2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

Registration is now open for entry into the fifth annual dog show. The show will take place in the beautiful gardens of the British Embassy on Friday March 5th from 11AM to 4PM. I’ve been to their first and second annual dog show and it was a lot of fun. I only missed out on the other two because I was out of the country. It’s very well organized and it’s really great having an event like this in Kuwait. I always sign up my dog to the different categories and even though he always ends failing miserably we still have a really good time. Here is a link to pictures I took at their first annual dog show back in 2006 when my dog was still just a puppy then. [Link]

For more information on the dog show and all the proper forms needed visit the PAWS blog [Here]

Please note that even if you are not entering a dog in the show and just want to go to the event to hang out, you still have to pre-register because it’s being held at the British Embassy. You can’t just show up at the gate and walk in, you need to be pre-registered to be let in.

Seems Arwa has gotten a face lift. A new water bottle and label design is going to be introduced, and compared to the previous bottle, it looks better. It’s not a great redesign but its better than before.

Here is the calendar for Cinemagic’s rooftop movie nights for February. Starting this month they will start charging KD1 for the venue fees including refreshments, popcorn and much more. There are lots of good movies this month, here is the list:

Thursday, February 4th
OUTSOURCED, USA/CANADA 2006
Director: John Jeffcoat
Genre: Comedy | 103 min | English Subtitle
Rated: PG 13

Saturday, February 6th
WHEN MARIAM SPOKE, LEBANON 2001
Director: Asad Fouladkar
Genre: Drama | 98 min | English Subtitle
Rated: 15+

Thursday, February 11th
UNDERGROUND, SERBIA 1995
Director: Emir Kusturica
Genre: Comedy | 170 min | English Subtitle
Rated: PG 15

Saturday, February 13th
SURPRISE FILM

Thursday, February 18th
HOUSE OF GAMES, USA 1987
Director: David Mamet
Genre: Thriller | 102 min | English Subtitle
Rated: PG 13

Saturday, February 20th
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, USA 2000
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Genre: Adventure | Mystery | 102 min | English Subtitle
Rated: 18

Thursday, February 25th
CORPSE BRIDE, USA 2005
Director: Tim Burton
Genre: Animation | Drama | 80 min | English Subtitle
Rated: PG 13

Saturday, February 27th
SOPHIE SCHOLL: THE FINAL DAYS, GERMANY 2005
Director: Mark Rothemund
Genre: Drama | 127 min | English Subtitle
Rated: 15+

Cinemagic movies are screened in the old Salmiya, on the roof on top of Alghanim Electronics and LG. Here is a link to their facebook group [Link]

Two weeks back I posted pictures of the GulfRun guys getting their cars washed and stickers applied and now Negative Effect just released a video of that event. I’m looking forward for the video of the actual races since he had a whole bunch of FlipHD cameras setup around all the cars capturing footage from every angle. For now though you can watch this. [YouTube]

I couldn’t stop laughing, this has to be the coolest movie ever made. [Link]

via nibaq

This might sound strange but this little store is probably one of my favorite shops in Kuwait. It’s called Teacher’s Cellar and it’s located in Muthana Complex in Kuwait City. The store sells classroom supplies and it’s unbelievable the amount of stuff they were able to shove into the place. It has everything from scratch and sniff stickers to fake plastic food, washable crayola paint, stamps, hand puppets you name it. It’s mostly supplies for kindergarten and primary school classes so that’s why it’s all fun stuff. It’s really an incredible little store and I wish we had more of these little specialty shops in Kuwait.

They’re located on the Mezzanine floor of Muthana Complex opposite the Internet cafe. They also have a pretty decent website which you can check out by clicking [Here]

No not really. It’s actually one of the really old Toshiba laptops displayed at the Toshiba dealer in Kuwait City. This one’s from 1993 called the T100x Dynapad. It had a 25MHz CPU, 4MB of RAM and came with a 40MB hard drive. The Toshiba dealer has this amazing display of old laptops from the 80s up till the 90s. It’s like a mini museum.

Aramex just sent an email out saying that packages over 10KG will benefit from a 30% discount. Sounds cool but in the 9 years or so I’ve been using Aramex I don’t recall ever shipping anything that heavy. How about 30% discounts on all packages no matter what the weight for customers who’ve been with Aramex for 9 years?

This mini club was found inside what looks like an ordinary tent from the outside. Pretty cool. [YouTube]

A reader called Haresh sent me the picture above which he took last night around 8:45PM. I checked and the picture isn’t retouched, its straight out of the camera. That looks like a pretty big lightning strike.

Picture was taken with an Olympus E-520 with an f-stop of 5.6 and shutter speed of 5 seconds. Location is Salmiya.

