Nabil Al-Jeraisy, Vice Chairman and CEO, stated that City Bus is committed to providing world class public transportation services to its customers in Kuwait in cooperation with the Traffic Department Authority to contribute in the reduction of traffic congestion and support the environmental protection agenda.
…
He also affirmed to providing a better service to citizens and residents alike, and to encourage drivers to abandon their cars and use these public transport services. Here Al-Jeraisy invited both citizens and residents to try the new “double decker buses”, which will begin its maiden trip today on Route 999 starting from Sheraton hotel bus stop in Kuwait City going along the coastal road of the Arabian Gulf passing through “Al-Ta’awen” street to Fahaheel costal road ending in Fahaheel area and then return. [Source]
I doubt people are going to abandon their cars for busses anytime soon, but I like his optimism. Now the metro on the other hand, I’d use that for sure.
Nintendo’s new console, the Switch is coming out on March 3rd. There’s a lot of positive hype surrounding the release of Nintendo’s new console which is a hybrid of a home console and a portable console. I pre-ordered one back in January from Amazon US for $299 while Mark pre-ordered his from the Walmart website. If you’re interested in getting one yourself, there are two ways to do so:
The first option is to get it locally. Xcite have a sign-up page to get a notification once they have more information on the Switch, but theres no mention on when they’re expecting to get it. Then there’s Rihab. I paid a visit to Rihab on Friday to ask if they were getting the Switch and how much they were expecting to sell it for. I wasn’t given a concrete answer, but I was told that there would be a shortage of consoles locally, which isn’t surprising since Nintendo is only making two million units available at launch worldwide. I was also told the approximate price of the Switch would be KD150 (approximately $490) which I found hard to believe since I’m expecting it to go as high as KD250 on the first few days of launch. The shops I asked were adamant that it wouldn’t go that high up, but I’m still skeptical.
Your second option is to pre-order a Switch online and ship it to your forwarding mailbox like Shop&Ship or PostaPlus. It’s sold out in most of the US stores but they’re still available to pre-order at a bunch of UK ones including:
The UK stores are selling the Switch for slightly more than the US stores at KD106 verses KD98 (with tax). But, it should still be cheaper than buying it locally… at least in the beginning.
Some of you might have already heard about this but for those of you who haven’t, a proposal was put forward to transform Salem Al Mubarak street in old Salmiya (where I live basically) to a pedestrian only street with brand new futuristic looking buildings.
As someone who’s lived on this very street for 30+ years, and as someone who truly loves and experiences this street every single day, I can with full confidence say… none of this is ever gonna materialize.
There is a higher chance that Kuwait will beat UAE to building the first city on Mars, than there is for old Salmiya to transform into this wonderland.
I’m not being pessimistic, I’m just being realistic.
The street is in shambles and the municipality doesn’t care, nobody cares and these renderings to me are a joke, they’re making a mockery of the current situation. It’s like some rich kid passing through some poor village in Africa and decides to stop to take a selfie with some street kids pretending to be helping them out for his instagram account before driving off in his convoy to a luxury resort.
It’s insulting.
There is no way on earth the transformation project will ever happen without demolishing the whole area, kicking out all the low income expats and then rebuilding the street from the ground up, the main street AND all the back streets as well. The metro project? That’s gonna happen. The railway project? That’s gonna happen. Kuwait building a city on Mars? That’s gonna happen. But this Salmiya project, it’s never gonna happen.
If you want to see more renderings on this concept as well as get more information, check out this thread I started on [SkyScraperCity]
Yesterday while getting my FJ serviced I decided to pass by the dealerships check out if there was anything interesting. One thing I found surprising was the fact a lot of dealerships still had 2015 cars that were unsold. So for example Jeep had a brand new 2015 Grand Cherokee SRT for a heavily discounted price of KD16,000 while a new 2017 model goes for KD24,000. Same with Nissan who had 2015 model year 370’s selling for a heavily discounted price of KD9,000.
Anyway, the cars below are the ones I figured car fanatics might be interested in:
Nearly forgot about this but 12 years ago today, I started 248AM and published my first post. Here’s a line I wrote two years ago but one that still holds true today:
I don’t know how long I will be doing this for, I just know that I really love doing it and I’ll keep doing it as long as you keep coming back here to read what I have to say*. Thank you everyone for being the best readers a blogger could hope for.
Dear Tourist Enterprises Company, could we please have 90s throwback nights once a month at the ice skating rink?
Back in the early 90s, the ice skating rink was one of the coolest places to hang out in Kuwait. There used to be an arcade over there filled with gaming machines, pool and air hockey tables as well as a small restaurant that served simple food like burgers and fries. The ice skating rink itself used to be packed with people and there was even a DJ that would be pumping out the latest hits. Walking into the ice skating rink felt like walking into a club with now classics like SNAP! – The Power or Soul II Soul – Back To Life blasting loudly over the speakers.
