Category: Personal

Yesterday I was able to scan all my CD collection into Delicious Library using the CueCat. I was surprised at how good the CueCat worked. Since it cost me only $10 I was expecting it to be inaccurate and unreliable but out of the over 300 CDs I scanned I had maybe only 5 instances where the CueCat couldn’t read the barcode and those were often because of non standard sized barcodes (ie very small) or because they were inverted barcodes (white stripes instead of black). For $10 the CueCat is a real steal.

I had some issues with Delicious Library though. I was able to scan the barcodes of most of my alternative music without any problems and I wasn’t expecting any problems since most of my alternative music is made up of mainstream stuff like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails etc.. When it came to my downbeat music I was expecting Delicious Library to have problems since the majority of the stuff are low profile and from small labels but since Delicious Library connects to a wide variety of sources it didn’t have a problem recognizing the CDs and loading up their info with CD covers. Sometimes though Delicious Library would load details from Amazon.co.uk for example where they wouldn’t have a CD cover while if Delicious loaded it up from Amazon.com it would have gotten a CD cover so I had to manually go to the Amazon.com website, take the ASIN number and dump it into the library myself to reload the info to be able to solve this issue. It did this less then 10 times but it does slow things down.

The big problems with Delicious Library came when I was trying to add my old techno stuff from the early 90s. The majority of the labels and CDs don’t exists anymore and Delicious Library had a hard time finding the CDs at all in the online databases yet alone finding the CD covers. So I was forced to add around 5 CDs manually because they didn’t exists online while the rest of the CDs which it did find didn’t have CD covers, but thanks to a wonderful website called Discogs, I was able to find the CD covers and drag and drop them into Delicious Library.

Today I will start adding my books to Delicious and then will follow with my DVD’s and videogames. I don’t know what I will do with all this information when I am done but I am sure I will figure something out. Oh and by the way, you can scan barcodes right after each other without having to wait for Delicious to load up the info. This saved me a lot of time since I just scanned CDs non stop without delay.

Be Cool
My streak of good movies ended yesterday after watching Be Cool. Although the movie features a lot of celebrities including John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, The Rock, Danny DeVito, James Wood and Steven Tyler, the movie was still boring and slow. John Travolta plays the part of a successful movie actor who wants to get out of the movie business and decides to go into the music industry where he ends up getting into trouble with the Russian mafia and a competing music company. The coolest person in the whole movie was surprisingly The Rock who played the role of a gay bodyguard who wants to become a movie actor. I swear if it wasn’t for him I would have turned the movie off after the first 30 minutes.

Ladder 49
The second movie I watched yesterday was Ladder 49 which also starred John Travolta. This movie was a lot better then Be Cool and a lot more exciting. The movie is about a rookie firefighter who joins John Travolta’s fire station and matures to become a seasoned veteran. The firefighter who is played by Joaquin Phoenix gets married, has two kids and then reaches a point where he has to choose between his risky job which he loves or taking a desk job which would make his family a lot happier. The last good firefighting movie I watched was Backdraft but that was ages ago so it was good to watch another one. I usually hate Joaquin Phoenix in movies since he usually plays the role of a dickhead but he was pretty cool in this movie and John Travolta’s acting compared to Be Cool is wayyyyyyyy better. It really doesn’t suite John Travolta being a tough guy, maybe it worked in Pulp Fiction but it wasn’t working in Be Cool. I got a lot more movies still to watch and hopefully I won’t have another Be Cool.

Yesterday afternoon I watched Green Street Hooligans starring Elijah Wood. The movie is about Elijah getting expelled from Harvard and then moving to England where his sister lives. While there he starts hanging out with his brother-in-laws brother who is a leader of a bunch of hooligans. He starts hanging out with them, learns to fight and becomes part of their gang. The movie is pretty cool and half way through it you just want to turn it off and go out and pick a fight with someone. The problem I found with the movie is Elijah Wood. After watching him in Lord of the Rings as a tiny hobbit, its hard to imagine him as a soccer hooligan, the part doesn’t suit him at all. Still though it was a cool movie I would recommend watching.

