It is reported by South China Morning Post (SCMP), the leading english daily, that iPhone will be carried by CSL and PCCW as well. The paper reports that a “rival” of 3, the only carrier with iPhone announcement so far in Hong Kong, has commented that 3 deal is not a big story as there will be lots of iPhones by other carriers as well.

Yes, the iPhone is not coming to my door. The short version of the story is Atif has not sent me the iPhone. he did tell me 3 weeks ago he has sent but I have not got it and he is kinda avoiding talking to me now. So all this suggests he has not sent the iPhone.

3 has announced today that they will be releasing the iPhone in Hong Kong and Macau in this year of 2008. No other details were given which is same as in other iPhone announcements done in other countries. Here is the official statement:-

Hong Kong and Macau, 29th May 2008 - Hutchison Telecommunications Limited today announced that it has signed an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to Hong Kong and Macau later this year.

Finally, it is here.

Well, it is more than two weeks now and the iPhone is still not delivered. I was told that it HAS been sent as registered mail but it has not come so far. I have asked for the registration number from Atif but have not heard from him as well.

So I still continue to wait for it.

Mac OS X Leopard’s Address Book’s address block does not have the address format for Pakistan. So, last night I found a way to custom input it by editing a plist file. At the same time I amended the Hong Kong entry as well in it.

Everything looked fine and I spent well over 1 hour to correct all the address related to Pakistan and Hong Kong. Only to find out later that if you do the Map It thing on the address block, Google Maps does not take “certain” address block entries from my customized Pakistan and Hong Kong plist editing.

Also, these same fields are missing if you sync the Address Book to your mobile phone. In the Address Book on the Mac though everything looks fine. I think some other settings have to be tweaked as well to get it work but I can not think of any.

So, today I will make some changes so that everything works fine. It will take time and I think most likely I will have to change the way I input the addresses.

Pakistan to observe summertime, that is, Daylight Saving Time. The people of pakistan will advance their clocks by 1 hours thus they will GMT +6 till first Sunday of the October 2008. After that the clocks will back to Pakistan Standard time till first Sunday on April 2009.

The plan to save energy by doing this of which there is a severe shortage in Pakistan.

Last time they observed Daylight Saving Time was in 2002 and many people were confused. Since it was introduced when Mr. Musharraf was at the peak of his power, people started to call it “Musharraf Time”. If you had asked ‘What time is it?” you will normally be asked back a question ” Which one? Real time or Musharraf Time?”

Hope this time the government does educate people the benefits of it and sticks to it in coming years and it is not a one year stint like last time. 

Never in my life have I waited for postman as much as nature is making me to. I mean come on, how many days it really take for a small parcel to arrive from London. Royal Mail’s own website says 4-5 working days following the day of posting. I should have it yesterday if I go by this statement.

I don’t feel that optimist for today, if you ask me the truth.

As promised, here is a set of pictures that holds 30 years in between them. In out time we used to play on concrete grounds but now they made them in rubber

  

 

 

 

We visited a place that we in our own family call “Ede Road”. Actually Ede Road is just a road name in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. There in the apartments on this road I have lived with my brothers and sister for few years. There is a children’s playground just across the road where the apartments stand and we have great memories with this playground. I have played there when I was at my son Abdullah’s age. And now after about 30 years I can see my son playing in the same park giving almost the same smile I have in one of my childhood snaps.

You can enjoy more pictures in my flicker account.

I will post two pictures sometime later, one of my childhood and one of Abdullah, here and you’ll see 30 years in between them.

Orange today announced that they have signed a deal with Apple to release iPhone in ten more countries other than France. Here is the official press release:-

Orange today announced a new agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to Orange customers in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Orange’s African markets later this year.

So this brings the total number of countries to about 40 where iPhone will be available within this year and it continues to grow up every week with more announcements. 

The wait for the iPhone being delivered continues. There was no sign of postman or courier till yesterday. Today might be the day but I am not that optimist. 

Will keep you updated.

I used to browse many websites in my spare time but for sometime I hardly find any site worth stopping longer than 30 sec. I am “confined” to few websites regularly and most of them are forums of which I am member. Perhaps the quality of the content on the net has decreased, a lot.

I do agree that blogging is the most wonderful thing that has happened after perhaps World Wide Web itself. And Forums, well, you can learn almost anything from there. It is like free school. And you sometime get amazed the quick and personal service you get at some forums. My own experience relates to AppleNova and Hackint0sh forums.

And who can forget RSS feeds. In fact RSS has decreased the number of sites i used to visit regularly. Now all of their news just coma via RSS.

So here are my net habits these days:-

• Read RSS feeds. I am subscribed no less than 25 of them.
• Visit AppleNova and Hackint0sh forums

I am a user of NetNEwsWire for last couple of years. It is a greate app to read and manage all of your news feeds. I have subscribed to about 25 feeds, most of them which are related to Apple and Tech news. 

Lots of people have mentioned the Google Reader for this purpose but I never liked the idea that every time I have got to read the feed I have to visit Google website. Also, NetNewsWire has a nice way to tell how many unread messages are there to read. I can not find this in Google Reader though. 

Anyway, as I am expecting the iPhone so I definitely wanted to find a way to read my feeds on the move, hence Google Reader which co-incidentally also released the Google Reader for iPhone optimized version.

I am still exploring the Google Reader but I guess I can live with it, especially thinking that the feeds will always be available on my iPhone. 

I have been following hackint0sh.org website and its section related to iPhone. Though, I have read a lot about how to unlock the 1.1.4 OTB iPhone with PwnageTool, yet I am feel nervous about it as I have never done it before. The process itself seems very easy to understand and it is the risk that is involved. 

There are lots and lots of successful stories but then are there failures as well with issues which need to be fixed later. 

I hope all goes fine with my iPhone when I pwn it.

I have setup almost all of the data on my PowerBook so it can be synced with iPhone in a clean manner. Here is a short list of the things I have done.

1. Cleaned up the Address Book by removing old contacts which were not required and giving it a consistent format
2. Moved my work mail from Entourage to Mail.app
3. Created a smart album in iPhoto to transfer pictures from it to iPhone. I have set the last 1 years data to be synced but I might change this to 6 months or 3 months when I have seen it how much space it takes.
4. Created some smart playlists in iTunes beginning with letter “i”. Only these playlists will be synced because of space limitation. I am giving about 4GB for music and 1 to 1.5GB to videos.
5. Cleaned up Safari bookmarks.
6. Downloaded the app to unlock the iPhone.

Here is a video of my son shot on Sony CyberShot V1.

In a surprise Yahoo! messenger message pop-up, I got the message from my friend Atif that he has got the iPhone for me and he was asking my address so he could send it to me. I was for a while in a state of disbelief. Is it true? Am I going to have an iPhone finally? These were the questions which were popping up in my mind.

Not sure how will he send it to me. I requested him to let know the postage method he is going to use before he sends it out.

Now another wait for the courier/postman begins.

     

 

 

 

Went to see Victoria Park on Hong Kong Island. It is first time I visited too. A nice place with lots of trees and greenery. It is a bit far from Tsuen Wan. We had to change few trains to get there.

My son liked a lot swinging on these swings. He can not find these baby sings in Tsuen Wan.

And yes, be prepared to be injected quite frequently by mosquitos.

Check the complete photo album at my flicker account.