Search: “ur”

A couple of days ago I was contacted by Bazaar magazine and was offered a chance to have my own “B-Sides” page in the magazine every month where I could post mini reviews on anything related to Kuwait. At first the idea sounded really interesting, combining blog with print sounded like an excellent opportunity. But the more I thought about it the more I realized.. excellent opportunity for what? What could I gain with this?

Increased Readership
Bazaar prints around 25,000 copies a month while 248AM gets more then 3 times that amount of visitors every month and we are still growing. Bazaar readers would only read around 4 mini reviews by me every month while my blog readers would read at least 4 mini posts by me a day. My sites url would be advertised in that Bazaar page but from those 25,000 readers how many would actually think about checking out my site? When was the last time anyone saw a url in a magazine and then checked it out online.. it happens but just not that often.

Digital to Print
At first this sounded interesting, but then I realized isn’t that a step backward? Isn’t print trying to get online? Shouldn’t Bazaar start thinking about getting online instead? WIRED magazine have a small 2 page section where they print interesting posts from the web but I never liked that section but thats besides the point, WIRED can do whatever they want since their whole Magazine is published for free online anyway.

The Money
The first offer I got was KD20 (yes two and one zero) a month. I calculated the amount of time and effort I would have to put extra every month to have at least 4 mini reviews of something interesting to do with Kuwait and I realized KD20 wouldn’t be worth my trouble at all. Bazaar were nice to say they would consider another amount I had in mind but if they had KD20 in their mind to begin with I doubt they would go that much higher.

The Magazine
Do I even like Bazaar? Not really. I do think its the best locally published magazine but thats because their competition is really crap. I pick up Bazaar once a month so I can skim through it quickly and see if there is anything interesting. I mostly don’t find anything worth reading and the magazine ends up in the trash or left on a food court table. I enjoy reading local blogs a lot more then I enjoy reading Bazaar thats for sure.

Who’s the boss?
When someone suggested to Zaydoun that he should hook up with one of the newspapers as a syndicated writer, Zaydoun replied saying “I am my own editor… I can’t imagine being subjected to deadlines and editorial controls!”.

So taking everything above into consideration, I sent an email back to Bazaar today morning thanking them for their kind offer but that I wasn’t interested. I think I made the right decision.

Just saw some spy shots of the upcoming Mercedes CL. I think it looks weird from the back while the front end looks like shit. Mercedes is really playing it safe when it comes to their car designs. [Link]

[source autoblog]

Aramex have a new customer service manager because they want to fix all their problems. If you are having any problems or if you have any feedback or comments about their service then let them know about it so they can fix it. I know I had a lot so I sent them like 2 pages worth of problems with their solutions.

Send all your Shop & Ship feedback and comments directly to the customer service manager, her email is: [email protected]

Thanks

update: just replaced the hotmail email with her aramex email

I got a phone call yesterday from the owner of Choowy Goowy cookies, he wanted to reply to my post titled “Choowy Goowy Waiting List“. Basically it turns out the reason why I was told it would need two days for the cookies to get delivered was because the Choowy Goowy bakery was being renovated and they had stopped all orders for 1 week. The day I called asking for cookies they had just started delivery again and they had a long list of backorders they needed to complete. Part of the reason for the renovation is so they could accept customers who want to pick up the cookies themselves.

I then asked him about the fact that the person who I spoke to on the phone told me that I couldn’t order just 1 jar. He replied telling me that VIP customers could order 1 jar if they wanted to but new customers would have to order more. He told me they currently have only 1 delivery car and its difficult and time consuming to go deliver 1 jar in Fahaheel for example and another 1 jar in Kuwait City. He told me they are still a small bakery and they are growing slowly but steadily and they would get another car in the near future but for now they only have just one.

On another note I will soon be trying their Sorbet icecream, the owners of Choowy Goowy also have Boozah Boozah and they are working on some new receipes at the moment but once they are done they will send me a batch of their icecream to try out. Cookies in the winter, Icecream in the summer.. I can’t wait.

If you would like to place an order for cookies call 2626559

Nat’s been using Skype to call and talk to her family and friends back in Lebanon and it works pretty cool and its also fairly cheap. The problem is that talking to your family using headphones and the Apple Powerbooks built in mic is a pretty dorky experience. So I decided to look around for a phone handset that would plug-in and work with the Mac. There are many handsets available but 99% of them only work with PCs. Even some handsets that were compatible with the Mac ended up lacking features the same phone would have if connected to the PC. The coolest Skype phone I found was a cordless Linksys and at $105 it wasn’t too expensive, the downside ofcourse was that it wasn’t Mac compatible. Finally I stumbled upon the IPEVO phone which is pictured above. It looked really cool, it was fully compatible with the Mac and it only cost $29. So I ordered a white one for myself and a black one for my sister. The phone also works with PC’s so thats a bonus. Once the handsets arrive next week I will take some pictures and post my feedback on them but so far it looks like a really great device.

Buy the white IPEVO phone from Amazon
Buy the black IPEVO phone from Amazon
Visit the IPEVO website

I was just reading Zaydoun’s post on how he has been blogging for three years and it really brought back some good memories. You see, before it was just Zaydoun’s “Kuwait Unplugged” blog and qHate which was made up of me, Rampurple and Nibaq. qHate originally was Nibaqs idea and it started off as a blog about life in Kuwait but when the US decided to invade Iraq, qHate quickly turned into a war blog. We were posting on things that were going on in Kuwait like the sirens, the panics and the gas masks we even got the chance to stalk meet Wolf Blitzer and John Vause. It was a lot of interesting little things that showed people how everyone in Kuwait was living during this uncertain time. Checking my first post (2-2-03) now though I realized it was actually related to the war.. so now I am wondering if war blogging was part of the original plan… It was cool how me, Rampurple and Nibaq used to blog together in one blog and now we all have our own separate blogs. I keep telling Nibaq we were like a rock band that split up and all the members went solo.

