Search: “mis”

On my way to work today as I was passing Souk Sharq on the Gulf Road I saw a few police cars parked on the side and an ambulance. They were parked on the curb near where all the old wooden fishing boats park and it looked like something bad had happened. There was a large crane also parked and I figured something must have gone wrong. So I parked my car and walked towards the crowd. As I was passing the police barrier to get to the other side two cops stopped me and asked me if I was “joumhoor” meaning crowd in Arabic. I used my Miskan technique and just pretended I didn’t speak a word of Arabic, pointed towards my camera and then towards the sea. They were like OK and they let me stay in the restricted area.

Anyway turns out they were salvaging a boat that had sunk. Their were scuba divers in the water and it seems the ambulance was there just in case anything goes wrong. I snapped a few pictures and then left back to work.

I was planning on going to the 4×4 event which is currently being held at the Mishref Fairgrounds, but after checking out some pictures taken there I don’t think I am gonna anymore. It looks really boring compared to the one they held last year at Marina Crescent. [Pictures]

The Strong Man Competition is going to be held at the Hilton Kuwait Resort this Friday the 10th of November. The event starts at 10AM to 5PM. For more information and pricing you can contact Hilton on 3725500.

update: Admission is KD12.5 and that includes food and drinks.

update2: here is the poster of the event. (Thanks Moustapha) [Poster]

I live in Salmiya, Salam Mubarek Street. The “old” Salmiya. I live right on the main shopping street and have been living on this street for most of my life.

Pre 1990 I was living in the building that had A&W, after 1990 I moved to the building across the street from it and thats where I have been living ever since. As you can imagine, I know the street very well. How well?

I remember The New Super Market before it closed down, I remember when Dairy Queen was open here and then shut down and Jashanmal opened instead. I remember buying my Thermos metal lunch box with the Dukes of Hazzard picture on it from there. I remember the night A&W opened with Mister Donuts right next to it. I remember when Majda el Roumi the famous singer came to open a perfume store right across the street from my building. I remember Hungry Bunny, I remember how after they renovated a cookie store opened inside it which had the best chocolate chunk cookies ever. I also remember the sad day when that cookie area inside got closed down.

I remember the high end stores like Channel, Versace and Cartier. It was a high end street and Rolex and Mercedes are still open here today serving as a reminder to what was once a beautiful street. I remember when Kids R Us opened and I remember what was there before it opened and after it closed. I remember the most popular music stores of their time, Soul II Soul, Bells and Swan Lake. I remember buying my original copy of Windows 95 from Computer World, I remember the small video game store on the ground floor of the same building, he had a NeoGeo in the display and I used to watch the Samurai Showdown demo play while I gazed through the glass hoping to own the system one day. I got my first Swatch from Fay stationary, I remember getting my Peter and Jane books from Family Bookshop. Fay shutdown, Family Bookshop is surprisingly still open.

Well my Salmiya isn’t what it used to be. All the upper scale stores shut down and everyones attention moved up to the Sultan Center area. All thats left here are low end stores all selling the same shit. The whole street has turned into a garbage dump. The sidewalk tiles are damaged, the trees look unhealthy, and the worst thing of all, Salmiya is slowly slowly losing its soul.

I was taking a late night walk just a while ago and I noticed the building that housed Swan Lake was going to get demolished. Thats when I realized I need to do something.

Why do old buildings get demolished and not refurbished? Salmiya (and Kuwait even) would look so much nicer if the old buildings were just redone up. Look at what was done with Beirut. They could have demolished everything and sprung up modern glass buildings but instead they decided to keep Beirut’s soul intact. Why can’t that be done here? My Salmiya really has a lot of history, how many other shopping streets in Kuwait can even begin to compare. No other has sidewalks wider then here nor is any other street located in such a good location. No other street has as much history! The Swan Lake building has a style, it can be cleaned up, updated and reopened but instead its going to get demolished and replaced by a cheap ass low end tiny crappy wannabe mall.

I want to be elected as the mayor of Salmiya. I would clean it up, repaint it, re-tile it and revive it. I don’t know who the mayor is now (if there is even such a position here in Kuwait) but I do know that he can’t be a true Salmiya dweller or else he wouldn’t let it die and rot like this. Vote for me, I won’t let everyone down.

