Category: Personal

Last month while coming back from London my favorite pair of traveling earphones, my Shure E2’s stopped working properly. They lasted me for three years and I guess it was time I got a new pair. Following that trip I tried flying with another pair of headphones but they just weren’t the same. My AKG 81’s were too big and bulky while my PX100’s barely isolate any sound. I needed to get another pair of in-earphones and after a lot of research I decided to go with the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 5 Pro (really long name).

Why and what are in-earphones?
Unlike the regular earphones that come with the iPod, in-earphones actually go into your ear canal, they don’t just sit on the outside. Some people find it strange and uncomfortable having something placed inside the ear but I never had that problem. If you want to know how they feel just take two fingers and place one in each ear. First thing you will notice is how they isolate sound and thats one of my favorite things about in-earphones. It makes them perfect for traveling since they block out the plane engine noise and anything else inside the plane. With music playing loudly you could have someone standing in front of you and screaming at the top of their lungs and you wouldn’t hear them.

The reason I went with the Super.fi’s and not another model is mostly because of the price to performance ratio. I didn’t want to pay over $200 for my earphones and I didn’t want something under $100. In my price range the Super.fi’s had the best performance according to numerous reviews online. In fact it sometimes even outperformed more expensive models.

USWS delivered my Super.fi’s two days ago and the first thing I noticed when I took them out of the box were how much lighter and smaller they were compared to my older Shures. When I put them on I also noticed they fit a lot better into my ear compared to the Shures and since they were lighter after a few minutes it felt like they weren’t there. I was really impressed at the build quality and the snug fit and I still hadn’t experimented with the other rubber sleeve sizes included in the pack or my usual favorite foam ones. Sound wise I also noticed a big difference. The Super.fi’s ran louder than my Shures at the same volume and they also sounded a lot more clearer. My old Shures had a single driver for every ear which handled the lows, mids and highs all alone. The Super.fi’s on the other hand have dual drivers for every ear, one to handle the lows and one to handle the mids and highs. The much more expensive Triple.fi 10 have three drivers for every ear, one for every range.

So far I am really impressed with the Super.fi’s. I only listened to them for a few minutes but it was instantly obvious how much better they performed compared to my Shures. Currently I am burning in my Super.fi’s, they’ve been playing music non stop for around 48 hours and they still have another 48 to go before they are ready to start using.

What is burning in?
You know how when you buy new jeans or shoes they are not very comfortable the first few times you wear them? Then the more you wear them the more comfortable they get? Well the same with earphones/headphones. When you first buy them they are stiff and over time the diaphragms loosens up. Since I don’t want to wait a weeks for them to loosen up I just plug them to my stereo and leave them running for nearly 100 hours. You can find more info [Here]

Anyway, once I get back from London later this month I will post a full review on the Super.fi’s. I got my black ones from Amazon for $169, they also come in red, white and clear. [Amazon]

For those of you who don’t know, Marzouq, Khalid, Bader and myself will be participating in this years Red Bull Flugtag which will be held at Marina Waves next month. Our team is called Imperial27 and we are planning to kick some major ass.

Our plane should have been done by now but getting stuff cleared from customs in Kuwait is really a big hassle specially since its Ramadan now. Well the guys (Khalid actually) managed to clear two boxes a couple of days ago which contained some parts we needed for the plane. We ordered them from Renault which although sounds really cool the parts themselves are actually pretty boring looking, they are part of the system that will be propelling our plane off the ramp. Problem is we (cough cough Bader cough) measured one part wrong and now it won’t fit so we are trying to find a solution. Once everything is sorted and put together it should turn out pretty cool.. if our theory and calculations turn out to be right that is.

The Imperial27 website is also nearly done and should be ready by next week. It will be located at www.imperial27.com and we will launch the site by revealing our plane there so in case we couldn’t finish putting our plane together by then we will have to push back the launch of the site. We are also trying to see if we could do a live broadcast of the revealing but we have some minor glitches that we need to work out. Anyway will keep everyone posted with any updates.

