2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

I watched Saw IV while I was in London and I found it really lame. The gruesome scenes were pretty detailed and realistic which is great but the story was just really forced. Part 4 was just squeezed out of no where, the whole thing should have ended in the third part, they should never have done a fourth. Currently there isn’t much on at the theaters so it might be worth watching just to kill time. I would recommend The Kingdom and Stardust over Saw 4 if you haven’t watched them already. Final score a 2.5 out of 5.

While in London I kept spotting this really cool retro looking car. At first I thought it was a classic British car but when I found a parked one and was able to get closer it turned out to be a Nissan Figaro. When I got back to the hotel room I did a quick google search and it turned out the Figaro’s were produced in the early 90’s and have a small cult following. I am not usually a fan of retro looking cars but I can’t help but not love this one, it just looks really funky. I found a place online that sells excellent condition versions for prices ranging from 3000 to 4000 Kuwaiti Dinars. [Link]

I got the latest version of OS X with me from London and I installed it today and its pretty cool. No major upgrades but instead lots of tiny ones here and there. My biggest concern was the dock, I was worried I wasn’t going to like the redesigned version but not I don’t think I can go back to the old one. Overall Leopard is just much prettier. I am now going to just format my Macbook and reinstall it again fresh. I don’t have a particular reason for doing it other then its a good way for clearing up space.

Flipbook with 36 black pages. When you flip through the book, a 3D rainbow will appear inside your hand. Smart. [Link]

I just found an article by mistake on the Kuwait Times website on the demise of the orange taxi’s. Although I’ve never used them before I’ve always been intrigued by them. According to the article though they might not be around for much longer, with no help from the government and a lot more competition, the orange taxi’s are quickly losing ground to buses and jawal taxis. [Link]

Picture by mahooya

This is really messed up. One of my hard drives, a 500GB Western Digital has just died on me. The drive was full with only around 8GB of free space. It had a ton of movies, tv shows and my iTunes library. Now its fucking dead, just like that out of the blue.

Now what? Thats what I have been asking myself for the past few minutes. Do I get another hard drive and go through the painstaking task of re-downloading all the movies and shows? Where do I begin? I don’t even know what movies and shows I even had on this drive. I’ve been asking myself for a long time now why I am building a large database of shows and movies and why I don’t delete them when I am done with them. I never have a proper answer. What about the other shows and movies I have on other drives, do I just delete them as well and say fuck it to all this?

I didn’t back up my data because it wasn’t important data. The only thing I do have backed up are my MP3s but thats because they are all legally ripped from my CD’s or purchased digitally online. I backed them up because I did not want to go through the painstaking task of ripping my CDs all over again one by one. My movies and TV shows are illegally downloaded and they are just too huge to back up anyway coming in at over 1.5TB. I don’t know what I will do, its a shock. I guess I will just get another drive and just continue from where I stopped.

Just got back from London today morning and I think I need a vacation. Thanks to Nibaq, k.thekuwaiti and Z District for guest writing on the blog while I was away. Everything should get back to normal from tomorrow.

Check out this guy’s Star Wars collection. [Link]

I went last week with my parents to the new Al-Sahya restaurant in Avenues called Il Forno. We all enjoyed it. The windows looked out to the garden/fountain area. The food was good except the fish that was bad, but the staff apologized so we forgave them.

I’d go again.

We decided to pass by the London Zoo today since its in Camden Town close to where we wanted to do some shopping. The zoo is larger than the Kuwait Zoo (duh) but much smaller than the San Diego Zoo. They have an incredible gorilla exhibit surprisingly with around 3 gorillas. The zoo looks like it was built in a forest, the whole area around the zoo is a huge green park with hills and trees and the inside of the zoo is the same. The zoo is actually split in two with a canal passing through, you need to cross a bridge to get to the other side, very cool. There are a couple of more pictures if you click on continue.

They’ve put Jack Bauer in a suit and Tony Almeida is back but as a bad guy! It looks like its going to be one heck of a season. If you are having trouble loading the video above here is a lower quality version on [YouTube]

Here is some info on season 7 [Link]

I don’t know if anyone has any news about this or pictures, but my friend just called me telling me that the ice skating rink is completely on fire. I wonder how that could have happened or if they put it out, its an ice rink how could it catch on fire, its cold and has ice. And if it is damaged to the point its beyond repair would they build a new one?

Does anyone have anymore updates?

Well for some reason today my credit card just stopped working. It didn’t get canceled or anything of the sort, machines just don’t read the card anymore. I think the chip on my credit card got damaged somehow. Now I have to walk around with cash, sucks!

