Category: Interesting

Thanks to Rami I currently use Tivo to record all my favorite shows on Showtime. But tonight I past by the Showtime stand at Marina Mall and noticed they now have something similar called Showbox. I tried to find out how close Showbox is to Tivo in features but the salesperson there didn’t know anything. The way she explained it to me was that with Showbox I can watch any show I want any time, meaning if I feel like watching King of Queens now I can just click on King of Queens and watch it live. I think thats bullshit and she really doesn’t know what she is talking about. I got the leaflet on the Showbox from her and I was able to understand a bit more. Basically what I understood is you can pause live TV which is something the Tivo can do of course. With Showbox you could also schedule what you want it to record for you 7 days in advance but say Seinfeld is playing everyday, you have to manually tell it to record each and every episode one by one. Now this is where Tivo kicks Showbox’s ass. With Tivo I can just say record every episode of Seinfeld with one command and it will record every episode of Seinfeld from now until I tell it not to which can be a month from now, a year from now.. whenever I want. I don’t have to manually set it to record each and every episode over and over. Anyway she also said Showbox would cost me KD135 and has an 80GB hard drive inside. Tivo cost me $70 and I have a 120GB drive inside. So far Showbox doesn’t interest me but it might for those of you who don’t have a Tivo. I scanned the leaflet and you can check it out below.

Leaflet
Front Page
Second & Third Page
Fourth Page

I think you can also find more information on showbox.showtimearabia.com but I wasn’t able to connect to it because I am on my slow GPRS connection now.

Having trouble knowing which Danish brands to boycott? I don’t know why I didn’t realize this earlier but Bang & Olufsen is Danish.. I wonder if their store in Fanar is still open? Anyway I did a bit of research to see if there were other brands I liked that were Danish and I found out that my favorite brand of gum, Stimoral is Danish. I need to check and see if Sultan Center still carry them but I am guessing they aren’t. Here is a nice list of Danish products I found, I don’t know if all of these are available in Kuwait:

Food & Beverages
* Arla Foods – milk and dairy products
* Danish meat
* Carlsberg – beer and softdrinks
* Tuborg – beer and softdrinks
* Suntop – orange drink
* Puck – cheese spread
* 3 Cows – #1 feta cheese in Kuwait
* Dano – powdered milk

Danish design
* Lego – Toys
* Bang & Olufsen – Music systems and televisions
* K.I.S.S. – DVD Recorders
* Stelton – Danish design
* Jacob Jensen – Danish design
* Alfi – Danish design
* Rosendahl – Danish design
* Louis Poulsen – Lightning
* Skagen Watches – Danish watches
* Danish Furniture Online
* Piet Hein – Fritz Hansen furniture
* Arne Jacobsen – Fritz Hansen furniture

Candy
* Toms
* Galle & Jessen
* Stimorol Chewing Gum

Cigarettes
* Prince

Healthcare
* Novo Nordisk – Healthcare

Clothes, textile & Shoes
* H2O
* Jysk – Quilts, pillows, mattresses
* Hummel
* Ecco
* Jaco
* Inwear
* Matinique

Other
* Maersk Sealand – one of the largest shipping companies
* Aqua – pop group (Barbie Girl)

I just checked my email today morning and found an interesting offer by Jazeera Airways. Two return flight tickets to Beirut plus a one night stay at a 4 star hotel for only KD129. Not a bad deal and not a bad idea at all. [Link]

According to AskMen.com Haifa Wehbe got voted the 49th most desirable woman in the world. Not a bad number at all but what pissed me off is Angelina Jolie is number 3!! She should be like number 80 or something. Jessica Alba came first which is ok I guess. I didn’t check the whole list but I hope Tara Reid is in it somewhere. [Link]

In Kuwait? Order Pirated DVD’s & CD’s Online
New Look, Same Great Taste
Video: Fun at Work
Review: Band of Brothers (mini series)
Lost Brothers
Sushi Eating HOWTO
Import Papers for Importing Dog to Kuwait

I don’t know how I didn’t notice this before but I just realized something really cool. The airhead lawyer on the show Arrested Development is played by the actor Henry Winkler. He always looked familiar to me and I just realized why. Winkler played Fonzie, the “cool” guy on the old show Happy Days. Whats even cooler is I also just found out that Ron Howard who is the executive producer of the show Arrested Development and other shows and movies like 24, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, The Doors and Felicity was ALSO on the show Happy Days. I can’t believe I just found all this out now. Better late then never.