The good stuff:
– It’s pretty
– Excellent browser
– Everyone wants to touch your iphone
– It has an iPod built in
– Touch screen is amazing
– Decent camera
– It’s cheap, KD95 for 4GB and KD130 for 8GB (with shipping to Kuwait) prices the iPhone very competitively to other regular phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson

The bad stuff:
– Once you have an iPhone you realize its just a phone
– If you have a lot of numbers its a real pain finding a contact
– Everyone wants to touch your iphone
– Typing on the iPhone is a joke
– Battery life is a bigger joke, barely lasts a day with below average use
– Adding a ringtone is a hassle
– Majority of headphones won’t work with it
– Not as useful or fun without a wireless internet or GPRS connection
– You have a lot of basic phone features missing like forwarding an SMS, turning off the predictive dictionary, different phone profiles, searching for contacts etc.. etc.. etc..

Would I recommend it?
If you aren’t a heavy phone user yes.
If you don’t send a lot of messages also yes.
For everyone else, no.

Final score, 3.5 out of 5. Nat loves it although she has issues with it. I personally could never have an iPhone as my primary phone.

Update: I now use the iPhone as my primary phone and can’t imagine life without it. The software 2.0 brought with it the app store which has made the iphone a lot more interesting for me.

I don’t have any paintings or pictures on my walls back home in Kuwait but when I get back I will have my first one. I got the picture above enlarged and will frame it and hang it up on my wall once I get back. Its a beautiful photo taken in the 80’s during the war in Lebanon. The picture was taken by Roger Moukarzel who also signed the photo for me. I love war photos and this one is probably as good as they come. if I wasn’t working in advertising I would most probably be a war photographer. Its something I’ve always wanted to do.

A few weeks ago a new shawerma place opened up called Mr Subs. I got emails from readers of the blog telling me about it and some friends also recommended it to me. What made this shawerma place special is that it was owned by Samir Saeed, the owner of Mr Baker.

The place is located in Jabriya, over looking the 4th Ring Road near where Mr Baker is. I passed by last week for dinner and it wasn’t that hard to find, you take the first right after Hardees, then another right so that you are driving in the direction of the 4th Ring Road and at the end of the street take a left to find Mr Subs on your left hand side.

Mr Subs serve a variety of stuff other than shawerma but I wasn’t interested in them. I ordered two chicken shawermas and was told I had a choice of 3 different bread to choose from. I chose the regular Arabic bread, the other two choices were a burger bun like bread and a bread that had olives in it or something. First thing that struck me about the place is how clean it was. It’s probably the cleanest shawerma place I have ever seen, the area around the shawerma grills were spotless which really impressed me. Sadly that was the most impressive thing about the place.

After picking up my two shawermas I went back to the car and started munching on them. I wasn’t very impressed. The shawermas reminded me a lot of the Kurdo shawermas which I am not a fan of. Its what I call commercial shawerma and its mostly because of the sauce they use. Notice I said sauce not garlic because thats basically what both Mr Subs and Kurdo use. Its a consumer friendly replacement to regular garlic most shawerma places use. The sauce which probably does use a bit of garlic doesn’t taste like garlic, instead it tastes more like mayonnaise which I can’t stand. Its also very liquidi which makes the shawerma feel greasy.

Another problem I had with the shawermas were the price, starting from 600 fils per shawerma its not cheap. The cheapest shawerma they have is the one that comes in Arabic bread, the other two choices of bread add 100 or 200 fils more to the price. At 600 fils a shawerma is also puts it really close in the price range of the Villa Fayrouz Express shawerma which tastes a lot better and is of much better quality. Oh and while I was waiting for my shawermas at Mr Subs I saw them pre grilling their burgers. They were grilling their burgers and then placing them in a container so that if someone ordered a burger they could just place it on the grill and heat it up. Although the place is really clean I didn’t like the idea they were pre-grilling their burgers. Anyway for the final score I decided to give their shawermas a 3 out of 5.

I went and watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry tonight at the movies and I really wasn’t expecting it to be good. All the recent Adam Sandler movies have sucked, sucked in comparison to his best two movies, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmor. Still, I decided to watch this movie because of Kevin James from The King of Queens and I am glad I ended up watching this movie because its easily the funniest movie I’ve watched this year. This is actually the funniest Adam Sandler movie since Happy Gilmor.

First lets get something out of the way, you get to see Jessica Biel in her underwear in this movie and she is hot!

