About

Born somewhere in Middle East in late 70s. Other than wasting years in school, spent lots of time in building bad sounding audio amplifiers, fixing and riding my bicycle, playing stupid tunes on keyboards and getting friendly with wild street cats.

High school period got a bit better, started to enjoy maths and physics. Also started programming in C, played Flight Simulator (the only application I like from Microsoft), snorkled regularly in Red Sea and got involved in musical activies at the school.

Moved to my native country, some place in southasia at age of 17. Spent most time fixing computers/networks and discovering new tracks on nearby hills on my 125cc bike. Also sometimes went to college and technical institute to see friends and teach my teachers. Wrote some system level applications in C and did some basic digital electronics stuff for PC interfacing. Internet was not too common at that time; this resulted in limited answers for all my technical problems, but enabled me to be more focused and productive on PCs.

Accidently got a job offer in 1998 for a 2 years project in Saudi, ended up spending almost 7 yers doing some mega projects in the field of data networks. Traveled to many places around the world for technical stuff and for dangerous roller-coaster rides. During this job of high level stress, I got addicted to online chats and wasted nights for several years on yahoo messenger. Later just quit the chat things and started a band with 6 other members, playing famous songs at gatherings & events. Finally got tired of playing live music in front of stupid audiences and started to compose and sequence my own music at my apartment.

After doing many huge network projects and acheiving multiple expert level certifications in my field, finally got tired of data networks and switched to IT security field.

In mid 05, I moved to London where I joined a US based security firm as a security consultant. Currently involved in a project for a global investment bank for installation of few hundred firewalls.

Other personal projects that I am have been working on includes a solo instrumental album, a commercial music album with 2 of my friends, and nusratforever.com project.

Thats it for my not-so-quick intro, below is some more information about myself …

Stuff I like to do:
Sleeping, Staying at home, Movies, Music, Shoot to kill games, Reading and Thrill Rides (magic mountain’s my favourite)

Hate to do:
Travelling in planes, trains, tubes and cars, watching indian movies, being social

Foods I love:
Non-vegetarian Paki/Indian food, mainly Biryani, Sajji and Haleem, big fan of Mexican Fajittas, Italian Pastas/Pizzas and Arabic Mandi & Mutabbaq

Foods I hate:
Vegatables, Lentils, American fast food, Tea, Coffee, all tobacco stuff

History of Vehicles:
Honda 125cc bike, Honda Accord, Honda Prelude, Raleigh Voyager Bicycle (current)

Vehicles that I would love to own:
Honda Valkyrie Rune bike, BMW 5 series sedan

History of my Mobiles:
Some Ericsson amps set with illegal scanner, Ericsson R320, R380, T28, Sony Ericsson T68, Z200, P800, K700, K750i (the best mobile ever made), W850i, m600i (current)

History of my PDAs:
Casio pb-2000c, Palm III, Palm V, Palm Zire 71, Zire 72, Sony CLIe NX80v, XDA Exec (worst one due to OS), BlackBerry 7290

History of Desktops Computers:
Custom made 386sx 25MHz, 386dx 40MHz, Pentium 100MHz, Athlon 700MHz, Sun Ultra 10 sparc, Athlon XP 2600+, Apple MacMini Intel 1.83Ghz dual core, Apple iMac 20 inch 2.0Ghz Core Duo

History of Laptops:
IBM ThinkPad 486, Dell c800, Dell d800, IBM T40, Apple MacBook 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo

History of Keyboards:
Yamaha PSS-140, PSS-795, PSR-SQ16, Motif 7, Motif ES 7, Emu Mo’ Phatt, PSR-3000

Other Music Gear:
Cubase 4 running mLAN network with everything, Native Instruments Storm Drums, Roland R-8 Drums, Roland JV-1010 sound module with asian expansion, Yamaha EMQ-1 midi disk recorder, Alesis MidiVerb-4, Yamaha i88x pre-amp I/O module, Yamaha RY-70 drum machine, 8×3 ports midi hub, Shure sm58 mic, AudioTechnica-3035 mic, Alesis MK2 monitors, headphones from AKG and Sony, Kenwood & Pioneer cassette recorders and 20 kilograms of various cables.

Audio/Video Equipment:
Sony Wega 43inch TV, Sony DAV-SC8 with active sub, DreamBox dm-7000

Books that I loved:
Optimizing Windows 3.1 — Daan Gookin, PC Intern — System Programming, Computer Networks — Andrew Tanenbaum, Shahab Nama — Kudratullah Shahab, Da Vinci Code — Dan Brown

Monthly Magazines that I love:
Wired, Suspense Digest, Electronic Musician, Sound on Sound