Category: Information

This is a good post by a student on how to wake up feeling fresh and energetic instead of grumpy and sleepy. The student suggests a very simple method of setting up 2 alarms, the first one would play music at a very low volume while the second alarm will ring at your normal volume. The thinking behind this is you set your first music alarm at very low volume to play at a time you want to wake up. If you wake up to the music you would probably be in light sleep and you will wake up feeling good. You set the second alarm to the latest time you would want to wake up, as a backup in case the first alarm didn’t wake you up. If you wake up to the second alarm you would wake up the normal way you wake up every day.

You can read the full details when you click the link, I am gonna try this myself tomorrow morning. [Link]

Update: Dogbert gave me a link to an alarm clock that runs away and hides after it rings so you wouldn’t be able to snooze it off, thats fucking crazy! [Link]

zMacShop finally got their batch of iPod Nanos. They are selling them for only KD88 with a free sleeve. Thats over KD40 cheaper then the other Mac stores in Kuwait. So if you are interested here is their contact info.

zMacShop
116 Walla’a Complex – Basement
Hawalli, Ibn Khaldun Street
Kuwait City – Kuwait
Tel: +965-261-7575
Email: [email protected]

Update: I received a phone call earlier tonight from zMacShop telling me about the following offer. For the first 6 people who buy an iPod Nano and mention my site (2:48AM) they will get a FREE rubber unpowered boom box for the iPod in addition to the free sleeve. Everyone else will get a free pair of Apple Logo stickers in addition to the sleeves. So if you want an iPod Nano hurry up to get the extra gift, they only have 6 to give away.

Since Google VPN is kinda flaky at the moment, you could try anonymous browsing (for Free) using Hide My Ass. [Link]

Note: Keep in mind, Hide my Ass is NOT secure. Meaning if your connection at the office is monitored, they will know where you have been going. For a secure connection use Proxify.

Ummm is there a Hash Bar in Kuwait that I don’t know about? BusyNow was researching for his upcoming trip when he discovered this under a review of accommodations in Kuwait:

SAS Radisson, Salwa, Tel. 575 6000, Fax 575 0155, E-mail: Again we have some good eating, a reasonable gym, and hosts of many Quiz Nights. Chalets are available for long term guests and this is the nearest hotel to the (un)official Hash Bar.

WHAT HASH BAR?? Can someone post a map or something??

Here is the link to the page he found it at, do a search for the word “hash” and you will find it. [Link]

I can’t find it now but I remember reading in a local blog a complaint about Kuwait Cinema closing for Ramadan. Well I think I now know why, it seems they are rebranding. KNCC will become the mother company while CinemaScape (if i remember correctly) will be the new name. You might have noticed the outdoor ads recently (the do not cross yellow police line), I think they will launch the new brand once they open up the cinemas again during eid.

update: seems KNCC closed today till eid and has been open throughout ramadan.

Apple turns 30 on April 1st. When Apple turned 20 they released the Twentieth Anniversary Mac. It cost $10,000 and was delivered to your home in a limo. The system looked like nothing else at that time. It had a very small foot print kinda like the current iMacs and the sound system was designed by Bose. The Mac came with a remote control so you could turn it on and off plus control the volume. You could even watch TV on the Mac and change channels using the remote. Due to the price though they only sold 12,000 world wide. I was able to purchase a brand new TAM three years ago from a local dealer for KD150. I gave it as a gift to my parents who proudly display it and use it today. Even though the TAM was released in 1997, it still grabs the attention and curiosity of visiting guests.

If Apple would release a Thirtieth Anniversary Macintosh this time around, it has to follow the footsteps of the previous one. It has to look like nothing else available which shouldn’t be too hard for Apple to accomplish. It should cost $10,000 and this time they probably would team up with Bang & Olufsen. Finally every hardcore Mac user would want one but none of us would be able to afford it. [Link]

1- walk really fast when you are going anywhere as to appear something important is going to happen

2- carry a notebook with you at all times. seems like you are suppose to be somewhere taking notes. if at your desk keep it open with a pen on it

3- keep your headset on if you are in your cubicle

4- actually do work but that defeats the purpose. okay more later. any suggestions?