Maybe I am a few years late but I just watched Swordfish yesterday for the first time. Halle Berry’s tits were fine but other then that the movie was pretty lame except for the last few action scenes. The hacking / worm building scenes have to be the worst in any hacking movie I have ever seen. The way they visualized the hacking into a 3D Lego like building process was just stupid and very fake. I think that ruined the movie for me the most. I wasn’t planning on watching Swordfish yesterday, I was planning on watching Dark Water but it turns out I accidently downloaded Honogurai mizu no soko kara… the original Japanese version of Dark Water which I couldn’t watch because it was in Japanese and didn’t have English subtitles. If it was anything like Ringu (The original The Ring movie) it most probably was going to be crap anyway. I also think Dark Water is going to be crap, I mean it looks like a movie about someone with bad plumbing, but Nat wants to watch it which means I have to watch it..

I got my CueCat today from Aramex. So far I have been having problems with it. The CueCat works like a keyboard, when I scan a barcode with the CueCat, it types out the barcode number on my mac. The problem I have is that when I scan the number in the organizing software Delicious Library and when I scan a number into TextEdit (like Notepad on Windows) I get 2 completely different numbers where the one in TextEdit is the right one. For example I picked up a random book lying around here, when I scan it into Delicious Library I get the barcode “978908090103408” but when I scan it into TextEdit I get “9780891348382 90000”.

I don’t know whats wrong with Delicious Library, I am going to try and google it now and figure out the issue. Other then that the CueCat is pretty cool, works like a charm. Unlike regular barcode scanners you don’t hold the CueCat from a distance and highlight the barcode, you have to take the CueCat and touch the barcode and then swipe it across. It doesn’t matter if you hold the barcode upside down or vertically it will still scan it right.

Anyway if you are interested in the CueCat it sells for only $9.99 on Amazon. The cheapest barcode scanner you can get.

Update: Ok figured out the problem, or atleast figured out how to get the barcode scanned right. Instead of clicking on “Add a new item” and then scanning, I should just scan right away and it will add it for me. Cool.

Oh I nearly forgot, I watched the Family Guy movie yesterday night. It was so so, some scenes were really funny like the Thundercats one but they were few and spread out. I was expecting the movie to be a lot more funnier, maybe its because I prefer the Simpsons.

Oldboy
I just finished watching two really great movies. The first one is called Oldboy, its a Korean movie that made a big splash at the Cannes Film Festival back in 2004. The movie is available with an English soundtrack but the one I manged to get was Korean with English subtitles. I can’t say much about the movie without ruining the plot but basically a guy gets locked up in a studio apartment for 15 years by some unknown assailants before getting released one day. Once he is out he tries to seek revenge by trying to find out who locked him up and why. Quentin Tarantino loved the movie and thats why it got the extra attention in Cannes.

The Devil’s Rejects
The second movie I watched was called The Devil’s Rejects. This movie reminded me a lot of Natural Born Killers except its way cooler and more violent but they both involved violently sick people who are on the run from the cops. The movie was written and directed by the freaky Rob Zombie and it features A LOT of violence, nudity and general weirdness. If you liked Natural Born Killers you would really like this movie then.

With all this free time now that Ramadan has started I was able to watch a few movies the past two days. I watched Cinderella Man first and I didn’t like it. It was too long and it starts off very sad and doesn’t really turn into a happy movie by the end. Million Dollar Baby was way better. I watched Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy second, I had never read the book but the movie was pretty cool. I mean any movie where earth gets blown up in the first 5 minutes must be cool. The movie was filled with a variety of weird and strange characters so it was very odd and entertaining. Finally I watched Land of the Dead yesterday night. This was fun to watch. Its not as scary as Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later but it was interesting none the less and it did play from a different perspective. This is the only zombie movie I have watched where the movie makes you side with the zombies. It’s definetly worth watching.

What are your Ramadan working hours?
Mine is Saturday to Wednesday, 9AM to 3PM.
Thursdays its 9AM to 1PM.

Nataly is the same except her agency get Thursdays off!

I know everyone recently has been complaining about the traffic and I want to add something here. Today the traffic was the worst I had EVER seen in Kuwait EVER. Not even the great winter floods or the Thursday night Salmiya traffic could even come close to todays traffic. Everywhere I went, all my little traffic escape routes, every corner, intersection, road, everywhere was just packed with cars. There was traffic in places I couldn’t imagine their ever being traffic in! I got to the office nearly 30 minutes late so I hope this isn’t going to be like this everyday now…

Jazeera Airways seems to be all the buzz lately, I was a great fan of Kuwait Airways but it seems lately they have turned into trash (last time I used them was 4 years ago). So me and Nat were planning our trip to Lebanon on Christmas and I decided to give Jazeera Airways a shot, I was impressed.

