Search: “ace”

Reign Over Me
The movie was slow paced but it never got dull and the soundtrack and the whole mood of the movie was very indie which made it feel less mainstream and more artsy. I don’t usually like Adam Sandlers non-comedic roles but in Reign Over Me it suited him and Don Cheadle was also a great supporting actor.

The Good German
I love war movies and I was really looking forward to this one since it was filmed to look like an old black and white film. Problem is the story turned out to be weak. I still enjoyed watching it but not enough to recommend it. The movie stars George Clooney and Tobey Maguire. If you feel like watching a black and white movie get Vertigo.

Disturbia
A guy witnesses a murder and the killer finds out the guy saw him so he tries to kill the guy. A very cliché storyline and one that I hate.

Ocean’s Thirteen
This movie was wayyy better than the previous one. While Ocean’s Twelve was boring and starred Catherine Zeta-Jones, Thirteen stars Al Pacino and the whole story is based in fast paced Vegas. Lots of funny moments and the all star team of actors are all back minus the women thankfully.

The Bourne Ultimatum
Too many chase scenes, is that a problem? I know its weird but I found it exhausting to watch. I can’t imagine anyone but Matt Damon playing the role of Jason Bourne, he’s got this cold neutral robotic look that suits the part perfectly. On the other hand I could think of at least 20 other women who could play the part of Julia Stiles. Has anyone seen her in The Prince & Me? I have no clue why they couldn’t find anyone else…

Year of the Dog
How could they go wrong with a movie staring John C. Reilly???

Fast Track (originally The Ex)
Starring Zach Braff, Jason Bateman and Donal Logue, three very funny comedians from three different very funny shows (Scrubs, Arrested Development and Grounded for Life) so I was expecting this movie to be extremely funny. It wasn’t. The funniest parts I had already seen in the trailer and what was left wasn’t good enough. REALLY disappointing.

I finally managed to finish working on the new redesigned template and I just activated it. I took all your feedback into consideration and I tried my best not to change the design that much as you can see. Although the template looks similar to the older one under the hood its completely new. The coding is much cleaner and everything should look better and work faster. There might be some minor kinks here and there which I will find and fix in the next few days. Overall I am pretty excited about the face lift, I think it looks much better than the older one and is less cluttered and cleaner. While I was at it I also upgraded to the latest WordPress and I am now running 2.3.

The theme I am using is called Grid Focus by 5thiryone but it’s been heavily modified by me.

Last month while coming back from London my favorite pair of traveling earphones, my Shure E2’s stopped working properly. They lasted me for three years and I guess it was time I got a new pair. Following that trip I tried flying with another pair of headphones but they just weren’t the same. My AKG 81’s were too big and bulky while my PX100’s barely isolate any sound. I needed to get another pair of in-earphones and after a lot of research I decided to go with the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 5 Pro (really long name).

Why and what are in-earphones?
Unlike the regular earphones that come with the iPod, in-earphones actually go into your ear canal, they don’t just sit on the outside. Some people find it strange and uncomfortable having something placed inside the ear but I never had that problem. If you want to know how they feel just take two fingers and place one in each ear. First thing you will notice is how they isolate sound and thats one of my favorite things about in-earphones. It makes them perfect for traveling since they block out the plane engine noise and anything else inside the plane. With music playing loudly you could have someone standing in front of you and screaming at the top of their lungs and you wouldn’t hear them.

The reason I went with the Super.fi’s and not another model is mostly because of the price to performance ratio. I didn’t want to pay over $200 for my earphones and I didn’t want something under $100. In my price range the Super.fi’s had the best performance according to numerous reviews online. In fact it sometimes even outperformed more expensive models.

USWS delivered my Super.fi’s two days ago and the first thing I noticed when I took them out of the box were how much lighter and smaller they were compared to my older Shures. When I put them on I also noticed they fit a lot better into my ear compared to the Shures and since they were lighter after a few minutes it felt like they weren’t there. I was really impressed at the build quality and the snug fit and I still hadn’t experimented with the other rubber sleeve sizes included in the pack or my usual favorite foam ones. Sound wise I also noticed a big difference. The Super.fi’s ran louder than my Shures at the same volume and they also sounded a lot more clearer. My old Shures had a single driver for every ear which handled the lows, mids and highs all alone. The Super.fi’s on the other hand have dual drivers for every ear, one to handle the lows and one to handle the mids and highs. The much more expensive Triple.fi 10 have three drivers for every ear, one for every range.

So far I am really impressed with the Super.fi’s. I only listened to them for a few minutes but it was instantly obvious how much better they performed compared to my Shures. Currently I am burning in my Super.fi’s, they’ve been playing music non stop for around 48 hours and they still have another 48 to go before they are ready to start using.

