Category: Personal

Posted by Fahad AlYehya | Core Fitness – Kuwait

Your world rocked in 3, 2, 1….

And we’re back with part 2 of my original post (Herro Prease!) that seemed to cause more racial and homophobic controversy than health and fitness orientation and guidance.

Taste Buds
I’m often criticized for my diminishing taste buds. When on a strict diet, the food consumed tends to taste awful and total caloric intake is extremely low. I’m eating 6-8 small portions per day of gooky old-fashioned oatmeal, funky-smelling boiled eggs, cold and barely chewable chicken breasts, tasteless and dry brown rice, and a lightly sweetened protein shake that tries its best to taste like a Johnny Rockets milkshake, but is actually one notch above dirt, and dirt can taste like ice cream when dieting.

So Masta of da Universe, if taste bud BAD, how can we trust you, haaaa!?
Have you ever sat next to a person who has been dieting more than 3 weeks? He/she will stare at you eating that burger and those fries. Moreover, they’ll tell you how to lightly dip your food in ketchup. What’s even more annoying, they’ll screw you over for not eating your entire meal; I should know, since I’m that annoying person. Lastly, I base the meals I eat on the ingredients used and how I feel after consumption. Through trial and error, I’ve discovered how long it takes my body to clean itself out if I just ate a fatty and carby meal.

Breakfass!
I am not a morning person at all. I hate the sun and anything associated with looking at the sun. I’ll even wear sun-glasses indoors in the morning, and I could care less if it made me look douchey. (If anyone has any job offerings somewhere cold and dark, please let me know.) In the meantime, I can’t deny the sensation of breakfast food. Once in a while, I’d wake up early on weekends and just have this strong urge to ditch my gooky oatmeal and boiled eggs for some tasty restaurant-served breakfast food. Before I begin, you need to take these points into consideration:

• Upon waking from 8-10 hours of sleep, our bodies are deprived of nutrients and water.
• Our inner functions tend to work optimally in the A.M., providing a challenge to any calorie intake; you can actually get away with a large thick pizza for breakfast and it’ll have a hard time storing itself as fat (assuming your healthy and fit).
• Eating breakfast at a maximum of 1 hour after waking up will provide your metabolism with a boost from heaven. The earlier you eat breakfast, the better.
• Eating breakfast more than 90 minutes after waking up will skyrocket your chances of obesity by 150%!

If I was forced to keep just one app on my iPad it would have to be Zinio. Zinio has made me owning an iPad logical. I’ve already posted previously about the fact that I didn’t know what exactly I would use the iPad for but with Zinio its become very clear… magazines. I love magazines and I hate books (short stories are fine). Maybe if I was stuck on an Island with just a library I would take up reading but with my already hectic life I need to make the best of my time and books just take too much of it. It’s the same reason I don’t watch many movies, for the same amount of time it takes me to watch 1 movie I could watch 4 episodes from my favorite TV show. The problem we have in Kuwait is magazines are expensive costing KD3 and up per issue every month. In the US you could subscribe to a full year for the same price we pay for just a single issue here. I’ve tried subscribing to US magazines and having them shipped with Aramex but magazines can be heavy and in the end I was paying 10$ a year to subscribe to 12 issues of a magazine and then paying KD3 or KD5.500 to ship a single issue to Kuwait.

With Zinio I no longer have that problem. Zinio originally was a website which allowed you to subscribe to digital versions of magazines so you could view them on your computer. Now they’ve created an iPad app which allows you to view the magazines on your iPad. The magazines on the iPad look like the print version except it has a few advantages. For example I was flipping through an article in Car & Driver about a car and on one of the pages I noticed an icon, when I clicked the icon it opened up a gallery full of pictures of the car.. ones that weren’t available in the print version. Other nifty features is the ability to open the contents page and then click on the headline of the article you want to go to or view all the spreads as thumbnails and then select the spread you want to see. There was a Honda ad in the magazine with a button click here for a test drive, when I clicked the button it played a video commercial of the ad (which was actually a good one). You can also view the magazine as a spread (two pages side by side) or if you hold the iPad vertically you can view the magazine page by page. You can zoom into the page to enlarge the copy by other double tapping a location or by pinching the screen. Another cool feature is the fact that you can view a purely text version of the magazine in case you’re having issues for some reason reading the regular print version. Articles in the text format can also be emailed to friends or to yourself to print out and you can even control the font size.

