Category: Personal

I’m really not a good writer neither am I great in speeches which is what I believe this verdict deserves. I was extremely nervous today waiting to find out the outcome as you can imagine and it was such an incredible relief to find out I won.

I’m really not sure what to say other than the fact this ruling goes to show how much freedom of speech is highly respected in Kuwait. I love living here and I love having the right to state my personal opinion on this blog. I really want to thank EVERYONE for all the support that you gave me. Seriously what you guys did was just incredible and really gave me the courage to fight this out till the end. I also want to thank my lawyer Khaled Al Shamali from The Group Law Firm for taking this case and doing an amazing job. And most importantly I want to thank the judge and the court for their ruling.

I hope no other blogger will have to go through what I did and I hope the result of this case will serve as an example that you can’t stop people from stating their personal opinions.

Thanks again everyone!

PS: If you have no idea what lawsuit I am talking about click [Here]

The weather is getting hotter and biking season will soon be over. Before it is though there is something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile now and that is ride my bicycle to work and back. Since my car is at the dealer getting serviced plus I’m trying to burn some fat before the end of the month I figured it’s the perfect time to try this. I wiped the dust off my bike this past weekend and walked to Extreme Sports at the end of my street in Salmiya to get some new tires. The service guy there was pretty helpful, ended up getting some meaner wider tires for my bike, plus some new inner tubes as well as a pump in case I get a flat. It cost me KD15 per tire, KD4 per inner tube (comes with slime inside them) and another KD17 for the air pump. Not sure if these prices are good or not since it’s my first time replacing my tires.

My bike is now ready to ride to work and I’ve basically planned the route in my head already. I live in the old Salmiya and my office is near Muthana Complex in the city. I’m going to be going out onto the Gulf Road and ride my bike on the seaside pathway from in front of Shaab Park all the way till Souk Sharq. If I remember correctly the path ends once you hit Seef Palaace. From that point I’m not sure what route I will take. There is no way I am going to ride my bike on the street and I don’t recall there being a sidewalk. So I might end up cutting across towards the Kuwait Stock Exchange and head to Fahad Al Salem street and continue on the sidewalk from there. It’s around 8KM from my house to the Kuwait Towers and I would say less than 8KM from the Kuwait Towers to Muthana so I think it should take me under an hour if I take my time.

It really sucks how we don’t have any bike paths in the city. I know the weather gets very hot in the summer but this year there were at least 6 months of nice weather. In Salmiya we have sidewalks but if it’s crowded you can’t really ride your bike on them and then you have problems with the curb (check picture above) where you have a slope on one side of the street but no slope on the other. That’s not wheel chair friendly yet alone bike friendly. Anyway the plan is to ride to work tomorrow so will post again once I actually do it.

Update: Does anyone remember the yellow siren below? I used to have one on my bike as a kid, I wonder if they still sell them in Kuwait…

After building the amazing Tamiya 502x last week I got back into the RC cars mood again. So, over the weekend I decided to get another car to build and passed by Pro Hobbies and purchased the Xray 808e. I’ve had my eye on the Xray 808 since 2009 but back then they only came in nitro versions until last year when Xray released the electric version of the same car and called it the 808e. Xray is a high-end radio controlled car company and they’re sometimes called the Rolls Royce of RC cars. As soon as I opened the box I understood why, everything looked just incredible and felt top notch. From the thick plastic bags the parts are placed in to the glossy fully colored manual and the “authenticity certificate” it comes with. Makes the whole package feel more expensive than what I paid for it.

[YouTube]

One of the main reasons I wanted the Xray 808e is because it’s a 1/8 scale car which means I will finally be able to take it to the Radio Control Car Club of Kuwait (RCCCK) off-road track near 360 Mall. It’s one of the largest tracks in the world and it would be a real shame not to take advantage of it. You can watch the video above of the track which I shot last year.

Usually when I start building these cars I zone out and ignore everything around me (including the blog) but this time I am going to take my time by dedicated only 2 or 3 hours a day to work on the car. Hopefully it will be ready sometime next month before it gets too hot. Still need to think of a color scheme, the wheels are white and the spoiler is white so not sure what color I am going to paint the body yet.