In my Hummingbird Bakery post I was told to try out Ben’s Cookies in Covent Garden so first thing I did today was try some for breakfast. They sell cookies by weight not piece. I had one milk chocolate and one double chocolate cookie and they came out to KD1.250 which is around 600 fils a cookie. Not bad considering they were pretty big and Starbucks in Kuwait sell their crappy ones for nearly the same price. I ate both cookies and found the double chocolate a bit too heavy but the milk chocolate one which is basically a chocolate chunk cookie was delicious. It was perfectly balanced, not too sweet, very light and crunchy on the outside while soft on the inside. I loved it. (Posted from my Nokia e61i)

We left Paris today and got back to London but not without going on one hell of a ride.

We got to the Eurostar train station in Paris around 5PM which was around an hour before our train was set to leave. When we got to the automatic check in the machine rejected our tickets. I couldn’t understand why until an employee there arrived to help us and explained to us the problem. Our train had left over an hour earlier!

I am not one to make a lot of mistakes, I am usually the extremely reliable guy who plays it really safe and always tries to arrive earlier than the recommended time. Somehow, for some fucked up reason, I read our London arrival time as our Paris departure time. I can’t understand how that happened, looking at my non refundable non exchangeable ticket now I can’t imagine how I mixed up the departure and arrival times. Its right up on my list of dumbest things I have done in my life. We had missed our train out of Paris and that was just the beginning of our adventure.

There was another train leaving to London in around 2 hours so we headed to the really long cue queue to buy tickets and waited. While in line I tried calling NBK on 801801 to try and move money onto my credit card. I didn’t know how much I had left on the card and I didn’t know how much the tickets would cost so I figured I would play it safe and move some more money onto my visa. I spent 15 minutes trying to call Kuwait without any luck when suddenly I got through and got a hold of the NBK operator and explained to her that I wanted to move money onto my card. After 10 minutes of trying the NBK operator told me there was a problem with the NBK automated system and I should call back in 15 minutes.

We got up to the ticket counter and we asked for 2 one way tickets out of Paris. The employee told us we could get on the next train, price was 236 Euros per person which amounted to a total of 472 for the two of us. That was more than DOUBLE what I had paid for 3 weeks ago for our two way tickets! We didn’t have any other option so we asked for the tickets but when we tried paying for them both my credit card and Nat’s got rejected. Our cards were maxed out, it just wasn’t our luck.

Now you are probably thinking why didn’t I just withdraw money from an ATM machine and pay for the tickets with cash? Well the problem is when I travel I don’t keep a lot of money in my ATM card account so that just in case I get mugged at an ATM machine I can only withdraw a certain amount of money (I watch a lot of movies). It’s never been a problem before because I always use my credit card for my purchases and if I needed more money than whats available on my ATM card I just transfer more onto it.

So here was the situation, my Macbook had no battery and I didn’t have the charger so I couldn’t connect to a wifi network at the train station. There was also no Internet cafe at the station but even if there was I didn’t want to access my bank account from a public computer. I couldn’t get a hold of NBK, the answering machine never came on it just kept ringing and no one was picking up. Since I couldn’t connect to my NBK account I couldn’t use my credit card and I couldn’t withdraw any money so I was pretty much fucked.

I decided to call my sister and have her log into my NBK account and transfer money, problem was she wasn’t at home and the line kept breaking up. I then started calling my friends one by one to see if they were near an Internet connection including Bader, Marzouq and Khalid but no one was near a computer. It was just freaking frustrating. I had the money to buy the fucking tickets to get the hell out of Paris but I just couldn’t get that money onto my ATM or credit card! Time was running out by now and I needed to buy the tickets.

We decided to leave the station and head out around town looking for a place to get Internet access. After around 30 minutes of exploring and asking people we finally found an Internet cafe. I asked the guy if I could connect with my macbook but he told me it wouldn’t be possible. I looked at his computers, they had Windows XP on it… I had no clue if there were any trojans or softwares that would read and store my bank account info and passwords on the machines but I didn’t have an option, I was desperate and I just needed Internet. In literally 2 minutes I had logged into my bank account, transferred money onto my ATM and credit card and was out of the cafe. Thats all I needed, 2 fucking minutes of Internet to change the direction of my life.

We ran back to the train station with 45 minutes to spare but now we were back in the cue queue to buy tickets. 30 minutes later we purchased the tickets. The employee told us something about how our seats would be pull down seats but we didn’t care we just wanted to get on the train. We checked in, passed through passport and security check which luckily was empty and ran towards our train. If we had just been 1 minute late we would have missed the train again.

When we finally got on the train and the doors shut and we started moving, it was just the most amazing feeling of relief. Our fold down seats were these tiny seats located between the carriage cars (pictures above). They weren’t really that bad, it was kinda cozy sitting in between the carriage cars alone.

I can’t believe how an average day turned into such a mess. First thing I did when I got to my hotel room here in London was log on to the internet and change my NBK online banking password. Also when I get back to Kuwait I am going to take out another credit card and keep it aside just in case of emergencies like today. Finally Nat is going to be taking care of our traveling from now on, I am losing it!