When you run the app you have three main sections, featured articles, your library and shop. Featured articles is basically samples of articles from some of the popular magazines which you could read for free. Your Library is where all your magazine issues are stored. You can view your magazines either by titles or by date. It’s very organized and easy to navigate. Finally the shop section is where you can flip through the magazines available to subscribe to and order them. Once you download a magazine you don’t need Internet access to view them. Magazine sizes vary from around 20MB to 40MB per issue. The prices for most US magazines like Car & Driver, Maxim, Cosmopolitan etc.. are around $10 to $15 for a yearly subscription (similar to their print counterparts) while some magazines that are European imports cost a lot more. You can use your Kuwaiti credit card without any problems.

The Zinio app is free and available in the App Store (on both the iPhone and iPad). Here is a link to the Zinio website where you can check all the magazines they have available with their prices. [Link]

Has anyone stayed at Nu Hotel or any other hotel in Brooklyn? I’m looking to spend max $200 a night on a room in New York and all the good places in Manhattan are like $300 and up. How practical is it staying in Brooklyn and taking the subway to Manhattan every day?

Update: How about W Hotel in Hoboken New Jeresey?

Update2: After hours and hours of research and reading I ended up booking at Nu Hotel. I’m going to be staying in NY for 12 days and needed a decently sized room and most of the ones in and around Times Square were pretty tiny. I don’t mind staying in tiny rooms (I love EasyHotel Paddington) but I could never stay in one for 12 days. Subway station is 5 minutes from the hotel and I can get to times square in 20 minutes. Takes me as long to get to work every morning so its no biggie.

I felt like breaking my no carbs in the evening diet and decided to pass by with Nat to Johnny Rockets near Sultan Center for dinner. For some reason I felt like sitting at the bar and now I am not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

I was watching the cook prepare a bunch of burgers and noticed he put a piece of lettuce that had something dark on it. Since he didn’t react so I figured it was maybe just part of the lettuce texture or something and I ignored it. A few minutes pass and the cook starts placing the beef patties on the buns. He turns away and goes back to the grill and that’s when I notice something moving on the bottom bun of one of the burgers. At first I thought it was just my imagination and maybe it was a piece of the patty that fell off or something but then the cook came back with the top buns and put them on the burgers in front of him and that black thing I saw was now crawling on the top bun! It was a fucking worm! I am sitting there in shock cuz there was a fucking worm crawling on the bun! Then the cook starts wrapping the burger to place on a plate. I tell the waitress who was standing behind the bar that there was a fucking worm on the burger. She’s like what? I am like there is a worm on the burger and I point towards the burger. She looks and spots it and gives out a little shriek. The cook asks her whats wrong and she tells him about the worm. He quickly takes the burger and throws it away. I was like no thanks I’m leaving. I put 500 fils on the bar which was the cost of the bottle of water I had ordered and got up to leave. Two guys were sitting on the bar near by asked me what happened, I told him there was a worm on one of their burgers and I walked out.

This is extremely depressing. I spent the next hour wondering why I decided to break my diet tonight and why I decided to sit at the bar. Why did I have to see this? Why couldn’t I have eaten healthy tonight? Now I am never going back to Johnny Rockets again. In fact I am never going to have any kind of salad or vegetable anywhere outside my house. From now on I am going to order all my burgers without vegetables and I am not going to have any salad with my meals (maybe just at Le Notre since I pick my own salad at the bar). This is depressing! Where will I go from now on for a quick burger???

Who would have thought having a cast would be a complicated thing when traveling. I’ve been in Beirut for a couple of days now and I am getting back today but for some reason security at the Lebanese airport is being very anal about my cast. Kuwait airport didn’t even bring it up as a problem but here I’m being treated like I am trying to smuggle a machete or surface to air missiles in my cast.

I get to the airport at 6:30am still sleepy and hungover when the first security screening stop me from going through. They’re like wheres your paper? I was like what paper? They’re like for your hand. I was like wtf? They then spent 15 minutes fondling my arm and passing it in and out of the metal detector before letting me through. Then I found out my flight got rescheduled till the afternoon so I left.

Fast forward to around 3:30pm and I get back to the airport and pass through the same security checkpoint and they stopped me again. This time I got bounced from one person to another each asking me if I have a paper for my cast. I was like what paper where do I get it from? He’s like from where you got the cast. I was like I got my cast done in Kuwait you want me to go get a paper and come back?? I don’t think they liked my sarcasm because they then wanted me to remove the cast so they could check if I had hidden anything. I told them I couldn’t remove it and wouldn’t remove it and in the end had to get my arm fondled for 15 minutes again and waved through the metal detector a few times. What a mess, glad I just had my hand in a cast and not my ass or something.

Today I got a phone call from a friend telling me my tires arrived from the States. I went picked them up and then headed over to Michelin on Canada Dry street to get them installed. Michelin are also the dealers of BFGoodrich and the guys there are pretty cool so I figured would have them install the tires for me. The result? They look hardcore!