Having a 90s throwback night once a month would be a great way to bring people back to the ice skating rink, DJ Bonita even volunteered to take charge of the music, blasting us with all the great 90s hits. Imagine how much fun that would be? So TEC, lets set it up!
My favorite coffee place Arabica just opened up their second location in Kuwait and it’s HUGE. The new location which they’ve called the Arabica Roastery consists of two main areas, the main coffeeshop with interior and outdoor seating, and the roastery where they’ll be selling beans to businesses (B2B) as well as offer training on how to make coffee.
Arabica will also be selling coffee making gear at this location. So for example you’ll be able to buy an AeroPress or a coffee dripper from them, and they’ll show you how to use them properly and get the best tasting coffee out of them. With the new location they’ve also introduced new items on their menu, most notably Matcha Latte and baguette sandwiches.
The new Arabica Roastery is located in Shuwaikh on the same street as Lilly Center and right next to the newly opened Healthy Feast. Their opening hours as of this post is from 4PM to 10PM. Here is their location on [Google Maps] and their instagram is @arabica.kuwait
Around 10 days back there was a rumor going around that Talabat went under a cyberattack. I got a few messages saying that Talabat accounts were hacked and that users credit card and Knet information was compromised. I figured that was bullshit because Talabat doesn’t save our bank details, I wish it did so I wouldn’t have to enter my Knet information every single damn time I order something. A couple of days later, the Talabat CEO issued the following statement:
“We are aware of the rumors circulating today around Talabat, and would like to reassure our customers that these are absolutely false. We have experienced no disruption within our system and no customer issues have been reported around this. Our online payment is processed via trusted third party platforms and we do not store any banking information on our system. As a business that was established in Kuwait in 2004, data security is paramount to our business model and we have made security and privacy a core part of our structure.” Abdulhamid Alomar, CEO, Talabat
After that things kinda went quiet until yesterday people started leaving comments on the blog and emailing me asking me if Knet was down. Then, this morning a reader emailed me telling me the twitter user DedSec (@DedSecIsHere) had been taking credit for the recent attacks. Based on what I could put together from his tweets, he had previously contacted people at the various institutes warning them of security holes only to be ignored. So I decided to get in touch with him via Twitter and find out what was going on.
First thing I needed to do was verify he was who he says he was and not just someone pretending to be the hacker involved in the recent attacks. So I asked him if he could prove it to me and he replied asking if he should bring down my banks website. Literally 45 seconds later, my banks website was down. Freaky.
According to DedSec, he had been contacting and warning different government and private institutes of their cybersecurity flaws for months now, only to be ignored or told they would fix them soon. But none of them fixed any of the issues he highlighted which left their security vulnerabilities wide open for other hackers who didn’t have the institutes best intention in mind to exploit. Since everyone was ignoring him, DedSec decided to bring down their servers himself so he could grab their attention and hopefully listen to him. He shared with me a list of different businesses that included banks, food ordering websites and telecoms that had security holes, and according to him, the institute with the weakest security system was a payment gateway (lawyer told me I can’t mention which), even though they had received a lot of warnings.
DedSec explained to me that by having a weak security system, it would make it easy to launch attacks on, including “man-in-the-middle attacks” where a hacker can spy on the connection and get the data that is not encrypted properly. So even though your information isn’t saved on their system, there is a potential for it to be read as the information is relayed from your end to their servers end.
@AzizAlW My main goal is to show how bad is the protection, Kuwait has a strong youth with cyber intelligence who are ignored
The more I spoke to DedSec, the more I realized how frustrated he was with the lack of qualified people involved in securing some of our important websites. His pinned tweet states that Kuwait has talented young people with cyber intelligence that are being ignored. He told me there were hacker groups from Iraq, Iran and the USA who have been penetrating our systems and quietly stealing our data. I asked him how he knew that and he replied telling me that he did what IT departments haven’t been doing, and that is checking the server logs for unusual activity.
me and @master_roomi are fixing those problems that i found in the websites instead of attacking them, have a chill day everyone
As I finish up this post, DedSec’s last tweet states that he has now teamed up with Raed Alroomi (@master_roomi), a retired Colonel and information security and cyber crime consultant to fix the exploits he’s found instead of attacking the websites. Hopefully now with Raed’s help, local institutes will finally patch up their vulnerabilities.
Update: Here is an interview with Raed Alroomi that was just posted onto YouTube that discusses the recent attacks. It’s in Arabic but in short, the attacks this week were DDoS attacks, he recommends you don’t use your Knet card online for the next few days until things settle down, and finally he wants to bring all the Kuwaiti hackers and Kuwaiti IT specialist together to volunteer and run penetration tests on the important government websites. He thinks the government should support the local talent and that they should be more involved in securing important local websites.