Last month I posted on 248PM about these oreo stuffed cookies I had seen online and I quickly messaged my best friend Essa from Choowy Goowy and told him he HAD to make them as well. So he made some for me, after a bit of changes namely getting the size of the cookie right he’s now gone ahead and started producing them. He’s also started making stuffed brownie cookies which I haven’t tried yet. So if you’re interested in trying out the stuffed oreo cookies or stuffed brownie cookies you can order them by calling them on 22626559 or 22620011 or 99431177.

Sorry about all these food posts but whenever I get close to my cheat day (Fridays) all I think about is food.

Last week I messed up my knee running on my treadmill and since I still wanted to do cardio I decided to walk instead. I plugged in my wireless Nike+ sensor into my sneakers, started the Nike+ app on my iPhone and started walking from the start of Salem Mubarek Street in Salmiya all the way down to Electrozan which is at the very end of it, picked up an iPod Shuffle and then walked back. I was walking at a moderately fast pace and once I got back home I ended my session on the Nike+ app and checked the results (screenshot posted above).

Now I’m not sure how accurate the Nike+ app is, I doubt it’s very accurate but it should be somewhat accurate and if it is then I burned around 600 calories walking for nearly 2 hours. I thought that was pretty cool since when I run on the treadmill at home I usually run just 30 minutes before getting bored and tired. By the end of the 30 minutes I would have burned around 200 calories if I’m lucky, most probably less than that even. Walking on the other hand I can do for much longer periods of time and without getting either tired or bored.

Since I live right on Salem Mubarek Street I’m going to start walking on my days when I don’t have gym instead of running on the treadmill. I should burn more calories that way and I prefer walking in Salmiya over running on a treadmill facing a wall. But since I’m not a fitness expert maybe if Fahad reads this post he can add more information on how accurate my Nike+ is and if walking actually burns that much calories.

After spending a week building the car and then painting it, I was finally able to take it out for a spin. It’s a race buggy and I should have taken it to the Tamiya track to test out but since I wanted to try and capture some nice shots I decided to take it to an empty desert instead. I feel guilty for doing that to the car but I was careful not to bash it too hard since I have to give the car back once I was done with the review.

I don’t have that much experience with buggies since the only electric buggy I have is the Tamiya Frog and it would be really unfair to compare the two since the Frog is actually a design from 1983 while the 502x is a current generation carbon fiber framed racing buggy. But, I have taken a ton of RC cars and trucks out to bash in the dessert before and from all of them the 502x as expected handled the best. Usually when I take the cars out into the dessert to bash they spend a lot of time flipping onto their backs or over or under steering. With the 502x the car managed to flip only once onto it’s back and that’s an incredible achievement with me since I’m a really careless and abusive driver. It also handled incredibly well turning when I wanted it to turn and gripping the dirt and loose pebbles with great east. It also took all the jumps like a champ and whenever it was in the air time seemed to stop for a second and everything went in slow motion until it hit the ground again. That’s why my brother was able to capture so many air shots, the car just floats in the air.

It was really fun building and driving the car and it’s going to be really tough to give it back. But, last night I found out I won the 501x in the My Toy weekly draw so maybe they’ll let me keep the 502x instead. If you’re interested in Tamiya’s, the dealer is called My Toy and they’re located in Tilal Complex on top of In Living Color. It’s a huge store which I’ve posted about before [Here]. You could also participate in their weekly draw to win a 501x by visiting their Facebook group [Here]

The pictures above were taken by my brother but were post processed by myself. To see my brothers post processed photos click [Here]

A couple of days back the blog was listed with 9 others on CNN’s “Top ten must read blogs in the Middle East“. Automatically when that happened I went into red alert mode, I made sure the blogs cache plugins were up and running and I double checked my servers bandwidth and memory usage to make sure nothing was out of the ordinary so that once this large wave of visitors arrive, the blog wouldn’t crash and I wouldn’t lose or disappoint any potential new visitors. Imagine opening a restaurant and having enough food to serve 10 people but then 100 show up, I didn’t want that to happen to me. I was of course expecting it to be a temporary rush, my 15 seconds of fame before the majority of the new visitors disappear forever. So how much traffic came from that article?