I ordered my tires from Gavin at TireRack.com, I had previously ordered my Z4 wheels from him. This time I ordered 5 BFGoodrich M/T KM2’s. I had asked the local dealer if they could order it for me but turns out they’re not authorized to sell mud-terrain tires for some reason.

Anyway the tires look great, I love them and I’m glad I went for mud-terrain and not all-terrain tires. Next thing I need to do is black out the silver parts on the FJ (already swapped the silver door handle for black ones).

So far my set up is as follows for those of you who have FJ’s and want a similar setup:

Old Man Emu Full Suspension
2x OME-884 Front Coils
2x 2″ ToyTec Lifts Super Flex Rear Coil Springs
2x 90000 OME Front Nitrocharger sport shocks
2x 60020 OME Rear Nitrocharger sport shocks

Tires
Kind: BFGoodrich Mud-Terrain T/A KM2
Size: 285/75 R16

I ordered the lift kit from ToyTec
I ordered the tires from [email protected]

Thanks Troy for helping me out with all the shipping!

Update: I forgot to add something very important. You can get an OME lift from the local dealer in Kuwait and you can pick up some incredibly good BFG All-Terrain tires from the local dealer as well. Their prices are really good, OME is slightly more expensive than the US prices, the dealer is located in Shuwaikh at the corner of the turn that takes you to Ace Hardware. It’s the ARB dealer. For tires, BFG in Kuwait have the exact same prices as the ones in the States. They are located on Canada Dry right after McDonalds, the BFG dealer is the Michelin dealer. The only reason I got my stuff from the US is because I was looking for very specific items which weren’t available locally.

I use my In Focus posts to highlight some great businesses here in Kuwait and today’s post is no different. As I mentioned previously, I’m lifting my FJ Cruiser and installing large tires just like I did with my Wrangler. The previous place I had installed my Wranglers lift had shut down so I asked a friend from the FJ Club for a recommendation and he pointed me towards ORP.

ORP is short for Off Road Performance and that’s exactly what they specialize in. If you’ve got a 4×4 and want to install a heavy duty bumper, or get a suspension lift, larger tires and wheels, maybe a light bar etc.. then they’re the place to go. Personally I would love to install everything myself and if I had my own little house with an indoor garage I would attempt to do that but since I don’t, I have to get stuff installed at specialized places which I usually don’t like doing. With ORP I felt comfortable getting my lift installed there because the guys are 4×4 affectionados. I met two guys, both Kuwaitis. Yousef is the one I first spoke to over the phone while Saud I didn’t communicate much with since he was always busy working on a car. They’re both passionate about what they do and to me that’s extremely important.

First time I passed by ORP was to check out the location and see how much they would charge for my suspension lift install. Then I just set up an appointment, dropped my FJ in late at night and picked it up again the next evening. I needed to get the FJ aligned and they recommended I take it to a guy called John at Auto1 on Canada Dry street who also turned out to be really great. So overall I had a very good experience and their prices are very competitive. Now I have to go back and buy a shorter antenna since with the lift kit installed my FJ’s antenna is hitting every pipe in my underground parking. I haven’t even installed my large tires yet so I am starting to worry my FJ is going to be too big to take underground. Hopefully I should be ok.

If you need anything for your 4×4 I highly recommend them. They’re very easy to find in Shuwaikh. If you’re on Canada Dry street with McDonalds on your right keep going straight past the bridge and then do a u-turn at the round-about so you’re heading the same way you came from, then take your first right and drive maybe 100 or 200 meters and you will find them on your left. (see map above). Their website address is www.orp.com.kw and you could also call Yousef on 99422254.

An update for the 2:48AM iPhone App is now available in the app store. In this version I added the Bazaar Magazine category to the app so now you can read the magazine on your iPhone. Bazaar have also added a full RSS feed to their site so you can now add them to your feeds. I think I like the direction this app is going where I’m trying to get a variety of local entertainment in one app. If you have a suggestion that would fit leave a comment below. Next update will be for the Kuwait Blogs app. [Link]

A few weeks back a good friend of mine in Lebanon told me he wanted to start a Lebanese blog. I thought that was something I would be interested to be part of so I decided to work with him on it. First thing we had to do was come up with a name. We went through a few names and for awhile we were going with zouzou ebba (you’d get it only if you’re Lebanese) before finally settling on Blog Baladi.