A busy busy weekend with a bunch of markets and live music events taking place. The IMPROVengers are also back again this weekend. Check out the full list of events below:
I’ve been wanting to shutdown the Community (Forum) section of the blog for some time now. With the introduction of my Classifieds section it pulled a lot of traffic away from the forum and then with the introduction of Kuwestions, it basically pulled whatever traffic that was left.
The only reason I actually kept the forum up this long was for sentimental reasons. I know a couple who met in the forum and ended up getting married (How cool is that?), so kinda figured they’d want to keep all their first messages to each other. I already got in touch with them and told them to go in and save all their old conversations and once they’re done doing that I’ll probably close it down.
So if anybody else has any important messages in their account they’d like to save, do it pretty soon. [Link]
I’ve wanted an instant film camera ever since I was a kid since I always found them a bit magical because you’re kinda creating something out of nothing. It’s the same reason I’ve always had a thing for fax machines, you put the paper in the machine on one end then, a few seconds later, it starts coming out on another machine all the way on the other side of the country. But for some reason I never ended up getting an instant film camera, probably because I didn’t really have a reason to get one. I’ve always had cameras growing up and later digital cameras and phone cameras so the need for an instant camera wasn’t there, until I saw the Leica Sofort. I’m not a Leica fan. I think Leica M series are over hyped, extremely over priced, and I can’t understand why anyone would want to shoot with a manual focus camera. But, when I saw the Sofort I just fell in love with the way it looked. It had a great minimal and very retro design while also not costing an arm and a leg.
The Leica Sofort comes in three colors, white, orange and mint. I knew right away I wanted the Mint color but when I tried finding one it was completely sold out everywhere online. After searching for a couple of days I finally ended up finding one shop in London that still had the mint colored Leica and quickly placed my order. When my package finally arrived to Kuwait and I opened it I right away knew I made the right choice in color. It just works really well with the retro look, the orange I think would have looked a bit like a toy while the white would have just been boring (for me at least). I’ve had the camera now for two weeks and I’ve used it in a variety of different environments. What I’ve concluded is that the camera is a hit and miss when it comes to the pictures, but thats not a surprise, thats actually exactly what I was expecting from an instant film camera.
I’ll start with the good stuff, the battery lasts a pretty long time. It comes with a small rechargeable battery which I charged on the first day for like an hour. Since then I’ve used the camera to take around 80 photos and the battery is still showing as full. Another great thing about the camera is that it uses Fuji Instax Mini films which you can find all over Kuwait. I’ve been getting mine from Xcite and a double pack which contains 2×10 packs sells for KD5. That means each photo I take costs 250fils which isn’t that bad. I think the camera performed best when I took it to the “Walk This Way” sneaker event this past weekend since the photos came out looking like they were taken in the 80s or 90s which fit perfectly with the theme of the event. The portrait shots all came out great and best part is, after I took the photos, I just handed the pictures over. Like souvenirs they could keep. Even when the results didn’t come out as expected (like the ones above), the photos still had a pretty cool look.
But like I said the camera is a hit and miss. The exposure is all over the place, some portrait shots using the flash resulted in the subjects being super overexposed with washed out colors while other times the shots came out perfectly exposed with all the colors still intact. During bright sunlight a lot of shots would also be overexposed and even when I chose to underexpose (there is an option for that) it didn’t really do much. But, my biggest gripe with the camera is the fact that all the settings reset back to the default settings once you turn the camera off. One of the things I like about this camera is you have options you can choose from like selecting between four scene settings for different lighting situations, having the flash on or off, if you’d like to over expose or under expose a shot and finally most importantly, the camera has two focus modes, close (under 3m) and far. Since I mostly shoot landscape or architectural shots I would want my settings to be no flash and the focus set to further than 3m. But I need to set that up every time I turn on the camera because by default, the camera sets the flash to auto and the focus distance to close. On more than one occasion I’ve taken photos only to have them come out blurry because I forgot to set the focus or I’ve had the flash go off because I forgot to turn it off. Super annoying and I don’t understand why Leica decided to do this.
