Category: Interesting

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]

This is very practical and easy to do:

This tool allows you to customize a PDF notepad. I was always unhappy with a regular piece of paper during meetings because I rarely needed to take notes – but I did have to jot down actions and due dates that I had to complete. Often loosing tasks in a sea of random notes, I had to begin using something better. I created an Excel file first, but then found that I wanted to be able to customize it. Here is a tool!

[Link]

Heh, I just found out the domains example.com, example.net and example.org “are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration.”

Heathrow Injection n. Term given to the phenomenon of sudden and very rapid horizontal expansion, particularly experienced by non-British persons, upon settling in London.

Heathrow Injection is an interesting term I just learned the definition to awhile ago and I am thinking it can easily be modified to fit Kuwait since we have the same problem here.

I was just checking out pictures taken by a regular commenter on my blog (Hudis) and I found pictures of the Kuwaiti desert but like nothing I had ever seen before. We have mountains in Kuwait? I am guessing this is the Mutlaa Ridge near the Iraqi border and it looks like an amazing place. I didn’t think the pictures were in Kuwait until I noticed a car in one of the pictures had a Kuwaiti license plate. This place looks like a cool place to rock crawl with 4×4’s. [Link]

The indoor ski slopes finally opened up in Dubai and looking at the pictures on their website makes me jealous that we don’t have anything similar here in Kuwait. Entrance price is only $35 and that includes clothes and equipment rental which I think is a pretty good deal. But, the place doesn’t look “that” big so I am curious to find out if its going to be over crowded the whole time or not. [Link]

They are opening a Ferrari theme park in UAE which will feature a racetrack, rides, and attractions, a display of Ferrari history, and even driving instructions. Its seems like a good idea but I would rather they open a 4×4 theme park here in Kuwait. The 4×4 park could have different rough and muddy trails which you could take your jeep through. I remember reading about one in Japan where you would bring your 4×4 and then pay to go around their offroad trail. [Link]

Cool, seems Beirut is the place to be although I don’t understand why with all the recent political crap going on.

CooSt Tropez? Passé. Ibiza? So over. The hottest spots for bars and clubs in Europe right now are not where you’d expect. [More]

Single-letter second-level domains are domain names in which the second-level domain consists of only one letter, such as x.org.

Such domains are rare, as on December 1, 1993, IANA explicitly reserved all single letter and single digit second-level domain names in the TLDs .com, .net, and .org.

However, the few such domains that were already assigned were not recalled, and so circumvented the restrictions that have existed since.

i.net INet Corporation
q.com West Communications
q.net Q Networks
x.com PayPal
x.org The Open Group
z.com Nissan

[Source Wikipedia]