There are a total of 5 writers on the blog (including me) with that list mostly likely to grow in the near future. The majority of the posts will be related to Lebanon in the same way 2:48AM is related to Kuwait. So if you’re in Lebanon or a Lebanese living outside of Lebanon, make sure you check out and bookmark Blog Baladi. [Link]

Nat was about to leave to the gym when she decided to take little dyski (the dog) for his walk. I sat down in front if the TV and loaded up The Rainmaker to watch. Five minutes later Geo (my other dog) starts barking and someone is banging crazily on my door. I run down and open the door to see my neighbor yelling the dog the dog and pointing towards the lift. I closed the door and ran to the lift and noticed the elevator door slightly open and the dog glued to the door.

I’ve scaringly visualized a scene like that before in my head and it was horrifying just thinking about it, but now, it was happening for real. Turns out Nat got into the elevator with the dog and then just as she was pressing close the dog ran out and the lift closed and started going down. She had a retractable leash (pictured above) which she let go of just as the door was closing. The leash handle got jammed between the doors and when the lift started going down it pulled the little dog which was outside the door. The leash handle was stuck in the lift near the top of the door and the dog was getting squashed outside still tied to the lift which was around a full floor below and trying to take the dog down with it. Then somehow the lift stopped.

Nat didn’t have her phone with her and the dog was screaming in pain and crying. She was yelling and banging on the lift door for help but no one was coming. She tried to open the door and push the leash out but she couldn’t do it, the door wouldn’t budge. Luckily a neighbor on my floor was going to use the lift when he heard the dog and noticed him getting squashed.

Thats when he decided to call me. I came running towards the dog in my socks and slipped and hit the floor hard. From the immense pressure on his chest the dog pissed on himself while he was getting squashed and I didn’t notice until I slipped. I got up quickly as a second neighbor arrived, they tried to pull the doors apart while I tried to squeeze my hand in between so I could try and pull the leash up or at least disconnect it from the dogs harness. I couldn’t do it. The leash wouldn’t budge and because it was pulled extremely tight I couldn’t even unhitch it from the harness. I quickly decided to try and cut the harness off the dog which wasn’t making a sound anymore and looked like it could barely breath. I ran back into the house and into the kitchen and came back with two sharp knives and a scissor. I tried to cut the harness but it was squeezing the dog so tightly I could barely shove the scissor between his body and the harness to cut it. At that point one of the neighbors went to get the building caretaker. Nat was still stuck in the lift below yelling wanting to know where the dog was and if it was still alive. It was just too crazy, the whole time I was concentrating on trying to cut the leash and thinking I wasn’t going to let this dog die like this. I managed to cut two straps from the leash but had one more which was extremely tight and I just couldn’t get the scissors in. I thought about sticking my hand through the lift door and try to cut the main line but the gap was too tiny and I barely managed to squeeze my hand through the first time and I wasn’t going to risk dropping the scissor which was the dogs only chance of getting freed. I don’t know how long all of this took, it felt like a few seconds but it must have been a few minutes. I just kept trying to cut the last strap off to free the dog when suddenly the leash loosened up, the door opened slightly and I managed to pull the dog towards me and unhitch the leash which fell down the elevator shaft. The lift came up and I could see Nat inside. With the help of the neighbors we pulled the door open. Nat ran out towards the dog which looked like it was in shock but other than that fine. The neighbors had gotten the building caretaker to force the lift up which ended up saving the dogs life.

What a horrifying experience, just really fucked up. We took the dog to the vet right away and they checked him and didn’t find anything wrong. This dog seriously has gone through hell this past 3 weeks. First he gets lost, then Animal Friends rescue him, a few days later there is the big fire at Animal Friends which he luckily survives, he gets adopted by us, he then get neutered and then a week later nearly gets squashed to death!

I’m sitting typing this post with one hand by the way. It seems when I first slipped and fell I landed on my wrist in the same place I had injured it a few years ago when I fell off my motorbike. I have a cast on and need to go back on Monday for another check up. I am very pissed since it means I can’t work out for at least 2-4 weeks. I sooo did not need this right now, I hate wearing casts and I NEED to go to the gym! Its depressing! On the bright side the dog is fine and although Nats a bit shaken up and traumatized by the whole thing shes doing ok. I am glad I’ve got some great neighbors, not sure what would have happened if they hadn’t spotted the dog and called for help. What a day…

Now that the initial hype of the iPad has died down a bit I’ve been trying to figure out where and how I would use the iPad and I haven’t really come up with an answer. The iPad works with WiFi meaning for me I can only use it at home or at work. I don’t go and hangout at coffee shops so it wouldn’t matter if I can get WiFi elsewhere.

At the office I barely have time to scratch my head and I’m sitting in front of a pretty 15″ MacBook Pro so the iPad wouldn’t serve a purpose there. I also don’t want to carry the iPad along with my Blackberry and iPhone to work everyday.

