2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

Passed by Salmiya’s Jewels (Jawharet Salmiya) yesterday night for dinner. Its a Shawerma place I frequent often because of the lack of other decent Shawerma places in the area. The Shawerma place is located on a corner of the building next to the Lime Light boutique in Salem Al Mubarek street. Its not a big place but the Shawerma guy is very friendly and nice. They don’t have meat Shawerma only chicken. They give you two options for the bread, you can either have a hot dog bun which is my favorite or the regular bread. Price of the Shawerma is 250fils and they sell cans of softdrinks for 100fils. They have Shani available. The garlic is pretty good and strong and be-worn, it will leave your breath stinky for the next couple of hours unless taken care of. The place although doesnt look it, is pretty safe and clean to eat at. I have eaten there numerous of times and never gotten sick. There is a small seating place outside but its not very comfortable. The place doesnt have much competition around if any. The closest Shawerma places to him are Kurdo which is down the road towards McDonalds, and this other unknown place in an alley accross the street from Marina Mall. Over all the place gets a 3 out of 5. Its a decent score for a shawerma place in this range.

Here are two pictures of the place:
Picture 1
Picture 2

Thanks to BusyNow for the heads up. Amazon.com is now allowing you to preorder your Sony PSP value pack for a price of $250 (KD73). The value pack includes a 32MB Memory Stick Duo, headphones with a remote control, a battery pack, and a movie/music/video game sample UMD. Sony is also tossing in a special UMD-version of the film Spider-Man 2 with the first one million PSP Value Packs sold. So preorder your PSP now, this is the link.

This is my order:
1 of Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) Value Pack
Sony Computer Entertainment; @ $249.99 each

1 of PSP Ridge Racer
Namco; @ $39.99 each

——-
Item(s) Subtotal: $289.98
Shipping & Handling: $5.48
Total Before Tax: $295.46
Tax: $25.48

TOTAL: $320.94

Update: Amazon has stopped the preordering. It seems the first batch of PSPs on Amazon have already been preordered.

Wooohooo, this was a bit of a shock to me but today I got an email from FILE Magazine telling me one of my photos will be added to their collection. So I go to their website and their it is, my photo of the Kuwait Towers on their website.. as a featured file! Thats such a compliment since the pictures on that site are really beautiful and having one of my pictures up with them in the collection is seriously the best.

Here is a screenshot of their main page
Here is a permanant link to my picture in their file
Here is a link to FILE Magazine

How could I forget to post about this. Apple announced new iPods today as expected. The new iPods include:

iPod Mini
– New 6GB Model. $249
– 4GB Model. $199
– Up to 18hrs Battery Life
– 4 Colors. No more gold, and the pink, blue and green are still there but they are now more vibrant. Silver still the same.

iPod Photo
– 30GB. $349
– 60GB. $449

20GB iPods ($299) remain. The 40GB iPod appears to have been discontinued.

So sadly, no extremely new colors for the ipod mini, and no color screen also. For more details visit Apple.com.

I was just about to leave the office to go home when I decided to check CNN for some news. Turns out Korn’s guitarist has found God and will be leaving the band. I was just listening to them all day today on the road and I find this freaky. Korns, Life is Peachy album is one of my favorites and this news is shocking. I don’t understand what finding God has to do with leaving the band. Anyway I got to go home, here is the link to the CNN article.

I passed by Mac & More today in Galleria 2000. The place was closed but the storefront is all glass so I could see what was inside. A couple of things grabbed my attention. First, the store has a large sign-age outside saying “Apple Center”. Then on the far right of that sign in small it says “Mac & More”. So ummm.. if the store is called Mac & More shouldn’t that be the largest and highlighted? Secondly the place does not match the official Apple Stores design. Thirdly they are using a red colored apple logo..?! Finally the place is tiny! Like ultra small. My pakistani barbershop is bigger.. and i am not being sarcastic here! I looked inside I could see 1 G5 powermac with an Apple display, 2 imacs, and a bunch of ipods on the shelves. I wasn’t able to see any powerbooks or ibooks nor any shuffles and mac mini’s. They seemed to have some accessories like the itrips and some skinz, but other then that nothing special. I was expecting “more” and didn’t get to see that. I am not a businessman or anything, but I personally think the store is gonna fail. It isn’t offering anything that the other retailers aren’t. If the store opened last year maybe it would have been better, but now that Apple products are being sold at Eureka and Virgin.. I don’t see how this store is gonna do any good. I have some pictures below which I quickly took from outside without the security catching me.