What is burning in?
You know how when you buy new jeans or shoes they are not very comfortable the first few times you wear them? Then the more you wear them the more comfortable they get? Well the same with earphones/headphones. When you first buy them they are stiff and over time the diaphragms loosens up. Since I don’t want to wait a weeks for them to loosen up I just plug them to my stereo and leave them running for nearly 100 hours. You can find more info [Here]

Anyway, once I get back from London later this month I will post a full review on the Super.fi’s. I got my black ones from Amazon for $169, they also come in red, white and clear. [Amazon]

I am at the Beirut airport now waiting for my flight back to Kuwait. The airport is empty with barely any passengers. The part of the airport I’m in is completly vacant except for me which is cool since its very quiet and peaceful. ‎(Posted from my Nokia e61i)

Been up since 7:30 shooting. We are shooting outdoors today and for some stupid reason I didn’t get my shades. We are now at this really cool park that isn’t open to the public because the trees inside are still growing. Geo my dog would love this place. (Posted from my Nokia e61i)

A few weeks ago a new shawerma place opened up called Mr Subs. I got emails from readers of the blog telling me about it and some friends also recommended it to me. What made this shawerma place special is that it was owned by Samir Saeed, the owner of Mr Baker.

The place is located in Jabriya, over looking the 4th Ring Road near where Mr Baker is. I passed by last week for dinner and it wasn’t that hard to find, you take the first right after Hardees, then another right so that you are driving in the direction of the 4th Ring Road and at the end of the street take a left to find Mr Subs on your left hand side.

Mr Subs serve a variety of stuff other than shawerma but I wasn’t interested in them. I ordered two chicken shawermas and was told I had a choice of 3 different bread to choose from. I chose the regular Arabic bread, the other two choices were a burger bun like bread and a bread that had olives in it or something. First thing that struck me about the place is how clean it was. It’s probably the cleanest shawerma place I have ever seen, the area around the shawerma grills were spotless which really impressed me. Sadly that was the most impressive thing about the place.

After picking up my two shawermas I went back to the car and started munching on them. I wasn’t very impressed. The shawermas reminded me a lot of the Kurdo shawermas which I am not a fan of. Its what I call commercial shawerma and its mostly because of the sauce they use. Notice I said sauce not garlic because thats basically what both Mr Subs and Kurdo use. Its a consumer friendly replacement to regular garlic most shawerma places use. The sauce which probably does use a bit of garlic doesn’t taste like garlic, instead it tastes more like mayonnaise which I can’t stand. Its also very liquidi which makes the shawerma feel greasy.

Another problem I had with the shawermas were the price, starting from 600 fils per shawerma its not cheap. The cheapest shawerma they have is the one that comes in Arabic bread, the other two choices of bread add 100 or 200 fils more to the price. At 600 fils a shawerma is also puts it really close in the price range of the Villa Fayrouz Express shawerma which tastes a lot better and is of much better quality. Oh and while I was waiting for my shawermas at Mr Subs I saw them pre grilling their burgers. They were grilling their burgers and then placing them in a container so that if someone ordered a burger they could just place it on the grill and heat it up. Although the place is really clean I didn’t like the idea they were pre-grilling their burgers. Anyway for the final score I decided to give their shawermas a 3 out of 5.

A while back Villa Fayrouz Express opened up on Baghdad Street in Salmiya. It’s a take-out version of their popular Lebanese restaurant of the same name minus the express. Since the place is in my neighborhood I had to try their chicken shawermas and I have to say I was surprised.

I was surprised because each chicken shawerma cost 750 fils! That officially makes it the most expensive shawerma I have ever reviewed and it also makes it the most expensive shawerma I know of in Kuwait. 750 fils, thats three times the price of a shawerma at Badar Al Badoor and more than double that of Dodo. So is it worth it?

It takes only one bite to realize why the shawerma is priced so expensive. Its the quality of chicken they use, it tastes fresh and healthy. From the chicken to the garlic its all just top notch quality. They also aren’t stingy, I can barely finish two sandwiches at Villa Fayrouz Express while at Dodo for example I could easily have three in addition to a side order of fries. The sandwich isn’t huge mind you, its fat and short but not huge.

So back to the main question, is it worth 750fils? No, I personally don’t think so. I mean I really don’t care where I eat shawerma (except for this one place next to my office) as long as it tastes good. I have now had shawermas ranging from 200 to 750 fils and I can confidently say that I would rather have Badar Al Badoor’s 250 fils shawerma over Villa Fayrouz Express. Not because for the price of one shawerma at Villa Fayrouz Express I can have two shawermas and a kofta sandwich at Badar Al Badoor, but I also felt Badar Al Badoor’s shawerma was more fun. Shawerma isn’t meant to be healthy or made from great quality, its supposed to just taste good and thats it. Still though for people who care about hygene and are looking for a good shawerma Villa Fayrouz Express is highly recommended. My final score is a 4 out of 5.