At home I’ve got access to three computers, my MacBook, my G5 PowerMac and my MSI Wind (also running OS X). Where would I fit the iPad? The minute I get home from work I get on my MacBook and start work on my blog until I’m tired and go to sleep.

The only place I thought the iPad fit nicely was in bed. Its lighter than a laptop, easier to hold and felt cozier in bed. But again what would I use it for? By the time I get to bed I would have already spent around 15 hours of my day online on a computer so what reason would I have to get on my iPad at the end of that?

What about traveling? I continue to blog when I travel and so I would need a laptop with me. An iPad wouldn’t work for me, I need an Ethernet port for hotels that don’t have wifi, I need a USB port to connect my camera to and I need Photoshop to be able to resize, retouch and compress images so I could post them. I can’t trust the iPad for all of that, its like trying to go off-roading in a Corolla. For in-flight entertainment I’ve got my amazing Archos 7 which has a 160GB hard drive and can play practically any video format you throw at it. It also has an amazing battery life that lasts over 10 hours AND I can get an extra battery for extra long trips. So really the iPad doesn’t fit in my travel plans as well. Even if I wanted to travel light I could always take my tiny MSI Wind.

So will I get an iPad? Yeah of course, even though I don’t have a use for one its still an incredible need to have device and I need to have everything thats this cool. I’m sure as the iPad matures and more people develop applications for it I’ll find a use for it in my life.

Last week I ordered a lift kit for my FJ from Toytec Lifts. I’m planning to install a 3″ lift along with larger tires. So yesterday I went to get a set of tires but I couldn’t find any mud-terrain ones in the size I wanted. I checked Hankook, BF Goodrich, Maxxis and Goodyear. BFG actually were the most helpful, they told me they were getting some All-Terrain KO’s soon in the size I wanted but no plans on getting the mud-terrain KM2’s which I want. So now I am stuck with no idea what to do. I contacted Tirerack.com and they quoted me KD110 to ship 5 tires to Kuwait which isn’t too bad considering how heavy they are. But still, thats around KD22 extra per tire which I would rather not pay.

I’m now thinking maybe there is some small off-road shop in Kuwait that might carry BF Goodrich tires, does anyone know of any? Also does anyone by any chance know who the dealer in Bahrain is? I tried googling but didn’t find anything. Maybe I could drive to Bahrain to pick up the tires myself…

I finally got my veneers installed a couple of days ago at Bayan Dental and my teeth look really great. I also just realized that I used to be a bit self conscious before about my teeth without really knowing it. I only found out now because when I smile or laugh I’m now much more comfortable doing so than I used to be which is great since I spend most of my time smiling or laughing (happy happy joy joy).

I honestly couldn’t imagine getting my veneers done any other place in Kuwait and I’m really glad my dentist (Dr Samer Khaddour) was the one who installed them for me. So if you’re looking for a good dental clinic I highly recommend Bayan Dental. Both me and Nat have been going to their Salmiya branch for over 5 years now and we’ve never had anything to complain about. Here is a link to their website [Link]

It took a lot of my time but I finally finished my very own iPhone app. I actually launched it last week on my twitter page but I didn’t officially announce it since I wanted to get some feedback and fix any bugs that I might have missed first. Good thing I did since I spotted a silly bug the first day it got released and quickly released a version 1.1 update a couple of days later. Now the version has gone up to 1.2 and I’ve been able to introduce a few nifty features which I felt helped round off the app and make it launch worthy.

Originally when I went about creating the app I didn’t know what the use would be. Already the blog was very viewable on the iPhone because of a plug-in I had installed that formatted the site to work perfectly on the iPhone so if my app did the same thing it would be useless. I kept thinking about what else I could do and bit by bit I started adding stuff to it that made it more useful. Here are the things you can currently do with my iPhone app:

– Check my latest posts
– Check the latest comments on my blog
– Check the latest posts in the forum
– Check my twitter
– Check my YouTube channel
– Check latest posts on Safat
– Check latest Kuwait news from Arab Times
– Check the weather via the Kuwait Meteorological Center (contains more details than the default iPhone weather app)
and my favorite…
– Get the latest traffic updates via #q8traffic on Twitter

These are just the features I have currently but hopefully will be adding more stuff down the line. If you want to download the iPhone app search for 248AM in the app store or click the following [Link]

I am leaving to Beirut for a few days and will be back early next week. While there I will be carelessly indulging in an unlimited supply of Cadbury Chocolate Milk while having some of the best Nutella and banana crepes. Posting will continue as normal while I am there.