Now back to the guys in this movie and there are a ton of them. First you have the two main stars which are Adam Sandler and Kevin James. Then you have a few main supporting actors including Dan Aykroyd, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Nicholas Turturro and Nick Swardson. There are also kameo cameo appearances by David Spade, Rob Schnider and Rob Corddry from the TV show The Winner. The movie is just packed to the brim with all these comedians so its really non stop laughter from the beginning till the end. It’s easily the funniest movie I have watched in a really really long time and it’s going to get a full five out of five from me. I was going to give it a 4.5 because I would have loved to have seen more of David Spade and Rob Corddry and maybe even a kameo by Ricky Gervais but I guess nothing can be perfect.

I am in Lebanon now and the weather isn’t as cool as I hoped it would be. Its good enough to drive around in a convertible or on a motorbike but not cool enough for long walks. Its kinda humid, not Dubai kind of humidity but still enough to make you feel icky after a short walk. I can’t believe how hot it still is in Kuwait!

A while back Villa Fayrouz Express opened up on Baghdad Street in Salmiya. It’s a take-out version of their popular Lebanese restaurant of the same name minus the express. Since the place is in my neighborhood I had to try their chicken shawermas and I have to say I was surprised.

I was surprised because each chicken shawerma cost 750 fils! That officially makes it the most expensive shawerma I have ever reviewed and it also makes it the most expensive shawerma I know of in Kuwait. 750 fils, thats three times the price of a shawerma at Badar Al Badoor and more than double that of Dodo. So is it worth it?

It takes only one bite to realize why the shawerma is priced so expensive. Its the quality of chicken they use, it tastes fresh and healthy. From the chicken to the garlic its all just top notch quality. They also aren’t stingy, I can barely finish two sandwiches at Villa Fayrouz Express while at Dodo for example I could easily have three in addition to a side order of fries. The sandwich isn’t huge mind you, its fat and short but not huge.

So back to the main question, is it worth 750fils? No, I personally don’t think so. I mean I really don’t care where I eat shawerma (except for this one place next to my office) as long as it tastes good. I have now had shawermas ranging from 200 to 750 fils and I can confidently say that I would rather have Badar Al Badoor’s 250 fils shawerma over Villa Fayrouz Express. Not because for the price of one shawerma at Villa Fayrouz Express I can have two shawermas and a kofta sandwich at Badar Al Badoor, but I also felt Badar Al Badoor’s shawerma was more fun. Shawerma isn’t meant to be healthy or made from great quality, its supposed to just taste good and thats it. Still though for people who care about hygene and are looking for a good shawerma Villa Fayrouz Express is highly recommended. My final score is a 4 out of 5.

Disappointed, thats one way to summarize the movie for me. Maybe I was hoping the movie would stay true to the original cartoon or maybe I was hoping more then just a handful of transformers in the movie but whatever the reason is I didn’t like the movie.

Firstly I think there really wasn’t a proper story. To me it looked like the movie was written around the fight scenes. Its as if they went ok, we need to have one big fight here, two big fights there, a small one here and a nice big one in the end, now go write a movie. I know this movie is just an action packed movie with special effects made for the general audience but after Lord of the Rings this is no longer an excuse. You can have amazing special effects, lots of fight scenes, great characters AND a deep intriguing story and still make it mainstream and a box office success. Seriously with a franchise like Transformers how hard could it have been to write a proper script?

My second problem is the actual Transformers, they neither resemble nor act like their cartoon counterpart. I hate the super detailed industrial look of the movie robots, I prefer the sleeker and simpler cartoon version. Another thing, Megatron is supposed to be a gun not a plane, Ratchet is supposed to be white (thats why my MacBook is called Ratchet), Bumblebee is supposed to be a VW Beetle and Starscream is supposed to be annoying as hell! I used to love watching Megatron and Starscream argue with each other in the original cartoon but it doesn’t happen in this movie. I can’t help but feel this movie should have been an epic not a quickly scrambled together movie. Look at Star Wars and Star Trek! Because the story was short but the fight scenes extremely long, we never got a chance to get close to any of the Transformers, maybe Bumblebee since he had the largest role but he also hardly spoke. All of them actually barely had any speaking lines! My favorite part in the movie without ruining it for people who haven’t watched it is when the Transformers went to the guys house to get “the thing”. There were a bit of funny moments there and we got a feel of the different personalities of the robots but that was it, no other scene even got close to that.