5- shuffle papers

6- look pissed off

7- put up a do not disturb sign when you are browsing the web

8- continually click on a pen

9- walk around with your laptop open, side note: take your laptop home and say you are WFH (working from home)

10- open up Microsoft Word and write blog entries to post later

[Link]

Here is the Top Ten Worst Shows for family viewing according to The Parents Television Council.

1. The War at Home
2. The Family Guy
3. American Dad
4. The O.C
5. C.S.I.
6. Desperate Housewives
7. Two and a Half Men
8. That ‘70s Show
9. Arrested Development
10. Cold Case

[Link]

Someone shared this with me in the morning. Did you know the nails on your fingers grow four times faster then on your toes? Also another fact I learned, international banks that are opening up in Kuwait like HSBC and CitiBank are only allowed to open only one local branch according to Kuwait law.

1 – Seinfeld
2 – Friends
3 – Frasier
4 – Drew Carey
5 – Roseanne
6 – Married… With Children
7 – Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
8 – NewsRadio
9 – 3rd Rock from the Sun
10 – Home Improvement

[Link]

Yesterday I recieved my 1GB Ultra II Memorystick Duo and I quickly tried running games off it by copying their iso’s onto the Memorystick and running them using FastLoader 0.7. Majority of the games I tried didn’t work and I even had trouble unraring most of the files. So here are some tips I would like to pass on from my experience.

– Firstly, Mac users, if you want to unrar files, get UnRarX. Its a great utillity that does a much better job then Stuffit. I was getting errors using Stuffit but didn’t get any when using UnRarX.

– Secondly, there are two different types of MemoryStick Duo’s, the regular kinda and the High-speed. Whats the difference? Regular memorysticks read and write at 15MB/sec while the high=speed ones read and write at 80MB/sec. So get the High-Speed (Ultra II) ones since they cost a bit more but offer better performance.

– Thirdly, most of the games like Winning Eleven 9 and Madden 2006 wouldn’t work with the regular FastLoader. To get it working I used Devhook 0.21.

If I have any more tips I will add them to this post in the future.

Just saw that BoingBoing posted a link to the 100 oldest domain names. I thought I had posted it here ages ago but it turns out I posted it in a forum back in December before I had this blog. Anyway here is the link to the 100 oldest dot com domains. [Link]

Thanks to Purg for the link to this site with famous Lebanese. Here are some interesting ones I didn’t know about:

Nicolas Hayek, creator of Swatch and savior of the Swiss watch industry.
Marisa Tomei, winner of Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in “My Cousin Vinny”
Frank Zappa, rock legend
Yasmine Bleeth, starred in “Baywatch” and “Nash Bridges”
G.E. Smith, guitarist and “Saturday Night Live’s” bandleader for many years (Smith is the translation of is family’s Lebanese name, Haddad)
Kathy Najimy, award-winning comic actress, the fun-loving nun in the “Sister Act” films and co-star of Kirstie Alley as Olive in “Veronica’s Closet”.
Tom Shadyac, director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective(1994), The Nutty Professor (1996), Liar Liar (1997), Patch Adams(1998), Dragonfly (2002) and Bruce Almighty (2003)
Ned Mansour, president of Mattel, Inc.
Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s

Here is the full list. [Link]

Update: Here is another list from a more reliable source. [Link]
Update 2: Wendie Malick is of Irish and Lebanese heritage. She plays Nina Van Horn on NBC’s hit show Just Shoot Me. [Link]

Send them a complaint. [Link]

DSL prices in Kuwait have gone down recently. Both Qualitynet and Fasttelco have double the bandwidth. It started off as an offer but it seems they have decided to keep this permanently. This is how much 512KB will cost you in Kuwait

Fasttelco
512kb down / 128kb up
1yr Subscription Price: KD360 ($1232)

Qualitynet
512kb down / 256kb up
1yr Subscription Price: KD380 ($1300)

Both providers are reliable, I use both of them, one at home and one at work. Sometimes a site could be blocked by Qualitynet and not by Fasttelco, and sometimes its the other way around, they mostly come out even. So if you are new in Kuwait and looking for a decent connection, get a 512kb DSL connection, the 256kb is too slow, and the 1MB too expensive, 512kb comes in nicely at around KD30 a month.