Search: “kuwait”

The owner of Larry emailed me his pictures of when he was still in Germany. So everyone, meet Larry Von Billberg (thats his full name).

This is the list for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region according to the Economist. I guess Kuwait is in a pretty good spot.

1. Israel 8.20
2. Lebanon 6.55
3. Morocco 5.20
4. Iraq 5.05
5. Palestine 5.05
6. Kuwait 4.90
7. Tunisia 4.60
8. Jordan 4.45
9. Qatar 4.45
10. Egypt 4.30
11. Sudan 4.30
12. Yemen 4.30
13. Algeria 4.15
14. Oman 4.00
15. Bahrain 3.85
16. Iran 3.85
17. UAE 3.70
18. Saudi Arabia 2.80
19. Syria 2.80
20. Libya 2.05

[Source]

Last month I purchased an old 300mhz Apple clamshell iBook. It had 32MB of RAM and was running OS 9.2 slowly. So I ordered a Kingston 256MB RAM stick for my iBook and it arrived earlier in the week. The first thing I did once I installed it was to replace OS 9.2 with Linux. The reason simply was I needed to be able to browse on the iBook and Firefox wasn’t available for OS 9.2 and I had heard OS X would run very slow on my Mac. So Linux was my only option and after over 1 hour of installing the OS I tried it out and was very disappointed. Although it was very responsive and it did have Firefox, I wasn’t very comfortable using it and I decided to give OS X a shot. If OS X turned out to be very slow then I would come back to Linux as my last option.

I formated the drives and proceeded to install Panther (OS 10.3) onto my ibook. Installation was brisk and in less then 30 minutes it was done installing and rebooting. When the OS launched again I played around with it a bit and I was shocked. Panther was pretty responsive and very very usable. It was not slow, there was no lag and I wasn’t even bothered by the 800×600 screen resolution. I was simply amazed at how well everything was running. I quickly copied Firefox and Adium from my main mac at home and proceeded to set things up importing my bookmarks and setting up my system preferences, everything ran extremely smooth and I even managed to install OS 9.2 in case I ever needed it.

After a week of using my iBook it has finally become my main Internet browsing portal. I am getting online from my living room while watching TV and I am really enjoying it. Sure I could be surfing from the living room with Nat’s powerbook but its not mine and even when I setup my own account on her powerbook it still always felt as if I was using HER powerbook. My previous Internet portal in the living room was my Audrey and I think I will have to find another place for it (maybe the bathroom) since because of my iBook I am no longer using it. This iBook is mine and I feel right at home with it… until the next generation of iBooks get released. So far its great and I even am posting from it right now. So in conclusion a Mac capable of running OSX smoothly cost me KD25 ($85) for the iBook and KD12 ($40) for the RAM. Unbelievable fucking cheap!

When it gets cloudy, cold and wet we love it here in Kuwait. Its been raining all day today and atleast a dozen people have come up to the window next to me, look out and say what nice weather we have today. Another example would be BusyNow, I was checking his blog and he posted a picture from the Munich airport (he went on vacation) and its like cloudy and wet outside and his comments were “Im in munich now the weather is great and i like the place.”

Was just talking to my sister Rampurple, she gave me some info on what to expect at the car show which starts today.
Here is the scoop so far:

– They have the Golf GTI and the new VW Passat on display
– They have the new Dodge Charger on display
– Eclipse is finally coming to Kuwait, new model on display
– Renault Megane convertible on display
– Nissan Tiida and Toyota Yaris on display
– Lots of vintage cars on display
– Renault has their F1 car on display
– Lexus has a concept car called the LFX on display
– New 2006 Nissan Pathfinder on display

I have been wanting to shoot with medium format film for like forever but I was never able to because the camera I wanted was too expensive. I wanted the Hasselblad 503CW which costs around KD1000 in Kuwait (like $3000) which is too much to pay for something I might end up not using that much. Even a second hand older Hasselblad 501 cost hundreds of dollars on eBay. So I put my dream of shooting 6×6 pictures aside until I found out about the Holga. The Holga I believe is the cheapest medium format camera you can buy, It is very cheaply built and takes 6×4.5cm or 6x6cm shots. The lens is made from cheap plastic the same way the whole camera body is also made of cheap plastic. There are also not allot of options on the camera either, it has a fixed shutter speed and a fixed aperture, the only thing you can control is the focus and even that has only 4 options. So how much does this camera cost? Believe it or not only $19 without flash and $29 with flash. Thats like super cheap. Now the coolest part of the Holga camera is the pictures. Because of the way the camera is cheaply built the effects you get on the pictures are amazing, they look like pictures that were shot by your parents back when Madonna was still a virgin and Michael Jackson still black. I already ordered mine from Amazon without flash of course since I don’t think I have ever used flash. Once I get it I will take a couple of pictures and post them on this site. Until then here are two galleries of pictures taken by the Holga camera.

Gallery 1 (Colored Shots)
Gallery 2 (Black & White Shots)

Click here to check out the Holga on Amazon

I watched the horror movie Shutter the other day. It was my first Thai movie I had ever watched and it left me impressed. I don’t know why I keep watching these horror flicks, they freak the hell out of me, seriously.

