Kuwait Liberation and Independance

Enjoy your extended weekend with Kuwait's Liberation and Independence day. I will be disappearing for a short break but before I go, I leave with this little clip that I made for Kuwait's Liberation.





To read the full story, you can find it here.

Kuwaiti Bloggers Exposed.

....

Not really, I just wanted to sound dramatic. They came of their own free will. I will not repeat what was mentioned but you can read all the details here:

Gulf Blogging Scene on Kuwait TV.

and a follow up post titled Goooood Morning Kuwait!

Writing Fiction Part V

Writing Fiction - Part I is here.
Writing Fiction - Part II is here.
Writing Fiction - Part III is here.
Writing Fiction - Part IV is here.

George Orwell has earned the right to be called one of the finer writers in the English language through such novels as 1984 and Animal Farm, such essays as “Shooting an Elephant,” and his memoir Down and Out in Paris.


George expressed a strong dislike of totalitarian governments in his work, but he was also passionate defender of good writing. Thus, you may want to hear some of George’s writing tips.*

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

One can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

* From “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell.

Copied from here.

There is No Reason To Ever Beat Your Child…

I found this on digg titled There is no reason to ever beat your child.
Here is the flckr page for it.

I never knew this

I never knew websites had working hours like regular establishments. I always thought they worked 365/24/7. Web sites live on electrical magic boxes that churn away different requests never complaining and never stopping, except for the little interruptions for upgrades or crashes.

Apparently, I was wrong.

I thought he was dead

While walking to my car, I saw a dead body lying in an open car. My mind raced, should I call 777? No use, 777 never answer. Should I surround the area with yellow tape? Powder the car for fingerprints ? Take DNA samples ? perform an autopsy by cracking open his chest?





I checked his pulse, and his wrist was warm and he had a pulse. It turns he was only sleeping.

The Meaning of Valentine

Valentine means love.
Love means Marriage.
Marriage means Party.
Party means Dancing.
Dancing means go Crazy.

Enjoy this party:

Kuwaiti Water Towers

Kuwaiti Water Towers, those mushroom shaped reservoirs that store water high above the ground and nourish the surounding suburban residences. These towers have recently received a dazzling makeover.





Full Size Picture Here.

The Rasterbator

Is your wall white and lonely?
Do you have a picture that you love and cannot tire of looking at it?
Would you like to wallpaper your wall?

If you answer yes to the above, your white bland wall days are over.

Using The Rasterbator you can upload a graphics file and specify its size and it will produce a pdf file of that graphics as large as you want it to be.

Tonight I will be busy pasting papers on my walls around the house, very cool.

McDonald's Burger Mashup

You heard of musical mashups, where two or more songs are taken and combined to make something new and sort of original, well here is a burger mashup. It looks delicious, I think I am passing by McDonald's after work and have make one.

A little bit of Joe to start your morning

Joe Dassin, that is:

Nasty Car Accident

Can you guess the sex of the driver? answer at the end of the clip

Signs

And the sign says "Long-haired freaky people need not apply"
So I put my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why
He said you look like a fine outstanding young man, I think you'll do
So I took off my hat, I said "Imagine that, huh, me working for you"

Signs - Tesla

I was walking down Fahad Al Salem Street (or Jahra street for the old timers) in Downtown Kuwait City this afternoon. While driving down towards the Sheraton roundabout, you can notice the old building with the distinctive old marble pillars. If you look close, you will see that all these pillars are half covered by different signs, especially near the bus stop.





I stopped to read the signs, here are a few:









One sign in particular caught my attention, it said:





I know the work conditions can get very bad sometimes in Kuwait, but is it so bad that working in Iraq would be considered a career opportunity?

20% Salary Increase for Everyone Announced

Read it here.

One little detail, you need to be working in Dubai.

Laptop Reincarnation

Reincarnation

The Hindu or Buddhist doctrine that a person may be reborn successively into one of five classes of living beings (god or human or animal or hungry ghost or denizen of Hell) depending on the person's own actions

---

My laptop died on me a few months back. My laptop just reached its third birthday, I know it is old but it survived being lugged around all over, being put in a suitcase and having lots of coffee spilt on it. I could not let an old friend die a miserable death. I mourned its loss for a few days. I had all my pictures and music on it. To emerge from my deep grief and depression, I went out and bought me a fully loaded desktop. I knew the problem was the hard disk. Hard disks usually have lifetimes of three to five years.

