s a great improvement compared to Vista. So far everything is working just fine. It has also improved performance, speed and feels much more stable then Vista.  I also like the improved taskbar and some other features!

]]> http://www.bioteck.net/2009/10/30/my-first-impression-of-windows-7-ultimate-x64/feed/ 10 http://www.bioteck.net/2009/10/10/our-new-car-ford-fusion-1-6i/ http://www.bioteck.net/2009/10/10/our-new-car-ford-fusion-1-6i/#comments Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:38:36 +0000 BioTecK http://www.bioteck.net/?p=4701 Recently we’ve bought a new car, next to our first car: Peugeot 106! This time we’ve bought a beautiful bigger car; a Ford Fusion 1.6I from 2003, see the pictures below!
We’ve bought this car last Monday and we’ve driving in it a lot and I have to say that I love this car! It’s so comfortable and it’s a bit higher (and faster ) then what I used to!! We will keep the Peugeot 106 as Jannie needs her own ride..

We had actually booked at the first hotel as the last time however we ended up in another hotel, which was even 10 times better! Why? Well, at the first hotel (The Loca Blue Lagon) they mixed up our hotel room and gave us a shitty room. A room which was 10 minutes a way from the main pool, bar, restaurant etc.. That’s not the worst part.. They offered us a room with 2 single beds! Yeah.. exactly on our honeymoon!  After complaining we were transfered (almost immediately) to the Palazzo Del Mare hotel which is even more luxurious then the first one! From then on we could enjoy our honeymoon perfectly!

Click here to go to the gallery and view the pictures or click on the picture above!!

With this new contract everything will remain the same, except the part that I’m going to do the MIL (Medewerker Inkoop & Logistiek which actually comes down to Purchase Management). I’m really existed about this as this is a very good opportunity to expand my knowledge.

I’m really looking forward to start with the education (which starts on the 12th of November) and also to continue my work at Joico! I signed the contract yesterday so my weekend started pretty awesome as you can imagine!

It was really a beautiful day and fortunately we’ve a lot of pictures (1100+!) of our wedding just to remember the day! I have made a selection and you can view them in the gallery by clicking here or clicking on the picture here below!

Enjoy watching them!

Movie Park Germany was very easy to find and once we arrived it wasn’t that crowded, lucky us! Off course this changed a bit during the day. As we arrived pretty early we started to explore the park and watched the Shrek 4D which was nice but definitely not great!

Unfortunately the weather turned around during the day, at first the sun was shining but then it started to rain, but that didn’t spoil the fun for us and we did have a nice time!
You can see the picture by clicking this little link here!

During the last couple of weeks, which were very busy weeks for us obviously,  we have managed to do a lot of stuff for our wedding and enjoyed life..
See below a small round up of what I was up to when I wasn’t blogging!

• I turned 27 on Friday the 26th.
  Jannie surprised me with some lovely presents; such as a Sony digital video recorder with 60GB harddisk and it’s accessories (yet another toy which I can play with! ), some perfume, a nice card, a nice diner and in the end a small party.
  Ow, I forgot to mention that I also got a Guitar Hero Metallica as a present! I haven’t had that many time to try it, but I already played it for a couple of minutes and I have to say… IT’S GREAT!

• I managed to buy my wedding suit!
  While shopping with Jannie we saw this lovely black suit and when I tried it on, it just fited perfectly!
• We went to “Zwarte markt” (blackmarket) in Beverwijk (somewhere near Amsterdam) with some friends.
  Every week, tens of thousands of visitors come to check out the stalls, lively cafés and countless bargains. Live music, interesting finds and the many restaurants and cafés all help to make this cosy and convivial picture complete. The atmosphere here is full of good fun and good fortune!
  After visiting the “Zwarte Markt” we drove to Scheveningen, yep our favourite place beside Eindhoven, to enjoy the sun.
  We ended the day by having an Iranian meal at some Iranian Restaurant.

• Working in the garden…
  Yep, it’s summer again and therefor it’s necessary to have the garden nice & clean as we love to BBQ and sit outside!
• Some birthday parties of our friends / family and had a great time..
• We went to Roermond for a day trip, which was really fun to do! The weather was just great!
• Ow, I forgot to mention.. The pictures above are taken with my new digital camera, yeah the old one has “passed” away. My new camera is a Canon IXUS 95 IS which is a very nice camera with 10 megapixels and a lot of cool features.

So as you can see a lot happened during the last couple of weeks.. So you may understand why I haven’t updated the blog that much!

As you might know HTC is actually a very large player on the Pocket PC ground and therefore it runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 PRO. I like having Windows Mobile installed on mobile phones as you can quickly have it working with your Windows PC/synchronizing it  and like a Windows PC you can install third party software on it and off course.. You can tweak it!