Shutter is about this guy and girl who run over a girl one night while they were driving back home and then they leave her to die in the middle of the road. The guy and girl are both photographers and so the girl starts haunting them in their pictures. They start finding weird shadows and ghost like forms in all the pictures they take which start to freak them out. If that wasn’t enough they start seeing the dead girl in real life. It was a really freaky movie with allot of creative moments which I had never seen before in any other horror movie.

This movie also convinced me to make my own horror movie except mine will be realistic. In my movie when you see a dead girl come out of your sink in your photography dark room, you run away and you never step foot into that dark room again! Seriously I can barely watch scenes like this while the people in the movie seem to find it freaky for 5 minutes and then act like it never happened. There was one really cool scene in the movie where the guy would be sleeping and then wakes up to find someone at the end of the bed is slowly pulling away the cover, he looks down and sees the dead girl! I told Nat that was pretty cool and I might try it on her one day, she told me if I did it would also be the last day I see her! No sense of humor at all..

I don’t know how easy it is to find this movie in Kuwait and its also not available on Amazon but you could download it the way I did via torrentspy. Its a great horror flick with a really cool ending, something thats just really fucking freaky and just goes to show how creative this horror really is.

Check out this video clip of a guy pulling off a nice long wheelie on his CBR motorbike on the Gulf Road here in Kuwait. [Video 814kb]

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The editor of Bazaar has replied to the previous post Bazaar Magazine Knows Shit. This is what he had to say:

mark,for your information I am a regular reader of your blog and am always very impressed by it as I am by all of you guys!. I wish we had a tenth of the freedom you guys have in expressing yourselves.Moreover,just to clarify something to you,we dont edit writers and we dont pick and choose what we print and what we dont print depending on OUR point of view. We dont neccesarily agree with what our writers submit,but we do give them space to express themselves. Unfortunately,sometimes that means that some readers will definately not agree with something written.These views do NOT represent our point of view,and to prove it,have a look at all the positive articles on blogging and on bloggers we have had over the years.I strongly urge you to write a column regarding the article that came out with your views on the matter and I promise you it will get published in bazaar! best regards.

I am personally not a good writer (my vocabulary is very basic) but maybe another blogger out there like Nibaq, shewritesq8 or K can write an article from a bloggers point of view.

I just read a post on K The Kuwaiti’s blog about an article in Bazaar magazine on local bloggers. While the whole world is talking about bloggers and realizing their online importance, our local Bazaar magazine seems to think us bloggers don’t have a life and are just a bunch of loser hermits living at home. I guess that article basically summarizes the magazine’s naive mentality. I should blame the author of the article but I would rather blame the editor instead since he was the one who approved this crap. Maybe the Bazaar editor should try using the Internet one time and maybe check up on the definition of bloggers before he would agree to allowing a lame ass article like that get published. Oh well, it is Bazaar in the end so you can’t expect too much intelligence. [Link]

Picture by Nibaq

Back in May I posted about the new BBK logo but I didn’t know who had designed it. Well today John Avery commented on that old post and it turns out the logo was designed by his agency, Financial Design in the UK in collaboration with their associates in Bahrain, Vision. Mystery solved.

My friend told me about this place in Kuwait that can pimp out your car by making your doors open vertically instead of horizontally.. like Lamborgini’s. I think he said it costs KD1000 per door or something. So today on my way back home from work I saw this pimped out envoy with the doors open and I took a quick picture.

Oh and earlier tonight I was crossing the traffic light (walking) behind this old Ford Bronco when I saw a sticker on his rear window that said “Don’t Look Inside”, so I looked inside and wow, the guy had the whole interior of the car laid out with speakers on the bottom and the amps all around the inside windows. There were atleast 12 subs and an equal amount of amps all laid out. Really cool shit.

I think Eureka are living in a world of their own. I past by yesterday and they had the old 15inch powerbooks for KD1115 which is $3818 making it nearly $2000 more expensive then the new 15inch PowerBooks. Way to go Eureka! I think they are officially the most expensive Mac store in Kuwait.

I just got the following message with bad punctuation about a rock concert that will take place in Kuwait but it doesn’t even say where the place is and I have no clue who sent it to me:

Rock Show on 24th of November ! ,thursday, doors open at 6 . Band silent scream . For tickets call: rashid 9551602 or max 6224577 . “BE THERE” !!

1. Sony PSP
2. Apple iPod (60GB, video, black)
3. Sling Media Slingbox
4. Sony Ericsson W800i
5. Toshiba Qosmio G25-AV513
6. Archos Gmini 402 (20GB)
7. Nokia N90
8. PalmOne Treo 650
9. Motorola Razr V3
10. Logitech Harmony 880

This top 10 list is crap and was taken from Cnet. I don’t understand them, the Top 10 list includes four phones! Who must have all these 4 phones?? They should decide on 1 phone and have that on the must-have list. Anyway, here is my Top 10 must-have list:

1- Tivo (Philips Series 1)
2- Sony PSP
3- Apple iPod (60GB, video, black)
4- Sony Ericsson K750i
5- Nikon D2x
6- Apple PowerMac Quad 2.5GHZ G5
7- Audemars Piguet Juan Pablo Montoya Chronograph
8- Lamborghini Murcielago
9- Barco Computer Display
10- Shure E4 Earphones