A lot of catching up to be done on here about my Saudi trip, unfortunately the seemingly flaky ISP I was using in Jeddah prevented me from posting after a few days. And no I haven’t been sensored by them, it was a plain old site not found message as opposed to the “inappropriate content” message you get when accessing a blocked site in Saudi. This seemed to be a common feature of the ISP Hanans parents use, DNS problems me thinks.

I’ll try and get some quick updates in here over the next few days, however I’m happy to say that we’ve now got the keys to our new house and I’ve started cleaning and moving a few bits before the big van move on friday. I may even do some decorating seeing as i’ve got the whole week off…

Woo! my birthday present has arrived early; it’s a lovely Wacom graphics tablet courtesy of Hanan. It’s a bit cheeky of me to use it already as my birthday isn’t until the 26th, but as we’ll be away in Saudi then I’ve allowed myself to start using it

Here’s a quick test sketch done in photoshop, cartoony eyes and of no one in particular.

I’ve spent a bit more time on my arabic to english transliteration, it now does English to Arabic as well. So put your name into the text area below hit the “To Arabic” button and see what your name looks like in Arabic characters. Also have a go at pasting some Arabic text in to find out how those characters are pronounced (well…roughly pronounced ) you have to be a bit creative and imagine that there are a few more vowels between the letters when doing the Arabic to English (see my lower transliteration post below for an explanation why).