2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

I had Hardee’s for lunch today. I had a Big Champ combo and the Turkey & Swiss sandwich. The Turkey & Swiss was decent, nothing special. The Big Champ today thought was awful. I don’t know how they messed it up but it tasted terrible and I just couldn’t finish it. Last time I will have the Big Champ again. Will stick to the regular mushroom & swiss next time.

Everything you need to know about the PlayStation Portable.

A robber posing as a customer took a dozen not-yet available for sale video game systems from a GameStop store near Matthews.

PlayStation Portable – the current rage for gamers – goes on sale nationwide after midnight tonight. Some Charlotte-area stores are opening at that hour to sell the $249 handheld devices, known as PSPs.

The GameStop on Galleria Boulevard had 12 taken Tuesday night, when a man went into the back storage room just after 7 p.m. and helped himself, according to a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police report.

When a clerk confronted him, he tried to knock her glasses off her face. She was not seriously hurt.

Question: What tips can you give mark regarding domain registration? in terms of url name, company, pricing, and so on..

Answer: I am gonna divide my answer into two parts, Domain Registration and Web Hosting.

Domain Registration
I get my domains from Directnic.com. I have been using them for a couple of years now since they first opened up. They offer domains for 15$ a year. There are other registrars like Joker.com who provide you with domains for $7 a year. I haven’t tried those registrars and I wouldn’t risk it also. There are some unspoken services which are offered and I don’t know if these other registrars offer it. For example with Directnic, incase you forget to renew your domain they will still hold the domain for you for up to 40 days. Then after the 40 days pass they will still hold the domain for you for another 30 days but you will have to pay an extra fee to get it back. Then after that they will let the domain go into public domain. With other registrars they might not hold the domain for you at all, some might even charge you an extra fee if you forget to renew it by 1 day.

Webhosting
There are thousands and thousands of providers to choose from but I will make it easy for you. If you register with Directnic, they provide you with free hosting for your domain but you will have their banner on your site. For a small yearly fee they can provide you with simple bannerless hosting. Now if you need something better then there are two ways you can go. Windows or Linux hosting. For Windows hosting I would recommend Fasthosts. I have a reseller account with them and have been using them for over 5 years now. They are VERY reliable with maybe only 1 down time in 5 years. They have excellent service, and their servers are very fast. I would also recommend Interland as a second option here. They also provide reliable Windows hosting for a decent price. For linux hosting you have a lot more cheaper options. If bandwidth isn’t an issue then I would recommend Interland here again. They are a good hosting provider for newbies. They have a very good “Help & Advice” section with lots of information for beginners. If bandwidth is something you need, then I would recommend Powweb. PowWeb offers 5GB of bandwidth a day for as little as 7$ a month. But the downside to Powweb is that their backdoor where you set your web settings and emails isn’t very easy to use at all. Other providers you might be interested in are: Addr, Dreamhost, Pair, iPowerWeb and LunarPages.

The site was down earlier for a few hours. My domain expired today and I had forgotten to renew it!

We had a brainstorming today during lunch so we ordered Pizza Hut. I had two slices of peperroni pizza. Tonight I have to go pick up my brother from the airport, will have Burger King with nibaq there.

I think my Sony Ericsson T630 is dying. This past week while talking to people on my phone I was hearing crackling sounds. Yesterday while talking to Nibaq he told me he was also hearing the crackling sounds on his side. So yesterday night I went into the “Service Tests” menu (From main screen press > * < < * < *) and I did the mic test and as I had expected all I was hearing was the crackling sound. Seems the mic on the phone is fucked. Now I don't know what to do. I am soo bored of all the phones in the market. I don't like Nokia, I hate the samsung brand, siemens are interesting but the phones they have which I like don't have bluetooth. Motorolla also have interesting phones but even the ones with bluetooth don't work with my mac and pda the way they should. So that leaves Sony Ericsson. My past 4 or 5 phones were all Sony Ericssons. They work best with my Mac (isync) which is the most important thing I look for in a phone. But there is no SE phone that interests me now. The S700 is cool but big and expensive. The P series I dislike because of their Symbian Os. That leaves me with the K700, which is probably what I will go with. I think I should be able to find it for a decent price now. If it turns out to be more then what I want to pay I will definitely find a second hand like new condition one for a lot cheaper. I am so bored with phones...

