2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003
I passed by the Skate Park today while I was on my way to Maki. There was a guy in charge there and I asked him a couple of questions. I found out that it costs KD1.5 per hour to skate, rollerblade or bike in the park. They don’t rent out the gear nor do they have any gear to rent out. What they will provide you with though is the safety equipment like a helmet and elbow and knee guards. For more pictures click [Here]
A very easy how-to on giving your resume a facelift using Microsoft Word. When I get a crappy generic looking résumé printed on a 10 year old ink jet printer I usually don’t bother looking at it. But, when I get one thats laid out nicely I always end up reading it. [Link]
Here is a collection of very short science fiction stories. How short? Each story is made up of only 6 words! 33 writers and 5 designers each wrote a 6-word science fiction story and surprisingly some are pretty cool.. [Link]
Recently PayPal started accepting credit cards from Bahrain, Qatar and UAE. How does Kuwait fit in to this? Well the American Express office in Kuwait issues their credit cards from Bahrain. So, if you have an American Express credit card you can now sign up for a PayPal account. When PayPal asks for your billing address just put the address of the Bahrain Amex office which is the following:
P O Box 5990
Al Seef District 428
Manama 428
Bahrain
For those of you who don’t have an American Express card you can get one from the American Express office located in Salhiya Complex. Their phone number is 2413000.
Thanks to BusyNow for sharing this information with me.
Metronatural is the new slogan for Seattle. It took over a year to develope at a cost of $200,000. I am definitely in the wrong line of work. [Link]
A guy basically decided to analyze CNN’s main page and remove everything except the real news. Turns out the majority of the articles on the main page are mostly just entertainment and gossip. I also noticed this recently, CNN’s main page is being filled up with articles of the kind I would find on The Superficial or Socialite’s Life except CNN was always a few days slower. [Link]
I have been watching UFC since morning starting from UFC 1 all the way to UFC 7. There were some amazing fights especially since the original UFC fights didn’t have any rules.
My favorite fight so far has to be Emmanuel Yarborough vs Keith Hackney. Emmanuel is 2.06 meters and weighs 280KG while Keith is 90KG and 1.8 meters tall, so it was a match between David and Goliath. Emmanuel is actually in the guiness book of records for being the largest athlete. Anyway he ended up losing the fight but Keith actually fractured his hand while trying to knock Emmanuel out. He later became known as Keith “The Giant Killer” Hackney. He must have punched Emmanuel’s head like 30 times before the fight was stopped, it was like trying to put down a giant bear using only a spoon.
Thats whats cool about the old UFC’s, no rules, no weight classes and a lot of blood.
This site has articles on every letter of the alphabet and talks about their origins. Its actually really interesting. [Link]
Introducing: International Direct by Amazon!
International Direct offers Amazon customers a unique service: providing duty and tax estimation during checkout and customs clearance by the courier on your behalf. Your order arrives at your door without surprise duty charges. International Direct is also a great way to send gifts overseas. International Direct currently provides service to the following countries: Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand and United Arab Emirates.
Currently Kuwait isn’t on the list but since UAE and Saudi Arabia are then Kuwait could be next. [Link]
Hello everyone, my name is Fawaz and I am responsible for marketing communication at Jazeera Airways, in addition to being an amateur blogger of course. We have been reading your questions about Jazeera Airways on this blog over the past few months. Questions that ranged from “how can we afford fares as low as KD 5?” To questions about our brand name. In an effort to answer all your questions, we recently asked Mark to gather questions you had for Jazeera Airways and in return we promised him that we would answer all of them, exclusively on this blog. Lets start
Mark: How can you afford to offer super low fares?
This is a great question that I will answer in two parts. First, we prefer to fly our planes full of travelers paying less per seat rather than flying with less travelers paying more. Other airlines prefer high fares and less passengers, which does not make sense to us. Why would they want to impact less people? For us, we enjoy flying people and being part of their lives.
The second part involves our business model that works to achieve high efficency and a lower operational cost base. In other words, we do more with less. We achieve our high efficiency by employing
1. state of the art technology to streamline processes
2. hardworking, multitasking, highly motivated team
In sum, we can afford super low fares because our business model is based on volume more than yield, and because we depend on leading technologies and great team to lower our cost.
Follow-up: How are you able to lower your cost?
We are able to maintain a lower cost base and high level of quality and safety through three main ways:
1- Recruitment- We recruit highly motivated and committed team members. This is crucial as it has direct impact on day-to-day cost. Being able to wear different ‘hats’ (so to speak) and do the work of several people is a quality we seek in and build in our team members. That’s why we call our people our ‘high flyers’.
2- Aircraft utilization – Aircraft on the ground do not make money, so we keep our aircraft in the air where they do make money. We achieve this through quick turn-arounds at the gate. Our planes arrive at a destination, wait for our travelers to disembark, board return travelers, and fly back to base ready to take off again in less than 45 minutes.
3- A fleet of single-type fleet: the Airbus A320.
If you had Porsche and a Ferrari and Lamborghini in your drive way, you would need three different specialized garages to service them with three different mechanics and three different spare parts inventories. On the other hand, if you had three Porsches you would only need to contract a single garage to service all three and your maintenance costs would be much lower. Aircraft are the same, though much more sophisticated. Allow me to elaborate.
If an airline had an A320, an A310, an A340, and a 777, they would need certified captains, first officers, cabin crew for each type of aircraft. In this case, if a 777 pilot falls sick with the flu, an A320 pilot cannot just jump in the captain’s seat of a 777 unless she is trained on a 777. Because of this, airlines with multiple aircraft types in their fleet need to have more pilots to cover scenarios like this, more engineers who do nothing but wait for someone to get sick, and spare parts inventories to cover all types. This creates redundancies and inneficiency.
In our case, we have an all-A320 fleet. We do not need to hire more crew since any of our crew can jump in any of our aircraft and take-off and any of our engineers is licensed to work on any of our aircraft, and our spare parts inventory covers all our aircraft.
4- Investment in Technology – By investing heavily into technology, we were able to raise efficiency, reduce operational cost and drive the price of tickets down even further. We currently employ over a dozen world class technology systems and tools that range from the booking systems we use to satellite aircraft monitoring that tells us the status and integrity of each aircraft while it is in the air no matter where it is on earth, and automatically dispatches support teams and parts to the destination airport if the situation required. These are only some of the benefits of having world class Lufthansa Technik engineers and technology working with us and for us.
I am a huge fan of the Rambo movies and when I heard they were coming out with part 4 I couldn’t have been any happier. Then I found out that Matthew Fox who plays Dr Jack Shepherd on LOST was going to the be the lead bad guy in Rambo IV I was like wow, thats crazy. Now I just found out that Jack Bauer who plays Kiefer Sutherland in real life is also going to be in Rambo IV. The movie is going to come out next year, I wonder who else will end up starring in it.