Once I got reconnected to the Internet from my desktop, I put on my surgical gloves, (not really, but it would have been more dramatic if I did). I looked for some magical software that would allow me to resurrect my now dead laptop back to life. After toiling night and day, I found a utility that builds a boot CD. That magical CD allowed me to recover my hard disk after booting from it.

I booted, my laptop came back to life, I wanted to scream, "its alive", just like Dr Frankenstein, when the thunder bolt zapped through the creature he was assembling.

I backed up all my music and digital photos to an external hard disk. Then moved them back safely to my new desktop. A little software tweaking and everything was safely back.

I left my laptop to collect dust and rest in peace. Everytime I passed my dead laptop a tear streaked down my cheek (not really). I always thought that if a laptop started misbehaving, it was as good as dead because you cannot fix it in Kuwait and I did not feel like shipping it to the US to be fixed. A few days ago, I met an old friend in Hawalli Bin Khaldoon Street. Marzouq mentioned him a few months ago in his post. It was Happy (yes his name is Happy). I knew Happy from Wazzan when he was working there. He always gave me the best prices. I was happy to see him again, I found out that he can fix laptops, so I brought my dead laptop to him. I knew everything in my laptop was working fine except for the dead hard disk. I bought a new 120 GB hard disk and went upstairs to Happy's workshop. The workshop was an apartment Kitchen, with different computer stuff thrown around.


I stayed there while my hard disk got replaced, a new Windows XP installed on the new Hard Disk and it booted normal. My laptop just got a new life. Now I need to download the updated drivers and it will be working like new.



The wonders of Reincarnation.

Ladies - Why buy when you can rent?

Preview shot of new iPod

LOL, looks like it is a prototype.

Mac gets owned - by The Guardian

Here are some choice quotes from the article:

PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.
---
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
---
Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality.
---

Full article here.

Disclaimer

I am technology agnostic, I don't care what I use as long as it does the job.

Kuwaiti Influence on Microsoft Vista

Hamad Darwish was born in Kuwait and raised in Bayan. He is currently employed at the Kuwait Ministry of Health in the Radiology Department. He also has a passion for Photography, where he posted a lot of photos on Flickr.

One day, Hamad says, "I got a short Flickr message asking me if I was interested in selling some of my work, without mentioning the party that is interested in buying. After I replied to message saying “yes. why not”, I received a professional offer from Microsoft’s MSX Design Group. The moment I saw the Microsoft logo on the header, I didn’t know how to react! It was the most tremendous feeling ever."

The end of the story is that five of Hamad's photographs will be used in the Vista background and 90 Million people will be seeing Hamad's work everytime they use their computer.

Here is an Interview with Hamad.

Here is Hamad's blog.

Here is Hamad's Flickr Page.

Don't you just hate...

Don't you just hate people saying something to you, then just as you are answering and in midesentence, their mobile rings and they ignore you and take the call.

Maybe, you find your significant other chatting with someone else, then you ask who it is and they act all suspicious, and say it is nobody, or a wrong number. Hmmm, very suspicious, one word of advice: don't do what this guy did, or what this girl did:

Dodging Bullets

Remember that classic scene from the Matrix where Neo dodges bullets fired at him. The scene was a classic and led to the term "bullet time" meaning something filmed and slowed down to show the bullet flying. Bullet Time has been redone in a lot of movies and TV shows after the Matrix. Here is the scene where Neo dodges bullets:





Here is another bullet time scene as done by Bollywood:

A Typical Family Dinner

Here is an Egyptian family over a typical dinner,

Our Camel Lovely Camel

Camels, those noble animals that travelled across the Arabian Deserts. Travelling in Caravans transporting people and cargo and supplying the town bazaars.

Now, in the present day, Camels get to ride in Toyota pick up trucks (or wanette). Here is a picture of a lovely camel as seen on the Maghreb Expressway on towards Kuwait City.