Mac & More 1
Mac & More 2
Mac & More 3

A bunch of people here at work are saying they heard an explosion today morning.. 5 minutes before I came in. That would mean the explosion happened around 9AM when I was in my car listening to Heart Shaped Box really loud. Anyone else heard this explosion?

PS: The sirens have been blasting for the past 10 minutes. They are test sirens… right?

Rami (Tivo Guy) got his Mac Mini yesterday. He ordered it the day they got released but since he customized his, he had to wait a lot longer to get it. He promised me he will take pictures of his Mac Mini to share with us all. As soon as he puts them up I will link to them.

I will be out of the office all day today I think. At 11AM I have an appointment with a photographer. He is supposed to shoot 46 KDD icecream buckets I need to be there when he does that. 46 buckets and 4 angles for each shot.. its gonna take forever!

Update: Here are his pictures of the Mac Mini!!

This sucks soo much. My favorite MP3 download site Allofmp3.com is being investigated by the Russian police. This site is my favorite MP3 download site because its very cheap and they have a lot of cool and hard to find albums. Downloads cost 2 cents per megabyte, so usually a song will cost you 10 cents. Thats 10 times cheaper then iTunes music store! I hope the site doesnt get shut down..

Here is a link to a cnet article about the investigation:
MP3s for pennies? Russian cops say no

According to some rumor sites, tomorrow new iPods will be released. So far the rumors point to the following:

iPod mini
– color screen
– new 6GB model
– six new colors
– 4GB model for $199
– 6GB model for $249

iPod (regular)
– two new iPods
– both priced at $349 and $449

Found this cool link via waxy that sells “Paris Made Me Change My Number” tshirts. The speed of the internet amazes me. No sooner did Paris Hilton’s phone and address book get hacked, and now there are already t-shirts making fun of it. If you don’t know what I am talking about I posted about it yesterday.

I found this website that lets you draw your own bitmap font and then download it in Truetype format onto your computer. Works with Windows and Macs.

BitFontMaker

Microsoft’s Bill Gates discussed iPods at Microsoft with news anchor Peter Jennings of ABC News.

From the transcript:

JENNINGS: On the subject of music, I read somewhere that about 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a music playing instrument or a music playing device use an iPod.

GATES: Well, I doubt that’s the case. Certainly, the iPod’s a great success.

JENNINGS: Do you have one?

GATES: No, I’m not an iPod user. I use the Creative Zen which is a fantastic product. That’s another space where, even what we have today, whether it’s iPod or the other things are only the start of what we’re gonna have in a few years. People are gonna want choices. These things are going to be smaller or better, cheaper. So, music has changed. The age of the CD is really coming to an end.

JENNINGS: The public likes this tension between you and the others as I’m sure you know. So people want to know do you have an iPod. You say you don’t have. Did iPod beat you in this issue?

GATES: Oh the iPod did a great job, but what Apple’s done there is typically what they do. It’s their, only their one music store, only their device. What we’re doing is providing choices. So it’s like the Apple computer versus the PC. With the PC you can buy from many companies so you get cheaper prices, you get more variety and here with music devices we’re coming in with the same. But they’re a strong leader in the space and I think as we gain share, people will be surprised.

Taken from Cult of Mac

I have been checking Amazon.com daily for the Sony PSP so I can preorder one for me. Today I just checked and their now is a listing for the Sony PSP on Amazon but you can’t preorder! I dont know if this will change or not, at the moment I have the Amazon PSP page as my browsers startup page so I will know once they start accepting preorders.

For those interested, this is the link.

I was at Toys R Us yesterday and guess what I got! A Hoberman Mega Sphere! Today I went back and got two more mini spheres. They are really cool? Want to see it in action, here is a video I shot earlier.

Watch Video [Quicktime Format]

Note: I shot it on the stairs at home since it is the brightest place in the house