A while back, me and Nibaq were talking about the days of Qhate. We were talking about the different roles each of us played in that blog and how those days seemed so far away. Then I realized something, Qhate was me, him and rampurple. Each one of us now has his and her own blog. We have all gone solo and each has his own separate project going on. We have become like the group New Edition. What if 3 of us decided to come back together into 1 blog?

I was just checking some Sony PSP game reviews on IGN and Gamespot and was happy to see that most of the launch games scored pretty decent and high scores. When the Nintendo DS and Ngage released the first batch of games, most of the games scored terribly low. Actually, if you take the average score of the PSP launch games which is 7.7 on IGN (7.8 on Gamespot) and compare it to the DS which has an average score of 6.4 on IGN, you will see Nintendo isn’t doing that well at all. The DS has even been out for awhile now and very little games have been released. Even the upcoming games for the DS aren’t that exciting at all. With the PSP on the other hand they have a pretty decent launch lineup with RidgeRacer, Wipeout, Tony Hawk, Need for Speed Underground: Rivals and Lumines. Plus there are some cool upcoming games coming up like Metal Gear Acid, Colin McRae Rally 2005, Grand Theft Auto and Grand Turismo. I am glad Sony decided to release a handheld system. I hate monopolies and Nintendo hasn’t been very innovative recently. It took them what, more then 10 years to come up with a backlit screen for the gameboy? Come on..

I just did a search for Podbrix on ebay and I got 13 results. Current bidding on a Keynote podbrix is $60 with 2 days to go. Original price was $17. tshirts which went on sale and finished today are currently at $76 for a medium with 5 days left for bidding. Original price, $29.

Click here for the ebay podbrix search

Today I passed by Burger King again, this time though they had received the WHOLE StarWars set. So I ordered 2 kids meals, plus an extra hamburger and I got the Darth Vader and the C3P0 toys.

They didn’t get the new toys, they still had only Chewbacca and Star Wars Falcon toy so I had a Big Fish meal.

The Imperial March – Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back

The other day I mentioned a design agency called Landor and today I am gonna mention another great agency called Interbrand. Everyone knows that Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and Van Gogh painted the Starry Night, but very few people know which agency created the Vodafone logo, yet alone which designer was behind it. Designers are not as appreciated as painters although both are creatives. Creating a brand identity I believe is harder then creating a painting. When artists paint they paint for themselves. Their painting in the end will be purchased by 1 person who might be the only one likes the painting. On the other hand a designer creating a brand identity has a lot more pressure and a much much more difficult aim. When a designer creates a brand its not just for himself, its for everyone. It will be seen by thousands and millions of people and it will become part of peoples daily life. Brands are not locked up away in some museum where viewers trickle in one at a time to see it. Brands are let out into the wild where millions and millions of people will interact with it.

Interbrand have created identities for some of our favorite brands ranging from Imation, Nikon, and Lufthansa to British Airways, 3com and Lexmark. My favorite is Petro-Canada.

For some samples of logo’s they have designed click here
For the agencies website and portfolio click here

I met with Nibaq awhile ago for lunch. He had been walking around Muthana complex trying to kill time until it was time for me to have lunch. While walking around he found a new Apple store that was still being worked on. The place is called Solize and is not connected to any of the other local dealers. We spoke to the guy incharge who was busy displaying mac hardware and he seemed like a nice person ALTHOUGH when Nibaq asked him if he supplied RAM for the powerbooks the guy asked is it Apple? Like duh… Anyway the store had two cool things. First they had second hand macs for sale although not cheap. One was a Graphite G4 500mhz powermac for 300KD. The second was a Dual 800mhz Quicksilver powermac for around 430KD. He also told me he had a Dual 1GHZ mirrored door powermac inside, but I didn’t see it nor did I ask its price. Another good thing he had although once again not cheap was Sonnet Encore CPU upgrades for older powermacs. A G4 1.4ghz upgrade would set you back 190KD at solize compared to the 450$ on amazon. The store will be completed within a week. I personally think this store will NOT succeed due to the terrible location. Its in Muthana Complex, Mezzanine 1, right in the back behind Steps and near the Asus and As Seen on TV dealers. Impossible to find and even if it was located at the main entrance, I doubt the people who frequent Muthana are potential Apple users..

Here are some pictures I took