In one of the forums I usually visit somone had a post asking for everyones home theater setup. This is mine:

TV: Panasonic TX-33P100X
Receiver: Kenwood KRF-V8881D
DVD Player: Sony DVP-NS575P
Speakers: Jamo X870 for left and right. Paradigm CC370 for center. Two OEM Kenwood speakers for surround (they came with an older amp). No subwoofer (Jamo’s have 10″ woofers built in)
Universal Remote: Sony RM-AV3000
Tivo: Series 1 Philips with 120GB drive

Future plans:
– Need to upgrade rear speakers to Paradigm ADP-170
– Need to get a Definitive Technology SuperCube Subwoofer
– Need to upgrade my TV to a Sony 34″ HDTV CRT
– Need to upgrade receiver, probably with a Denon

Click here for a largeer picture of my setup

Whats your home theater setup?

Update: I just replace my Kenwood receiver with the Denon AVR-2106 and the Sony universal remote with the Harmony 880.

I just read that Steve Jobs was supposed to announce much more cooler Mac products but decided not to last minute due to supply issues with the Intel chips. The products are not the 12″ and 17″ MacBooks, they are something much more cooler. What could they be??? [Link]

Took a cab ride today in one of those old beat up Mercedes cars. In Lebanon these cabs are called “service” (pronounced serveece) and they ride up and down the streets picking up people. They pickup more then one person and you usually get off on the main road near your destination. They charge LL1000 which is like 200fils (I think like 50cents). The driver I took a ride with today turned out to speak fluent Arabic, French, English and Indian. Turned out he used to work in construction back in Saudi and moved back to Lebanon in 1993. He ran out of money and couldnt find another job so he ended up becoming a cab driver. These kind of stories are pretty comon here sadly.

Yesterday morning it was five degrees celcius where we are staying at. On my way down to sea level I saw cars coming down from higher up the mountain with snow on their roofs. Its tradition that when it first starts snowing in your area you pile up as much snow as you can on the roof of your car and drive around like that as a way of informing people down below that its snowing up in the mountains where you live.

All of Lebanon seems to have the flu. I think the sudden change from its hot enough to wear a tshirt to its cold enough to store your frozen goods on the balcony has caught many people by surprise. Nat is sick and I am not, but I think thats going to change today. I feel it coming.

I was in the supermarket with Nataly when we were passing the alcohol section and I told her that if I lived in Lebanon I would have a huge bar in my apartment and draft beer. Just as I finished my sentence I saw the most amazing thing. A mini Heineken keg!!!! Fucking rocks, 5 Liters of fucking draft beer for only KD5! ($15). I quickly got one and its now sitting in my room infront of me. I would open it and start drinking now but I am worried I would be too drunk to go out later tonight. I vote this mini keg the best invention of the decade! Now if only I can figure out how to sneak one of these into Kuwait, its fucking heavy!

I finally figured out what I want for Christmas. It was really hard to find something I wanted but after weeks of searching I found something, the GP2X.

The GP2X is a portable gaming device based on the Linux OS. No games are made for it specifically like the PSP and Gameboy but there are tons of emulators and home brew games that would run on it since its Linux based. The GP2X also plays movies but unlike the iPod Video and PSP the GP2X isn’t picky with video formats and can handle most of them including MPEG, MPEG4, DivX 3.11,4x,5x, XVID and WMV. The device uses SD memory which means I can cheaply get a 2GB card and shove tons of stuff on it.

The device uses 2 regular AA batteries which when watching movies can last up to 6 hours which is 3 times more then the PSP and double that of the iPod video. Whats cool is I can buy a bunch of rechargeable AA’s and when the battery dies just swap them with new ones.

I found the GP2X online for like $179 so its also not expensive. So, I made up my mind, I want a GP2X for Christmas.

[GP2X on Wikipedia]
[GP2X Emulation]
[GP2X Dev Wiki]

Thanks to Pearl’s post I found the Yellow Pages online website and its actually pretty cool. I already tried finding a couple of numbers and they all worked. [Link]

Or should I say “was” in Kuwait. According to a reader of my blog, Vince Vaughan was in Kuwait at the end of September and he was staying at the Radisson SAS hotel. Is there anyway of finding out when celebrities like that come to Kuwait and where they would be staying AHEAD of time???

Some people seem to think that this webpage by Tim Berners-Lee was the first webpage. [Link]