Also, whats up with the heavy advertising in the movie? The guy is video conferencing with his wife and there is a huge ass “Cisco Networking” logo on the screen, a Transformer crash lands from space and visits the Pontiac dealership, another a Hummer dealer. Oh and they are ALL American cars! They took Bumblebee, a German VW Beetle and turned him into an American Cheverolet Camaro. Later in the movie you also have the Sprite machine and Xbox 360 transforming into robots which is fine if all these incidents above happened casually but instead they were very obvious which I felt was tacky.

On a positive note I really enjoyed the acting of the main kid in the movie and the visual effects of the robots was just incredible. The movie was fun to watch but I wouldn’t watch it again. My final score is a 3 out of 5.

It’s really gotten to a point where there isn’t much more that can go wrong. I’ve honestly lost count on how many politicians have gotten assassinated in the past couple of years and its depressing and sickening. I am going down to Beirut next Tuesday for a week long shoot and I hope things get back to normal by then. The last time I had a shoot in Lebanon another politician had gotten assassinated, its becoming fucking routine! [News]

My favorite thing about Ramadan is that I get off work at 3PM. This allows me to have a ton of free time to do stuff I wouldn’t usually do like riding my bicycle.

Yesterday I went riding with Nat and the weather was surprisingly great. We rode from Marina Mall to Scientific Center, a short route since we didn’t want to take a longer one in case our bikes had developed problems after a year of storage. Imagine riding all the way to the Kuwait Towers and then finding out the bike has a problem and you have to walk back all the way to Salmiya. It would suck…

Riding the bicycle is really different from the motorbike. For one thing falling off a bicycle is no longer a big thing. Nat crashed yesterday when her bicycle slid on a curve and she just got up and continued riding. When the same thing happened to me with my motorbike I ended up with road rash, a fractured wrist and a large repair bill.

There are two brands of bikes I would recommend people getting, Trek and Cannondale. I personally prefer and ride Cannondale. When it comes to road bikes I would go with Trek but for mountain bikes Cannondale all the way. The Cannondale dealer is located in Shuwaikh, you take the first right after McDonalds on Canada Dry street and once you reach the small round-a-bout the dealer would be on your right hand corner. Trek on the other hand is available at GoSport in The Avenues and eXtreme Sports at Marina Waves.

If you are looking for a place to ride, the Gulf Road is a good place to start. For a short trail you can start off at Marina Crescent and ride all the way to Scientific Center and back. For a longer trail you can go from McDonalds on the Gulf Road and head all the way to Souk Sharq and back. Both routes use a sea side trail away from dangerous car traffic.

Cannondale have soooo many hot bikes to choose from, my favorite being the Gemini but the prices can get ridiculous with models costing KD1000 and up. You can spend a lot less of course, a member in the forum recently purchase a Trek for only KD148 and you can even get bikes for under KD50 even although I wouldn’t recommend them at all. The difference between the cheap and expensive bikes is usually weight, quality of parts, the frame and the finishing. Cheap bikes are usually heavy, equipped with the crappiest brands and handle like crap.

There used to be a riding club that met up every Friday at like 7AM to go riding but I don’t think they do that anymore. If anyone knows of another riding club please leave it in the comments below.

Just wanted to boast to other video gamers that I am currently downloading the Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer Beta for the Xbox 360. Since I am a gamespot.com member I was given an activation key for the download. Gamespot rules! [Link]

A friend of mine at work just came back from Spain and while there she got me a gift from the Lomography Shop. This reminded me of my Holga camera which I haven’t used since the last time the sky was blue. Shooting outdoor pictures in Kuwait during the summer sucks because we don’t have blue skies neither do we have any clouds. This is why my favorite time of the year to take pictures is during the winter.

Holga is this really cheap camera I bought awhile back which takes pictures using medium format film. Since the camera is cheap the pictures have this really strange feel and effect to them which ends up making all the pictures look really trendy.

I have some pictures I shot with the camera attached to this post which I took 2 years ago at Marina Mall and as you can see you could never achieve the same with a digital camera. Now the coolest thing about the Holga is the price, it costs just $20 on Amazon. Thats a really good deal. [Amazon Link]

So yesterday I was kinda pissed that I forgot my phone in Dubai but now I am actually enjoying it. It’s been a peaceful day so far and although I should be getting my phone back tomorrow via DHL I think I am going to keep it turned off and see how long I can last without it. If I want a pager (beeper) can I still get one here in Kuwait?

I left Geo (my dog) with my parents for one night and this is what my sister did to him! [Link]

Note: This is not the first time… [Link]