Disappointed, thats one way to summarize the movie for me. Maybe I was hoping the movie would stay true to the original cartoon or maybe I was hoping more then just a handful of transformers in the movie but whatever the reason is I didn’t like the movie.

Firstly I think there really wasn’t a proper story. To me it looked like the movie was written around the fight scenes. Its as if they went ok, we need to have one big fight here, two big fights there, a small one here and a nice big one in the end, now go write a movie. I know this movie is just an action packed movie with special effects made for the general audience but after Lord of the Rings this is no longer an excuse. You can have amazing special effects, lots of fight scenes, great characters AND a deep intriguing story and still make it mainstream and a box office success. Seriously with a franchise like Transformers how hard could it have been to write a proper script?

My second problem is the actual Transformers, they neither resemble nor act like their cartoon counterpart. I hate the super detailed industrial look of the movie robots, I prefer the sleeker and simpler cartoon version. Another thing, Megatron is supposed to be a gun not a plane, Ratchet is supposed to be white (thats why my MacBook is called Ratchet), Bumblebee is supposed to be a VW Beetle and Starscream is supposed to be annoying as hell! I used to love watching Megatron and Starscream argue with each other in the original cartoon but it doesn’t happen in this movie. I can’t help but feel this movie should have been an epic not a quickly scrambled together movie. Look at Star Wars and Star Trek! Because the story was short but the fight scenes extremely long, we never got a chance to get close to any of the Transformers, maybe Bumblebee since he had the largest role but he also hardly spoke. All of them actually barely had any speaking lines! My favorite part in the movie without ruining it for people who haven’t watched it is when the Transformers went to the guys house to get “the thing”. There were a bit of funny moments there and we got a feel of the different personalities of the robots but that was it, no other scene even got close to that.

Also, whats up with the heavy advertising in the movie? The guy is video conferencing with his wife and there is a huge ass “Cisco Networking” logo on the screen, a Transformer crash lands from space and visits the Pontiac dealership, another a Hummer dealer. Oh and they are ALL American cars! They took Bumblebee, a German VW Beetle and turned him into an American Cheverolet Camaro. Later in the movie you also have the Sprite machine and Xbox 360 transforming into robots which is fine if all these incidents above happened casually but instead they were very obvious which I felt was tacky.

On a positive note I really enjoyed the acting of the main kid in the movie and the visual effects of the robots was just incredible. The movie was fun to watch but I wouldn’t watch it again. My final score is a 3 out of 5.

My favorite thing about Ramadan is that I get off work at 3PM. This allows me to have a ton of free time to do stuff I wouldn’t usually do like riding my bicycle.

Yesterday I went riding with Nat and the weather was surprisingly great. We rode from Marina Mall to Scientific Center, a short route since we didn’t want to take a longer one in case our bikes had developed problems after a year of storage. Imagine riding all the way to the Kuwait Towers and then finding out the bike has a problem and you have to walk back all the way to Salmiya. It would suck…

Riding the bicycle is really different from the motorbike. For one thing falling off a bicycle is no longer a big thing. Nat crashed yesterday when her bicycle slid on a curve and she just got up and continued riding. When the same thing happened to me with my motorbike I ended up with road rash, a fractured wrist and a large repair bill.

There are two brands of bikes I would recommend people getting, Trek and Cannondale. I personally prefer and ride Cannondale. When it comes to road bikes I would go with Trek but for mountain bikes Cannondale all the way. The Cannondale dealer is located in Shuwaikh, you take the first right after McDonalds on Canada Dry street and once you reach the small round-a-bout the dealer would be on your right hand corner. Trek on the other hand is available at GoSport in The Avenues and eXtreme Sports at Marina Waves.

If you are looking for a place to ride, the Gulf Road is a good place to start. For a short trail you can start off at Marina Crescent and ride all the way to Scientific Center and back. For a longer trail you can go from McDonalds on the Gulf Road and head all the way to Souk Sharq and back. Both routes use a sea side trail away from dangerous car traffic.

Cannondale have soooo many hot bikes to choose from, my favorite being the Gemini but the prices can get ridiculous with models costing KD1000 and up. You can spend a lot less of course, a member in the forum recently purchase a Trek for only KD148 and you can even get bikes for under KD50 even although I wouldn’t recommend them at all. The difference between the cheap and expensive bikes is usually weight, quality of parts, the frame and the finishing. Cheap bikes are usually heavy, equipped with the crappiest brands and handle like crap.