Overall though I’m happy with the camera. Yes the output isn’t consistent and sometimes random, but I like that because every time I take a picture I now eagerly wait for the photo to develop to see what I got. It’s a surprise every time. The Leica Sofort cost me around KD95 including shipping via PostaPlus to Kuwait. It’s not cheap, but it is one of the cheapest Leica’s you can buy. The camera that is the closest to it in terms of capabilities is the Fuji Mini 90 which I’ve read is what the Sofort is possibly based off. The Mini 90 costs around KD40 on Amazon without shipping or tax so basically half the price of the Leica. If you’re interested in getting the Sofort, I got it from Dale Photographic whom as of this post have all three colors in stock. [Link]
The Eco Experts recently revealed the “most toxic countries in the world” and Kuwait came in second place. The data was compiled by taking five environmental factors into account:
– Energy consumption per capita
– CO2 emissions from fuel combustion
– Air pollution levels
– Deaths attributable to air pollution
– Renewable energy production.
Even though last year I posted a study which ranked Kuwait’s air quality as the 9th worst in the world, I still found this new study as surprising as I found that one. I guess because when I imagine bad air quality I imagine those articles in the news about China, where the smog is so bad planes can’t land and visibility is down to nothing. But here, I mean other than the occasional dust storms, the weather is usually pretty clear and doesn’t seem polluted at all.
But it is.
A friend found out the local US Embassy has a Real-time Air Quality Index (AQI) which you can check out from your phone or browser. According to the index, the air quality at this very moment as I write this post is “Very Unhealthy”. That’s pretty scary. You can check the AQI yourself by clicking [Here]
Now if we go back to the list of most toxic countries, you’ll notice something in common with the top 10:
1- Saudi Arabia
2- Kuwait
3- Qatar
4- Bahrain
5- United Arab Emirates
6- Oman
7- Turkmenistan
8- Libya
9- Kazakhstan
10- Trinidad and Tobago
All 10 nations are all heavily involved in the oil and gas industry. If you want to read more about this study, here is a [Link]
Maybe a doctor can chime in in the comments below about the potential health issues that can be caused by this.
Update: Since I published the post the current air quality index has gone up to the status of “Hazardous”! WTF?!
As you’re probably aware by now, cops are resorting to remove the license plates of illegally parked cars in an effort to stop the habit. A reader last week left a comment under one of my old posts detailing the process involved in getting back the plates and I’ve went ahead and summarized it into bullets points below:
– Cops took his car plates after he illegally parked in old Salmiya
– They left a ticket and a sticker on the windshield with information on which traffic station to go to
– After waiting for a few days he went to the traffic station in Jabriya where he presented them with his traffic ticket and paid a fine of KD20. He then had to get a signature from the supervisor and after that was told to come back the next day
– Next day he headed back to Jabriya where they told him to go to the Salmiya traffic station instead
– After getting to the Salmiya traffic station he had to get another signature from the supervisor there
– After getting the signature he then had to go to another room where an officer gave him back his plates and asked him to sign a document stating he received his car plates
– You don’t get your screws back so you need to pass by a hardware store before you head back to your car with your plates to screw them back on
The process seems like such a hassle I hope I never get my plates taken. Not that I park illegally anyway, but in Salmiya there are some parking spot you might think are legal but are most likely illegal (Exhibit A).
The Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem Cultural Center is the second cultural center that is being constructed next to Shaab Park on the Gulf Road. Last night when I drove by I noticed they had their multicolored roof lights on so figured I’d try to sneak in and take some shots. That failed since there was security stationed at every entrance.
I then tried to hop over the wall from the Women’s organization building right next door but as soon as I stepped onto their property, their building security stopped me as well. Need to go back in a full black ninja outfit and try again.
Anyway I still managed to take some shots from the outside which I’ve shared in this post.
After taking the video above I realized the rainbow roof lights look like a real life version of the Rainbow Road from the Mario Kart game. So someone needs to fly a drone over this “track” ASAP pretending they’re racing in Mario Kart and then add the Rainbow Road soundtrack to the video so we can share it on Reddit.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with this project, it’s located on the Gulf Road right before Shaab Park. The project consist of six main buildings:
– A Natural History Museum
– A Science Museum
– A Museum of Islamic History
– A Space Museum
– A Fine Arts Center
– A 350 seat Theatre
The cultural center is expected to be completed by the end of this year. For previous posts on this cultural center with renderings and more information, click [Here]
S&S is a small bookstore in the basement of Laila Gallery. It’s not new, it’s been there for a few years but I was surprised to still see it open when I passed by Laila Gallery recently. I thought I had posted about the store before but turns out I hadn’t so I decided I’d post about them now. They mostly carry children’s books and school books as well as some educational toys.
They’re located in the corner of the basement of Laila Gallery in Salmiya and their opening hours are Sunday to Thursday 9AM to 1PM and then again 5PM to 10PM. On Fridays they’re open only from 12:30PM to 4:30PM and on Saturday 5PM to 10PM. Their instagram account is @SandSBookstore.
I heard the Kuwait Bookshop that was in the basement of Muthana Complex in the city moved to Hawalli. So need to also check that place out if I can find it.