I went to the Jazeera Airways website to check out the prices and stuff when I noticed a button to Book a flight. I clicked on it out of curiosity and started filling up some forms. 10 minutes later I had purchased two, two-way tickets to Lebanon. The whole process felt like I was ordering movie tickets online, it was too easy. The coolest part about the whole thing was I was actually able to book my seats on my flight to Lebanon and on my flight back to Kuwait. No one else had purchased or booked tickets for the two flights I was on so the whole plane was empty and I was able to get 2 seats on row 10 for the trip going and coming. When I was done paying for the tickets I received an email with all the details about my flight, my reservation number and my invoice, its like shopping on Amazon.

The booking and paying online, plus the fact I could reserve my seats ahead of time had already impressed me, but the biggest seller was the price. Two, two-way tickets to Lebanon cost only KD164 (with taxes and everything) during peak season. Kuwait Airways or Middle East Airlines would have cost around KD135 per ticket and they wouldn’t have allowed me to reserve my in flight seats ahead of time. So thats a total saving of over KD100 which I could now spend on 600 bottles of beer or 4 bottles of Jack Daniels at B018.

The only downside to Jazeera is that if you want to eat on the plane you have to pay for it. They serve cold sandwiches and drinks but they are not free which I don’t really think is a big problem anyway. For those of you who want to travel in style and not economy, for an extra KD26 per ticket per one way you can sit in first class. That would put the price similar to the Kuwait Airways or MEA regular economy ticket price though.

Finally, I called them up a few times on the phone (177) for details and info and the people I spoke to were very friendly and polite which made me feel more comfortable. Now the only thing left is to fly with them, my flight is in December so I will review it when I come back.

I had an invite for wordpress.com and I didn’t know what username to get. Then I remembered when I signed up to 23hq.com I was able to get the username “mark”, so I tried mark on wordpress.com and it was taken, I decided to try the next 4 letter word that came into my head which was fuck and it signed me up! I was expecting maybe a step 2 or confirmation screen but it just took the word fuck and now I am stuck with fuck.wordpress.com. I guess it’s cool…

I have been addicted to American Hot Rod for like 2 months now. Its been more entertaining then American Chopper and Rides since there are a lot of problems on the show and most of them I could relate to. The pace of work, the impossible deadlines, the how fast can you do it not how good can you do it mentality, all typical issues common here in Kuwait. Yesterday night though Charley the painter, the most chilled out guy on the show had enough and decided to leave Boyd Coddington and join Boyds competitor, an ex friend and ex employee, Chip Foose. Foose is a regular on Rides and has his own show Overhaulin also on Discovery. It seems American Hot Rod is falling apart. None of the employees are happy and the best people have left the body shop so I don’t think I will be watching it anymore. For fans of the show if you want to talk to Charley he posts regularly on the Overhaulin forum, his nick name is idahoboy. [Link]

Yesterday I watched a cool episode of CSI, it starred Wil Wheaton and Stephen Baldwin. I had actually been waiting to watch Wil Wheaton in CSI since I first read about it on his blog. For those of you who don’t know, Wil Wheaton played the part of Wesley Crusher, Dr. Beverly Crusher’s son on Star Trek The Next Generation. TNG is one of my favorite shows so I am a big fan of Wil Wheaton. Sadly though he didn’t have a very large role in the show which was disappointing since I had been expecting to see a lot more of him. Wil played the part of a crazy homeless guy who was a suspected of murdering a kid. Having Stephen Baldwin also in the same episode was awesome, he played the part of a cocaine dealer and we got to see him a lot more then Wil. I hope a lot more celebrities start popping up on CSI, makes the show even more cooler.

I am sitting at work listening to music and I realized something, I am old. I am listening to R&B songs from like the year 2000 and I realized thats like nearly 6 years ago. Then I started thinking about Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Blind Melon which are from the early 90’s and I realized, I listen to music thats like 15 years old. In the 80’s when my parents used to listen to music from the late 60s and 70s, we used to call those oldies. So now, is Pearl Jam an oldie?