Auction it TODAY is basically a company that will take care of selling your stuff on eBay. A Kuwait branch was announced awhile back but they just very recently opened up shop. I called them up to get an idea of how their service works and this is what I found out. Just a note, I am not 100% positive about the information below because the person I spoke to wasn’t very clear over the phone. But this basically what I understood from him.

1) You bring your item to them

2) If you don’t have an idea how much your item is worth they will research and find out how much its worth on the market

3) They will take a picture of your item, post it on eBay and take care of shipping the item to the buyer and everything else

4) In return they take a commission fee. If your item sells for under $500, they take 38% commission. If your item sells for more then $500 they take a 30% commission. The commission fee is negotiable if you have a lot of items.

5) If you list your item without a reserve and no one buys it. You pay them only KD2. If you list and item with a reserve price and no one buys it, you pay them KD7.

Auction it TODAY is located in the Free Trade Zone near Movenpick , Building D-14. You can call them on 4613325.

I personally think its a cool service but the commission rate is just absurdly high. Is this normal? I have never used a service like this before so 30% could be the standard rate and I wouldn’t know.

Hello everyone, my name is Fawaz and I am responsible for marketing communication at Jazeera Airways, in addition to being an amateur blogger of course. We have been reading your questions about Jazeera Airways on this blog over the past few months. Questions that ranged from “how can we afford fares as low as KD 5?” To questions about our brand name. In an effort to answer all your questions, we recently asked Mark to gather questions you had for Jazeera Airways and in return we promised him that we would answer all of them, exclusively on this blog. Lets start

Mark: How can you afford to offer super low fares?

This is a great question that I will answer in two parts. First, we prefer to fly our planes full of travelers paying less per seat rather than flying with less travelers paying more. Other airlines prefer high fares and less passengers, which does not make sense to us. Why would they want to impact less people? For us, we enjoy flying people and being part of their lives.

The second part involves our business model that works to achieve high efficency and a lower operational cost base. In other words, we do more with less. We achieve our high efficiency by employing

1. state of the art technology to streamline processes
2. hardworking, multitasking, highly motivated team

In sum, we can afford super low fares because our business model is based on volume more than yield, and because we depend on leading technologies and great team to lower our cost.

Follow-up: How are you able to lower your cost?

We are able to maintain a lower cost base and high level of quality and safety through three main ways:

1- Recruitment- We recruit highly motivated and committed team members. This is crucial as it has direct impact on day-to-day cost. Being able to wear different ‘hats’ (so to speak) and do the work of several people is a quality we seek in and build in our team members. That’s why we call our people our ‘high flyers’.

2- Aircraft utilization – Aircraft on the ground do not make money, so we keep our aircraft in the air where they do make money. We achieve this through quick turn-arounds at the gate. Our planes arrive at a destination, wait for our travelers to disembark, board return travelers, and fly back to base ready to take off again in less than 45 minutes.

3- A fleet of single-type fleet: the Airbus A320.

If you had Porsche and a Ferrari and Lamborghini in your drive way, you would need three different specialized garages to service them with three different mechanics and three different spare parts inventories. On the other hand, if you had three Porsches you would only need to contract a single garage to service all three and your maintenance costs would be much lower. Aircraft are the same, though much more sophisticated. Allow me to elaborate.

If an airline had an A320, an A310, an A340, and a 777, they would need certified captains, first officers, cabin crew for each type of aircraft. In this case, if a 777 pilot falls sick with the flu, an A320 pilot cannot just jump in the captain’s seat of a 777 unless she is trained on a 777. Because of this, airlines with multiple aircraft types in their fleet need to have more pilots to cover scenarios like this, more engineers who do nothing but wait for someone to get sick, and spare parts inventories to cover all types. This creates redundancies and inneficiency.

In our case, we have an all-A320 fleet. We do not need to hire more crew since any of our crew can jump in any of our aircraft and take-off and any of our engineers is licensed to work on any of our aircraft, and our spare parts inventory covers all our aircraft.

4- Investment in Technology – By investing heavily into technology, we were able to raise efficiency, reduce operational cost and drive the price of tickets down even further. We currently employ over a dozen world class technology systems and tools that range from the booking systems we use to satellite aircraft monitoring that tells us the status and integrity of each aircraft while it is in the air no matter where it is on earth, and automatically dispatches support teams and parts to the destination airport if the situation required. These are only some of the benefits of having world class Lufthansa Technik engineers and technology working with us and for us.