When I posted my water review I wasn’t expecting much interest. I just did it because I thought it would be something fun but the response was much more than I was expecting. A lot of you requested I add more details like the sodium content or where the water comes from so I went ahead and did that. I just finished a long and very cold session in front of my fridge tasting all the water and taking down notes. Since the last review I went and purchased some more water brands and I think I managed to get one bottle from everything available in the market except for the bakala waters (random unknown brands you won’t see anywhere else).

For each bottle of water I’ve now written what kind of water it is, where it’s from, the sodium content and the taste. Water to me should have no taste but some brands (like the bakala ones) have a strange flavor for some odd reason. So when you read “none” keep in mind that’s a good thing.

Finally before I share the results, most of these brands of water can be found at your regular super markets except for the following:

10 Thousand BC and Icelandic Glacial are only available at Dean & Deluca.
Fiji I’ve seen only at Dean & Deluca and sometimes at Sultan Center.
TSC, O2GO and Metro Mint only available only at Sultan Center.
Isbre isn’t available anywhere yet but will be released in the Kuwaiti market this March.

The review did reveal some surprises. The biggest for me was TSC. Turned out to be bottled in Lebanon and contains only 2.3mg of sodium. I think TSC could actually be re-branded Rim water since both are bottled in Lebanon and both contain the exact same amount of Sodium. But that’s just my theory. Between locally produced water the two I would choose over other brands are Arwa and AlRwadatain. From the more expensive brands Highland Spring seems to be the best deal and also contains just 6mg of sodium. Check out the results below.

Over the weekend I picked up an iJacket while I was shopping in Bahrain. I originally posted about it back in 2007 and then totally forgot about it until I saw it at the store.

Firstly just to be clear, I got the jacket because the jacket looks good. I was not interested in the iPod connectivity, thats just an extra benefit for me but not the reason I bought the jacket. I am not the type of person that walks around listening to music and so I won’t be using the controls on the jacket a lot. Now since I did get the jacket and I do own a number of iPods I figured I might as well give my feedback.

The iPod has a special transparent and water proof pocket on the inside of the jacket. There is a regular iPod connector in that pocket and you connect your ipod to it. The pocket also has a small opening for your headphone cable to pass through. The controls on the jacket sleeve are fairly basic, volume up and down, pause/play forward and reverse. The idea is that when its cold outside you don’t want to unzip your jacket and pull out your iPod every time you want to perform a simple command and that’s where the controls on your sleeve come to play. Without unzipping your jacket or removing your gloves you can control your iPod by just touching the buttons on the sleeve. Although I call them buttons they’re not really buttons. The part of the sleeve where the buttons are located feels exactly the same as any other part of the sleeve. No bulge or anything of that sort just the shapes of the buttons imprinted on the sleeve.

When I first tried using the controls I thought I had a malfunctioning jacket since the buttons didn’t work. Then I found out that the jacket auto-locks the controls after 8 seconds of no use and to unlock the controls you have to hold down on the unlock button for 5 seconds. That’s the biggest issue I have with the jacket… the auto-lock feature. It makes the jacket unpractical. Imagine you’re listening to music and then a friend wants to tell you something. To pause the iPod you need to hold down on the unlock button for 5 seconds and then hit the pause button. So it takes at least 6 seconds to pause the iPod which is silly. You know how sometimes one track plays a lot louder than others? Well you need to wait 5 seconds for the buttons to unlock before you could quickly lower the volume to a decent listening level.

That’s why I’m giving the jacket a 2 out of 5. The auto-lock feature is the dumbest idea ever. There is no reason to have it since I can’t imagine the buttons being pressed accidentally unless someone grabs you from your arm and how often does that happen? I’ve already emailed Zegna asking if there is a way to disable the auto-lock but I doubt there is. As a jacket the iJacket is very comfortable and great looking. As an iPod controller it sucks big time because the auto-lock makes it impossible to use. Now a cool feature I would use a lot if it was included would be iPod/iPhone charging. I know there are a few jackets out there that do that but currently the iJacket doesn’t which sucks. I’m hoping if there will ever be an iJacket 2.0 it will.

I spent most of the day today walking from one track corner to another trying to find the best to take pictures from. I finally found a spot that had green grass and some green painted pavement which I thought added some much needed color to the shots and so I ended up taking most of my shots there. I took around 400 shots today but here are some of my favorites right now. Like yesterday these are just a sample of shots, once I am done going through all my shots I will upload them all to flickr.

Just finished what has to be a 5 out of 5 burger. I’m staying at the Ritz Carlton here in Bahrain and just tried the room service burger and now I am regretting not having it yesterday or the day before. Luckily it’s still 8:30PM so I think I can fit another dinner before I go to sleep. I can’t wait…

Update: Had a second burger and was able to take a picture this time which I just added to the post above. I am full.

I took a bunch of pictures today and the ones below are my favorite at the moment. I might find some more interesting ones later but have some things I need to do now. Tomorrow is the second day of GulfRun5 and they will be racing on a different track which I think looks visually more interesting so I should get better shots tomorrow.