Anyway, the specs of HTC Touch Pro 2 are actually awesome, check them here below!

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and HSDPA 7.2Mbps
• 3.6″ 65K-color touchscreen WVGA display (480×800 px)
• Five row full QWERTY side-sliding keyboard of brilliant ergonomics which is really handy!
• Revamped TouchFLO 3D Home screen and gesture controls
• Wi-Fi and built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS. Yep, navigation is possible with TomTom!
• Qualcomm MSM7200A 528 Mhz CPU and 288 MB DDR SDRAM (yeah, reminds me of one of my computers which I used to have in the 90’s!)
• Dedicated graphics chip (64MB RAM reserved for graphics)
• 3.15 MP auto focus camera
• Active stylus
• Touch-sensitive zoom bar (which works with pictures and even with Opera browser!)
• microSD memory expansion (I guess it could go up to 16GB, but I’ve used my old microSD card of 1 GB for time being)
• TV out
• Teeter game aboard (a very nice game which you can play by tilting the phone up, down, left and right!)
• Cool YouTube client
• Excellent video playback
• MS Office Mobile document editor
• Opera 9.5 web browser (Yes, it has Internet Explorer on it, but believe me I’m NOT going to use that!)

I just have the phone for a day and I’m having a lot of fun with it and I don’t think I’m done “playing” with it!

I obviously haven’t played the game (yet), but as a Metallica fan I think I would like to give it a try.. However.. me and “making” music?
Anyway, while surfing the net I saw this very funny Guitar Hero Metallica commercial which you have to see! As mentioned it’s hillarious: “means you gonna have to put on some pants, pops”! Watch it your self here below!

Anyway, for some times we wanted to explore the Southern part of The Netherlands, Valkenburg and Vaals to be exactly. The Southern part of The Netherlands is really beautiful because of it’s landscapes and off course because of the history! Luckily for us, both cities aren’t that far from our house.

When we arrived in Valkenburg we went to the Chairlift which will take take you to the 90 meters higher! While sitting in the chairlift, you’ll get this view:

As you can see the view is pretty awesome! When you’re at the top of the “hill”, you can eat and drink at a cosy restaurant.
Beside the chairlift there’s also a toboggan slide, which is always fun to do, right? With the toboggan slides with has a length of 325 and 375 meters you can slide down the hill.

After walking around in Valkenburg, we moved to our next point; Vaals. Like Valkenburg, Vaals is also a very unique place. It borders on both Belgium and Germany. The two borders meet on the Drielandenpunt, which is also a few hundred meters from the highest point of the Netherlands (300 somewhat meter higher), the Vaalserberg.

Going to  Drielandenpunten was very easy, but going to the city was a bit harder. Why? Because almost ALL the roads were closed because of  a bicycle race! Any that couldn’t spoil our day..
After exploring the town (after a long way of looking for a way to go to the center of Vaals) having a very delicious Italian ice cream, walking to Germany.. It was “time” to head back home.

Next weekend is going to be a “long” weekend as we’re closed at the office on Monday, so we’re looking for a nice town which we can explore again.. Any ideas?

For more pictures, click here!

From left to right: Kasra, Carmen, Jannie and me

They arrived Friday at the airport and off course we picked them up. So after we got home from the airport, drinking something and making sure that Kasra and Carmen could “recover” for a while from their long trip , Jannie and me decided to give them a tour through our favorite city Eindhoven;  As this was their first visit to The Netherlands. The day went by pretty fast and we all had a great time together.

The next day we went to the market, showed them where we’re going to get married, the party place and more. We ended the day at our house with drinking something (Yeah, Kasra and me just love Smirnoff!) and catching up.

On Sunday they saw Amsterdam and later that day we went to this 3D movie called: “My Bloody Valentine”, which was an awesome movie! I really enjoyed watching it, unfortunately Carmen didn’t like the movie that much.. (Sorry Carmen! )

Unfortunately the weekend was too short and went by extremely fast, even faster as usual, and Kasra and Carmen had to go back to Italy on Monday. Yeah, time flies when you’re having fun, right?!
Anyway, it was really nice to see them again and we really enjoyed their stay! If only weekends were a bit longer!

You can find some more pictures in the Gallery: A Small Alborz Reunion Pictures.

]]> http://www.bioteck.net/2009/05/08/a-small-alborz-reunion/feed/ 5 http://www.bioteck.net/2009/04/30/my-new-blog-bj-alborzcom-is-online/ http://www.bioteck.net/2009/04/30/my-new-blog-bj-alborzcom-is-online/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 07:08:55 +0000 BioTecK http://www.bioteck.net/?p=3938 If you’ve followed my on Twitter then you must have noticed that I was twitting about designing a new blog called BJ-Alborz.com. Well, the blog is finally ready and can be viewed online!