I have this bad habit of miscalculating how much food I can eat during Ramadan. I spend the whole day without food and when its finally time to eat I over order. Today for example I had lunch at 6:30PM and I ended up going to Burger Boutique with Nat. We ordered 4 mushroom+swiss sliders, 4 midnight sliders, 4 west coast sliders and 1 street style pommes noisettes. Nat ended up eating two sliders, I had 7 and there were still 3 left. I actually should have stopped eating after 5 sliders but I didn’t and now I feel like I am going to blow up. I really should learn from my mistakes but I never seem to do so.

Today I got set up with an old 650cc Kawasaki bike. Since I was doing so well on the smaller 180cc bike I got moved up to the bigger one. I don’t like this new bike though, its too tall and feels weird. I had two “special” moments with the bike one of which was really scary and strange.

I was turning a curb with the bike going a bit quickly when for some reason instead of pressing the brakes to slow down I pulled on the clutch, then when I realized my mistake I panicked and turned the throttle for more power.. I don’t know why I did that instead of pressing the brakes but my next move was even worse… I let go of the clutch. After that everything went really quick and blurry, I just remember I put my two feet on the ground, then front wheel of the bike lifted up and I did a wheelie and then somehow I managed to control the bike like a wild horse, I pulled it back under me and continued riding. I was in like total shock cuz I should have been thrown to the floor.

The second moment I had with the bike was when I was coming to a stand still and I don’t know what happened but I lost balance and the bike fell down on its side. The problem is this bike was big and heavy so to put it back up was really difficult, but I managed without any help.

Today was Nat’s first lesson, I can’t say anything about it because she threatened to shutdown the blog if I do.. so you can imagine how her lesson went.

I complain too much, anyone who visits this site often will know that. I complain so much that its actually become part of my sites identity and thats not a good thing because I don’t want to be known as Mark, the guy who complains a lot. Not only that but my blog is also starting to get me in trouble.

So far in the past year my boss at work for example has been contacted four times by different companies I had complained about complaining to him about how I have been complaining about them. Luckily, my boss has been very understanding plus these issues just keep getting him more intrigued by this blog thing. But, I have also been pushing my luck.

For me, my blog world is a complete separate entity from my work world. But in reality they are not separate entities because I am not anonymous. I am the same person that goes to work every morning and also posts here at night. I chose not to be anonymous.

This is why I have decided I will no longer be complaining about large multimillion dollar corporations. You can call me a sell out, you can call me a chicken but in the end of the day you are not in my shoes. The blog is only a hobby and its not worth me losing my job, getting sued or getting arrested over. I just went through my blog and deleted a lot of posts which I believe at one point in the future can get me in trouble with the lawyers. So if anything is missing, now you know why.

Say hello to the new nicer me…

Just tried the new slider at Burger Boutique called Midnight and wow it was just amazing. Its my favorite slider they have at the moment.

Note: A slider is a small bite size burger

Today morning I went with Nat and the mandoob from TriStar to get our motorbike learners permit. I don’t know what mandoob is in English, but he is basically the guy who helps out with government paperwork. Todays experience like most government related work was exhausting, and the terrible humid weather didn’t help.

I picked up the mandoob at 9:30 and we headed to the Hawlly Traffic Department located in Jabriya. First place we went to inside was the typing room, there you give some guys your documents and for 1KD they fill out the forms for you on the computer and then print them out. Once we got the forms we headed into another much larger room filled with chairs and numbered booths. We headed to the very far end where we waited inline to get our papers signed by a high ranking police officer. This guy was very nice, he took a look at Nats form and he was like in English “you want to drive bicycle?” she was like yeah I want to ride a motorbike. He then proceeded to explain to her how driving in Kuwait is not easy and that if you are in a car its really dangerous so you can imagine how dangerous riding a bike is. He was like I could sign this paper for you if you want but I wouldn’t recommend it, she told him sign it please and he did. After that he told us we needed to go to Qurtoba to get an eye test so we left the place and headed there.

