Search: “ur”

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]

Many people have been complaining about Apple’s new Magsafe power plug that come with the new Macbook’s but these pictures on flickr show their might be a bigger problem. One guy came home to find his Magsafe connecter had melted… really freaky. [Link]

[source digg]

Although I have recently lost a lot of weight I am now afraid I will be gaining it all again with my new chocolate bar craving. I am having atleast 6 chocolate bars a day and from what I am being told, its not helping my diet. So since I am attached to the habbit of eating chocolate bars I decided to get granola bars instead from Sultan Center and hopefully I am going to get attached to them. These bars are supposed to be healthy and won’t cause me to gain weight. I got the Apple Crisp flavor by Nature Valley but I haven’t tried it yet, I hope it tastes good, or at least decent..

Update: I just tried a bar and it tastes like wood. Actually I think wood tastes better. Need to try another brand like Kudos or something, they had a chocolate chip version.

Interesting, it never occurred to me that it stood for something.. [Link]

Starting today I am back at work. I had to cut my ten day vacation short because I am needed back at the office. I wouldn’t call it a vacation actually, it was more like being under house arrest. I couldn’t leave the house and I could sleep late or wake up late because I had to take care of Geo (my dog). Thursday his cast will come off hopefully. For now, it feels good being back at work.

My Qualitynet DSL account expires next month and so I was just checking their website to see if they have any new offers because last year when I signed up they had a double your bandwidth offer. So I am checking to see how much 512KB will cost me this time around and to my surprise its KD100 cheaper. Last year if you signed up for 1 year of 256KB they would double the bandwidth to 512KB. I paid KD380 then. This time around I don’t see a double your bandwidth offer but a 512KB connection now costs KD280. The sad thing is 1MB is still KD560 a year which is double the price, maybe my sister who lives next door and steals uses my internet will pitch in for a 1MB (hint hint Rampurple). [Link]

I just used Alexaholic to graph and compare traffic with my site and other Kuwait bloggers and I found the results interesting. It seems most of the time our traffic dips and peaks together. The Kuwaiti blogging community in a way is connected together which makes sense if you think about it. We all for example got more traffic when the Amir passed away since everyone abroad wanted to find out what was happening in Kuwait. We probably also got a dip in traffic during the vacation when many Kuwaiti students studying in the US came back to Kuwait and stopped checking the blogs. You can check out the chart and see what I am talking about by clicking the link below. You could also plug in your own blogs and check and compare. [Link]