I’m not really sure what to think about this. This was an article on CNN and so my expectations were high of course and I was predicting around 5,000 visitors to come in and easily 10,000+. But somehow I overshot my estimates by a considerable amount as you can see. I have a few theories on why this must be the case:

– Maybe the majority of their readers only read their main news and not other none news related articles
– Maybe their readers aren’t used to clicking links in their articles and so never thought about clicking any of the blog links mentioned
– Maybe no one was interested in finding out more about my blog
– Maybe majority of the people who read the article already knew my blog and didn’t see a reason to click it
– The article went up at the start of the weekend which is when based on my blogs stats the daily readership dwindles down considerably
– Maybe the article wasn’t publicized enough on CNN and so not many people ended up reading it
– Or maybe their readership base are serious businessmen or older people who don’t think blogs are interesting enough or even newsworthy

Those of course are just my theories and I’m sure CNN themselves have a better idea of who reads what on their site and why this article might not have transitioned into a large quantity of clicks. But this got me thinking… How much traffic did the Benihana lawsuit really send my way? I went digging for the numbers and here are the top referrers:

– Slashdot.org 4,957
– BoingBoing.net 757
– electrony.net 469
– fakeplasticsouks.blogspot.com 437
– AmericanBlog.com 303
– FastCompany.com 285
– Zagat.com 184
– eConsultancy.com 166
– techania.com 171
– LAWeekly.com 139
– TheNextWeb.com 127

By the looks of it that’s not a lot but at the peak of interest and because of the fact that it was picked up by a ton of bloggers and news sites (here is the full list) it was enough to bring in around 20,000 visitors in a single day which is slightly less than double what I usually get. On January 31st when the story first started picking up my readership for that day increased to 16,748 visitors followed by an increase to 19,610 on February 1st until going back down to 15,672 on February 2nd and then things went back to normal on February 3rd when it went back to 12,030 which is what the blog usually gets per day.

In comparison, on March 29th the rumor of Jackie Chan being dead started spreading again and a search for Jackie Chan is dead on that day resulted in my blog being one of the first results on Google so I got a sudden influx of over 10,000 visitors coming in to check out my old post on that rumor. That sudden surge actually brought down the blog a few times during that day which resulted in me permanently removing some memory intensive plugin as well as having the Super Cache plugin permanently on so that in the future no matter what happens the site can handle it.

Anyway I’ve never shared detailed numbers like this on the blog before so hopefully you found the above interesting, it’s just a small behind the scenes glimpse.

I finished building the Tamiya 502x earlier today and managed to finished cutting up the body, masking it and then painting it in fluorescent pink. The color came out cooler than I was expecting, I painted the rear wing black and the wheels as well which helped give the car an aggressive look. Going to take it out tomorrow and have my brother snap some pictures while I send it flying off some jumps. Should be fun.

Note: The Tamiya dealer is called My Toy and they’re located in Tilal Complex on top of In Living Color. Here is a link to their website [Link]

I always try to make up some reason to get a new pair of headphones like for example I have ones I use on flights that are under 3 hours and ones I use for flights that are longer than 3 hours. I have headphones I use when I listen to electronic music while another pair I use only to listen to songs ripped at a 320kbps or higher. If I didn’t make up all these reasons and excuses I would probably end up with just one pair of headphone and I would hate that.

But, if for some odd reason there was a law that said every man can only one pair of headphone, then the pair I would want to own are the Sennheisers PX100-II. I purchased the original PX100’s back in 2005 and I posted a review of them here on the blog giving them a 4.5 out of 5. Those headphones became my office headphones since they were easy to take off and put on, they didn’t isolate me completely from my surroundings and they were cheap enough to leave lying around on my desk and not worry about them disappearing, breaking or having tea spilled on them. Around 2 months back the foam ear covers on my PX100 got ripped and I started noticing a rattling sound in the right ear so I decided it was time to get the newer PX100-II as a replacement.

As much as I loved my original PX100 it took me around 10 seconds to literally trash them and call them junk right after unboxing the PX100-II. The new versions are so unbelievably well made! They feel incredibly sturdy and they’re so beautifully designed. I can’t stop being amazed at how perfect these headphones look and feel. Sounds wise it’s hard to judge since although they do sound like an improvement over my older headphones (specially the bass which sounds a lot tighter) but my old headphones were falling apart so it wouldn’t be a fair comparison. Other than the new looks and build quality another nice feature is that there is only one wire coming out of the headphones instead of two (one form every ear). This makes things a lot tidier and easier to fold and pack away.