Once we got to Qurtoba I was worried I would fail the eye test. My vision isn’t perfect, I wear glasses when I am in front of the computer but I should be wearing them the whole time. Nat also has glasses which she wears in front of the computer and TV so she was worried she would fail too. So we go into the building and give in our forms and wait for our turn. 5 minutes later they call Nats name and she goes in for the test. A minute later she comes out telling me she passed although she made a mistake, her score was 24/6 for her left eye and 6/6 for her right. They called my name next and I went in. I don’t think I have seen an older eye test setup before. You sit in an old wooden school chair on one side of a room with a tall white plastic lamp behind you with the letters stuck onto it. You look ahead into a mirror stuck on the wall, cover an eye and read out the letters. It was really easy since they let me read out the big sized letters so I aced it with a score of 6/6 for both eyes. They signed the papers and we headed back to Hawally.

The weather was incredibly hot and humid and traffic was a bitch but we got to the traffic department and went back into the big room again back to the nice high ranking cop. He looked at the papers and told us to go to counter number 1. I get to counter 1 show him my papers only to have them rejected. The guy told me because I got my eye test today I needed to come back tomorrow to get the learners permit. I told him why do I have to do that, can’t I just get the permit done today? He was like come back tomorrow. So we were leaving the place when the high ranking cop asks us if we were done. I told him what the guy at counter 1 told us, he seemed irritated at the guy and took out some stamps from his pocket and stamped and signed out papers. He told us we needed to get a 10KD postage stamp and head over to counter 7. We got the stamps and headed to counter 7 where a guy took all our papers and filled them into the computer. He then told us to go get our pictures taken at the far end of the room.

There was a young woman sitting in a small room with a computer, a scanner and a small Canon digital camera attached to a cheap tripod. She told us to sit on the chair in front of the camera and she took our pictures. She then sent us back to counter 7. We got there and the guy started printing out our learners permit on his HP color laser printer. Although all the equipment they were using were off the shelf consumer electronics it was still cool that they were doing this. Finally the guy sent us to office 20, yes office, thats where the highest ranking official is located, we gave him our freshly printed learners permit and he signed it and we were done.

The whole process took around 2 hours and cost us KD11 per person. I am not sure but I am guessing this is the same process for getting cars learner permit. Below you will find some helpful information like papers needed and google map of the locations.

Papers needed for motorbike learners permit:
– 2 photographs, 3×4
– Work permit copy
– Passport copy (picture and visa page)
– Civil ID copy
– Driving license copy (if you dont have it then I believe you are required to do a medical test)

Location Maps:
– Hawally Traffic Department
– Qurtoba eye test place

Holla started work today at my agency. Regular readers might at one point or another read his “colorful” comments on the blog or maybe his posts in the forum. I met him in person a few weeks ago and I found out he was actually a copywriter. Since I had been looking for a copywriter to partner up with at work, he ended up applying here and getting the job. We are like Ponch and Jon from CHiPs except Holla is still missing a bike.

NASA lost 700 boxes which included a lot of important items including the original tape recordings of Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Misplacing 1 box I can understand, but misplacing 700??? [Link]

Tonight I met up with the owners of Burger Boutique. For some reason I always imagined them to be old but they turned out to be young and one of them was even with me in high school. They are very cool guys and they are extremly passionate in what they do. Tonight they relaunched the Burger Boutique website so check it out. [Link]

Definition according to Urban Dictionary:

A phenomenon which typifies Murphy’s law. The absolute worst possible outside circumstance which can and will negatively affect the current situation. Greater than minor inconveinienves, this is the sort of instance which all hope of success is lost.

An “Oh Shit…Meteors” event is also notable for the lack of control the participant has over the situation. In spite of all careful planning, this is the sort of situation in which all hell breaks loose for no apparent reason.

1) While driving to a friend’s wedding, you experience heavy traffic and are ten minutes late = minor inconveinence.

2) While driving to a friend’s wedding, you crash into another driver resulting in all sorts of pain and misery = tragic accident.

3) While driving to a friend’s wedding, an awkwardly positioned nail in the road hits your front tire and pops it, which causes it to fly back and blow out your back tire. The resulting blow-out causes you to spin, knocking your way across the road and into several other cars, which bounce you back into other cars, resulting in a fifty car pile-up which results in a massive explosion. In spite of all of this, you still survive, and as you are crawling out of the fiery wreckage you look up to the sky, only to see a ball of pain and doom, known among as a meteor, flying out from the sky, headed directly for you = Oh Shit…Meteors