There used to be a riding club that met up every Friday at like 7AM to go riding but I don’t think they do that anymore. If anyone knows of another riding club please leave it in the comments below.

I just found these four commercials on YouTube. They started airing on TV at the beginning of Ramadan and they were done by Caviar.

NBK 2007 TV commercial (WaterSki)
NBK 2007 TV commercial (Space)
NBK 2007 TV commercial (Race)
NBK 2007 TV commercial (Dama)

For the past two days I’ve been working on a redesigned template for this blog. I really don’t have any major problem with the current design but I do think there are a couple of areas that does need addressing. I was planning on working on the redesign in secret and then overnight just surprise everyone with the makeover but I decided going the other route. If large companies like CNN and Amazon are allowing their users to see and give feedback of their redesign while still in progress why can’t I?

Now I still have a lot more work to do on the redesign but you can take a peak at it by going to unex-t.com/blog. This is more or less how the new redesigned site will look like, most of the changes I am currently working on are the smaller details. I probably will replace the header with a newer one, I might not, I am still not sure about that. At one point I was actually thinking of rebranding from 248AM.com to markandnat.com but decided against it the last minute.

Anyway your feedback is welcomed, I still have a lot of work to do and might take your ideas into consideration. Keep in mind there are a lot of things that aren’t working yet or looking strange on the test site. [Link]

Update: Here is a screenshot of how the new design might look with a black background. I am finding it a bit claustrophobic compared to the white background version. [Picture]

Update 2: Here is another option with a black background which I think works better than the version in the first update but I think I still prefer the full white background. [Picture]

https://view.break.com/362761 – Watch more free videos

I was hoping for Rambo 4 the action would take place back in the city like the first Rambo but it looks like its going to take place in a Vietnam like location which is similar to Rambo 2. They should have at least made him fight the Al-Qaeda or the North Koreans. [Link]

Marzouq was supposed to get me an iPhone with him from the States but he couldn’t buy one from the store without signing up for an AT&T contract. So I decided to order one online from the Apple Store.

Thing is because of all my traveling and shopping these past 3 weeks my credit card is completely maxed out, like KD80 over the limit. I figured let me place an order on the store and see if it works, if it didn’t then it didn’t and if it did great. Surprisingly, it went through. MTC Zain couldn’t charge my last months phone bill to my card cuz it was maxed out yet Apple somehow managed to charge an iPhone!

Anyway for those of you who want to buy an iPhone, Amazon.com don’t sell it but you can purchase the phone directly from the US Apple Store online. For your shipping and billing address fill in your USWS or Aramex address. For your credit card you can use a local card. I personally used my NBK Visa card and it worked. I don’t know if it works with cards from other banks like Gulf Bank, Burgan etc.. but I am guessing they should. Enjoy!

So yesterday I was kinda pissed that I forgot my phone in Dubai but now I am actually enjoying it. It’s been a peaceful day so far and although I should be getting my phone back tomorrow via DHL I think I am going to keep it turned off and see how long I can last without it. If I want a pager (beeper) can I still get one here in Kuwait?

Last year I posted about this very strange tourism video I found on YouTube in which three women try to convince the world that Kuwait is a great place to visit. You would think that alone was strange but the three women then take us on a tour around Kuwait highlighting some of its best parts which include Canary Restaurant, Taxi Al Resala and some unknown electronics store. It was extremely weird, cheesy and funny but now the wait is over, the full version of the film is out!

It’s 43 minutes long but you really don’t need to watch it all to realize how unbelievably bizarre it is. The whole time I am just thinking to myself what the hell are they talking about!? In one scene early on in the movie they point out how the new Kuwait is getting built side by side to the old Kuwait and how old and new architecture is merging and creating a new better future. It all sounds decent and corny except for the fact the video accompanying this theory is of the old back alley streets of Salmiya and their idea of old Kuwait are the 30 year old nearly demolished crack houses while the new architecture of Kuwait are the cheap ass multistory tiny bedroom built cheaply out of cardboard to make money apartment buildings. Actually, that does sound about right. A few minutes later into the documentary they take us to meet one of the “important faces in Kuwait”… the sales manager of Holiday Inn!

They are unpredictable and you never know where they will be taking you next but surprisingly I love it! It just keeps getting weirder and weirder and I can’t stop watching it. Although its a really really really terribly shot and produced movie and although their idea of whats cool in Kuwait is very demented, the documentary still manages to crack me up. It’s soooo unreal!

Full version of the documentary on Kuwait [Link]
Short version of the documentary on Kuwait [Link]
Website of people behind the documentary [Link]