The final score? This is getting a 5 out of 5 easily. There really isn’t anything to complain about they’re perfect. Although the older PX100 headphones cost me $45 and these new ones cost around $70, I had previously stated in the old review that I would willing to pay double the amount for the PX100. Well the double of $45 is $90 and the newer and better PX100-II cost $70 so it’s still a good deal.

I ordered my headphones from Amazon but that’s because I couldn’t find them in Kuwait. That is until I passed by Virgin at Marina Mall last week and spotted them selling for around KD20. I’ve also purchased another pair of Sennheisers for running (the 680i) and will post about those once I spend some good time with them.

[YouTube]

965malls uploaded the video above which he shot of some teenagers fighting underneath his building. What makes his video special is the fact a car ends up running those kids over. According to him no one got hurt as a result.

The teenagers fighting bit I can easily relate to since my neighborhood in Salmiya has turned into the ghetto (plus a garbage dump) due to the fact I have a billiard place in the building next door. Fights amongst teenagers and young adults are practically a daily occurrence and women getting harassed by them has also become the norm.

Come to think of it I don’t know why I don’t use my blog to help improve my area by highlighting problems like I previously did [Here]. I’ve recently been considering moving out of my neighborhood because of all the garbage and fights but why should I move? I’ve been on this street for 30 years now and I shouldn’t have to move because the garbage collecting company isn’t collecting the garbage or the fact that there are no longer any street cleaners as well picking up garbage or that the cops don’t care about any of the violations that are happening on the street. I’ve mentioned this before but there is actually a brothel in the building next door and I have to say I’m glad they’re there since they’ve actually cleaned up a bit of the area around their building. Things are so bad I was actually considering hiring my own street cleaner just to take care of the area around my building!

As you already know by now I am currently being sued by the Las Palmas Restaurant Company who own Benihana and Subway in Kuwait. They’re suing me over my review which you can read [Here] in case you missed it. Today was the second hearing and this is just an update of what happened.

During the first hearing Benihana submitted documents to back up their claim and my lawyer had requested time to review the printouts and the judge gave us one month. The documents submitted by Benihana were basically print outs of my Benihana review, my Benihana media round up post and a print out of my Facebook page.. actually not my page but what you see when you search for my name.

Today my lawyer presented documents to prove that when I had posted my review I didn’t have any ill intent towards Benihana or Las Palmas Restaurant Company and that my post was based on my experience which happened to be a negative one. The documents my lawyer submitted were print outs of previous posts in which I had spoken positive things about Benihana as well as posts in which I had spoken positive things about two other brands owned by Las Palmas which are Subway and Charley’s Grilled Subs. Their lawyers then requested from the judge time to review the documents but the judge refused and instead set a third court date for April 26th in which a decision will be made on this case.

I’m crossing my fingers…

Back in January I signed up to the Orbit ShowTime service and I although the signup process was very smooth I was worried their customer service would be problematic since when I had Showtime back in 2005 any issue I had they would tell me to pass by their main branch in Dajeej which was unpractical and annoying.

Well I ran into a problem recently with my Showbox receiver, it kept rebooting randomly every 5 minutes or so which was very annoying. I reset all the settings, upgraded to the latest software did whatever I could to try to get it fixed myself and nothing worked. I finally gave up and decided to give OSN a call, I was expecting them to tell me to take the receiver to their workshop in Dajeej which is why I tried to fix things myself but instead I was told a technician would come over on Monday (that was on Saturday). Sunday (the following day) I get a call from the technician telling me if I was free that day he could pass by. I was like no problem but did they tell you what my problem was? He was like you aren’t getting a signal. I was like no my Showbox keeps rebooting. He told me no problem he would replace it for me and a few hours later he did come over and swap my receiver with a new one.

Everything is working perfectly now and I didn’t even have to drive out to Dajeej to get my problem solved!

I’m still working out three times a week at Core Fitness, it’s been over a year now and since summer is around the corner the only way to look ripped at the beach and showoff my abs is to shed some body fat. At my best my body fat percentage was 14% but that was before the Benihana lawsuit and since then I think I’ve gone back up to 15 or 16%. My abs are currently hidden behind a layer of fat and to get them to show I need to be under 12% so I’ve put that as a target to hit by the end of this month. I don’t know if that’s possible or not but I asked Fahad for help and he’s updated my diet to help me reach my goal.