In the end the site ended after we hit our peak, the war was over, there was barely anything to post about and only Rampurple was left posting and she finally also said goodbye. Maybe one day we will all be back together again, like a reunion..

This is an interesting surprise. Yesterday I posted my views on the Toot the Arab blog network and what I saw as problems with the way things were laid out. Well I just checked the site now and it looks like most of the problems are getting fixed. The first change you will notice when you check Toot now is that instead of 9 blogs being highlighted on top, you now only get 3. The second change and probably the most important one is the tootstream. No longer is it just a long boring list of blog names and post titles, the list now contains a brief snippet of what the post is about. This makes things a lot more interesting and more usable, even the post titles are now larger and more clearer… check it out. [Link]

For the past couple of years I have been forced to use Extensis Suitcase to manage the fonts on my Mac. There was one serious competitor and Extensis ended up acquiring it. Awhile back I found out Linotype released a beta version of their own font manager software called FontExplorer X. I went ahead and tried it out and it was a bit buggy and had some features missing so I removed it and continued using Suitcase. A couple of days ago Linotype released the final version of their software so I downloaded it and ever since then I haven’t gone back to Suitcase.

FontExplorer is wayyy faster, has more features, and best of all its fucking free! Its FREE! Suitcase costs $100 and I see no reason why I should pay that much for a software that doesn’t perform better then the free FontExplorer. So what I am trying to say here is if you are a designer and frustrated with Suitcase, download FontExplorer, its lightyears ahead and so much more cooler.. [Link]

Last year I posted pictures of the abandoned Apple store in Kuwait City and they quickly spread all over the web. The coolest thing about this dirty old store were the old Apple posters, everyone wanted to get their hands on them since they are very rare and impossible to find. So I passed by the place today during lunch time and to my surprise the posters were all taken down and the store completely emptied and cleaned. I quickly got closer to see if I could find any trace of the posters and their they were folded on the floor of the display window. So I went upstairs to the Apple stores office and spoke to this Apple tech guy whom I met a couple of times before and he told me that they had just finished repainting the store and they would be opening it up in the next few days. I asked him what they were going to do with the posters since he knows how badly I wanted them, he told me that they were going to hang them up again. SUCKS! So now I am never going to get my hands on these Apple posters nor will I be able to get my hand on Lego guy!

We took Geo to the vet over the weekend to check and see if his leg had healed. We removed the bandages from his leg and for the first time in 10 days he was able to scratch and lick it, I swear it must have been ecstasy for him. We decided to take some x-rays just to be safe and it turned out his bone had nearly completely healed and that we could keep the cast off him if we could make him not jump and run for the next week. That ofcourse is just impossible since Geo is like a puppy on speed. So we put the cast back on for another week. He should be in fit condition before his big day next month at the dog show.

Toot is like safat but instead of it focusing only on Kuwait Blogs, Toot focuses on all Arab blogs in the region.

The idea is good but I just haven’t been able to use Toot the way I use Safat. In Safat I scroll down the page reading a “post title” followed by reading a sentence or two from that post. If the post preview sounds interesting I open it in a new tab and continue reading the full post on that bloggers site.

With Toot I can’t do that since the only thing I see is the post title and the blog its from.. no post preview. Sure they have a section on the main page called tootreads but these are a few handpicked posts and they are not updated very often. Even the tootstream where all the latest post titles are displayed isn’t easy to use since the name of the blog is highlighted more then the post title itself. I would think the title of the post would be more important then the title of the blog since you are there to find new posts to read and not to read blog names. Another issue I have is with the voting system. If you like a certain blogger you can vote for them and give them a rating. The problem is its not an easy procedure, to vote you need to give them your email address and they will send you an email with a link to confirm your vote. They are doing this I am guessing to keep away cheaters but this isn’t a full proof plan and it makes voting a pain in the ass.

I do like the general visual theme of Toot and I really think Safat needs to get redesigned into something thats as appealing. Even the “new” Safatoo isn’t any better and if anything its a lot worse then the classic safat. Safat is lacking an identity and thats where Toot is succeeding the most. Anyway if you haven’t checked Toot out yet please do and tell them what you think. [itoot]

Back in September, Quark, the company behind one of the most popular publishing software’s released a new redesigned logo. It wasn’t a bad idea if it wasn’t for the fact that their redesigned logo looked like a copy of many other logos. The design industry was very critical on Quarks redesign and it seems it must have gotten under their skin because Quark just released another newer logo. I personally don’t like their latest redesign, it looks like a button. [Link]

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Poseidon
Mission: Impossible III
and Snakes on the Plane

Finally I was able to get one. It’s like you need to have wasta to get your hands on one if you are not a kid opening a Zeina account. Would have preffered the original one from the 80s though, the dark green and gold one.

Update: Here is a brighter picture of the original golden camel [Picture]

This is an interesting Firefox plugin I found..

Oil Standard is a web browser plug-in that converts all prices from U.S. Dollars into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil.

When you load a web page, the script seamlessly inserts converted prices into the page. As the cost of oil fluctuates on the commodities exchange, prices rise and fall in real-time.

I just tried it with Amazon and its a pretty “fun” script. The price of a PSP is 3.97 barrels of oil while a new Macbook Pro will set you back 39.77 barrels. We should use this standard here in Kuwait, everyone could walk around paying in oil! [Link]