So make sure you visit my new blog and leave a massage!!

So yeah, today is the first anniversary of BioTecK.net and it’s time to celebrate! I actually wanted to hold a contest or a give way around this one, but due the lack of time I wasn’t able to do so. Remember my post about how fast time flies, Another Week Passes By…!? It sucks that I still can’t buy time anywhere! Anyway, maybe some other time!? 

Now 1 year later, BioTecK.net got a PR2, some post pages even have PR1, 708 posts, 2120 comments & counting, received a lot of Blogging Awards (Sorry if I didn’t pass on the awards!!), got some very nice reviews and much more!

So I guess it’s time to say THANK YOU  ALL, yes every 177.233 one who have visited BioTecK.net the past year and a ::hug:: for helping me get this off the ground! I hope this year will be even better then the last year!

Anyway, this is what we’ve done in the past couple of weeks:

Cocody Party Centrum

After spending a lot of time searching for the right place to celebrate our wedding we’ve finally found the PERFECT place! The perfect place to have a nice diner, receive our guests and give a great party on our wedding day!

We actually made our decision some weeks ago but again as we were very busy I didn’t have that much time to write about this. Anyway, the place where we are going to celebrate our wedding is called Cocody Party.
Cocody is located in Geldrop (a small city near Eindhoven) with a very nice view over the nature and lake. It’s a great and beautiful location as you can see here below!

We really love this location and we can’t wait to celebrate our wedding there. As you can see it also looks very nice on the inside.

Our honeymoon

For a long time we didn’t knew where to go on our honeymoon, but Saturday we finally booked our honeymoon! After giving it some thoughts, we decided to go back to Kos island in Greece. As you might know/remember, we have also been there two years ago and we really had a wonderful time over there! The island, hotel, food, the swimming pool and actually everything was just perfect and as we want to have everything perfect for our wedding we decided to go back to Greece.

Now we know where we will celebrate our honeymoon and we have a party location, we can now focus on some other stuff like the wedding cake, wedding card and a lot of other things!
So we still have a lot of things to do an believe me when I say that I wouldn’t get bored for the next couple of weeks!

But let me start with this good news:
As you might know I’m working at Joico for a couple of months now and as my contract period is almost over, Joico has decided to offer me a new contract!
With this new contract some things will change (good changes)! A lot of things will remain the same; for example I’m still in charge of the database/ftp server & website, I still have to do some photography, registration procedure and a lot more!

However like I mentioned, I’m going to get some additional duties. Stuff I really love to do and which is in my field of interest! From now on I’ll also help people with computer problems and will do more computer stuff then before! Beside maintaing the website I’ll also have to maintain the webshop, including testing the application etc. Beside those there are some other small changes, which I love doing.

Believe it or not, I’m really happy about this.. Not only about my new duties but off course about my new contract and especially in this hard time when a lot of people are unemployed, companies shutting down etc.
Woehoe.. It’s time to celebrate!

You scored a 85% (A)! Your driving level is: very safe

So, take the test and tell me: How dangerous of a driver are YOU?

Beside that I have to design a flyer and a poster which is going to take some time.. Ow..This reminds me that I have to do a huge portfolio update! Hmm.. Where can I buy some time to do that? If you have some spare time I’m more then happy to buy it!

Our Car Covered in Snow…

There were traffic jams through whole city and it took me about 1 hour to drive from our house to Jannie’s work and another hour for me to get to work, so it was a pain in the ass! Anyway, I survived today.. Let’s see what tomorrow brings us, I hope it would be better then today!

Snowplough working on the roads. Source: omroepbrabant.nl

So let’s look back at 2008 and see if I’ve kept myself to the 2008’s resolutions! The year 2008 was a very nice year, one which I’ll never forget. It was the year when:

• I asked  Jannie to be my wife in El Gouna, Egypt, and she said yes. In the mean time we’ve set a wedding date: Friday 4th of September 2009.
• I graduated at school in June
• I got a new job at Joico which I still love to do!
• Me and Jannie got our driving licences 
• We bough our first car. Yeah I really love our Peugeot 106!
• We made our house even more beautiful.
• I have enjoyed life a lot this year, for example: we did a lot of nice things.
• I got a Nintendo Wii.. and believe me.. Wii is really addictive!

So beside one thing (doing sports) I’ve kept myself to last years resolution and even more! I think I’m going to move that point to this years resolutions which I’m going to post in a day or two. So I’ll keep you upated!
By the way: how about you? Did you keep your resolutions for the year 2008!?