I’ve actually been on a diet for over a year now and for the past 6 months and I’ve only been eating grilled food for lunch and dinner with Friday being an eat whatever I want day. It was hard enough but this month it’s going to be even harder. I am no longer allowed to eat taouk for example or have tabbouleh or even munch down on olives. Instead for lunch and dinner it’s now the following:

Pick 1 Carb Source:
– 1-cup of White Rice
– 1 Baked Sweet Potato (no white potatoes)

Pick 1 Protein Source:
– 10 oz Chicken Breasts (not Shish Tawook)
– 10 oz Lean grilled or raw fish (hammour, white fish, tuna, squid, shrimp, calamari)

Salad
Bowl of greens (no tabbouleh, or any dressing… just raw greens!)

Sauces Allowed
Tabasco, Red Rooster or Yellow Mustard

This month is going to be horrible. I don’t think I’m even going to cheat on Fridays since after suffering the whole week I don’t think I want to ruin it with a big fat juicy burger or a mouth watering chocolate dessert! Will see if I can hit my target or not and post another update at the end of the month.

Update: Found a lunch meal that fit into my new diet, it’s the “Only Salmon” platter from Sakura Express. According to Fahad “The meal’s loaded with omega-3 and fish oil (which are both great).”

If you’re a long time reader you probably know that there is cookie flavor at Choowy Goowy called Mark&Nat. We had been invited by Choowy Goowy back in 2006 to create our own cookie and after experimenting with a bunch of different variations and trying them all out we ended up with Oreo cookies which got labeled Mark&Nat.

So last night I was browsing the web when I suddenly spot the most amazing thing ever… an oreo stuffed chocolate chip cookie. It was simply a full oreo shoved inside a chocolate chip cookie, I quickly posted it on 248PM and then sent a BBM to my buddy Essa of Choowy Goowy and I was like dude you got to take an oreo cookie and shove it inside a regular chocolate chip cookie and send me some. I then made sure I didn’t eat any carbs all day today and once I got back home from my gym I found a bunch of oreo stuffed cookies waiting for me. I had 3 cookies and I think they were REALLY good. I am now trying to convince him to actually produce them and sell them as the new and improved Mark&Nat oreo cookies. So if you’re reading this Essa, please sell these cookies!

I think I’ve said this before but in case I didn’t here it is… I hate 3D movies. I think 3D is just a gimmick, it doesn’t add anything to a movie and I find it ridiculous that we need to wear glasses to watch a movie. With that said when I heard Nintendo were releasing a 3D portable I thought that was just stupid. Now that I’ve actually spent time with the 3DS I can back that statement up.

Nintendo have managed to get 3D on the DS without the need for 3D glasses. The screen manages to display a 3D image but it only works at a certain distance and at a certain angle. Any position other than the perfect one will result in a blurry image. It’s also very difficult to get a perfect position since it’s a handheld and you’re going to be pressing buttons which moves the DS in your hands and out of the perfect viewing position. I was playing Rayman 3D which is a crappy game but since it has a 3D environment it was a good game to test out the 3D effect. Sadly, even when the 3DS is in the perfect position the 3D effect isn’t really that 3D. Nothing jumps out of the screen and it really wasn’t comfortable playing since I was seeing doubles the whole time. I kept fidgeting with the 3DS to get it into the perfect position and after awhile I realized I spent more time focusing on trying to get the 3DS in a perfect viewing position then I spent focusing on the game. It also messes up your sight, I am seeing double right now as I am typing this post because I was playing with the 3DS before I started typing here.

I personally think the 3DS’s 3D is going to flop in the same way the Nintendo Virtual Boy did. I can’t imagine anyone playing on the 3DS without getting a headache or double vision. Now I’m looking forward for Sony’s followup to the PSP, hopefully they won’t mess things up as well.

My Nintendo 3DS was a loaner from X-cite Electronics and if you’re interested in one they’re selling them for KD110. They have them in two colors, Aqua which is the one pictured above and regular black. They also have a few games now for sale as well with more coming in at the end of the week.