Vote for Lujain

Lujian for parliament, oh wait, she's too young, maybe more competent but not old enough yet.

Ok, seriously, vote for Lujain here on the I love Kuwait competition on P0ach's blog.

Reasons to vote for Lujain.

She is the most articulate.
She has the best points.
Her sister told me to.
And last but not least, how can you not vote for someone so adorable.

vote for Lujain.

Jingle Bells Punjabi Style

It's been a while

I know its been a long time since I last posted here, I Will soon.

The 15 Best Things Warren Buffett Has Ever Said About Investing

These points where taken from businessinsider.com , instead of flipping through 15 pages to see them ,you get them all on one page here:

"Rule No. 1: never lose money; rule No. 2: don't forget rule No. 1"

"I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am no investor."

"You can sell it to Berkshire, and we'll put it in the Metropolitan Museum; it'll have a wing all by itself; it'll be there forever. Or you can sell it to some porn shop operator, and he'll take the painting and he'll make the boobs a little bigger and he'll stick it up in the window, and some other guy will come along in a raincoat, and he'll buy it." - On what makes people sell to him

"It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price."

"You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ."

"Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.” If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion

"Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre."

"After all, you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out."

"Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful."

"When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever."

"The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything--you can wait for your pitch. The problem when you're a money manager is that your fans keep yelling, 'Swing, you bum!'"

"Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that 'Price is what you pay; value is what you get.' Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down."

" Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change. With Wrigley chewing gum, it's the lack of change that appeals to me. I don't think it is going to be hurt by the Internet. That's the kind of business I like."

"The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble...We want to buy them when they're on the operating table."

" I have pledged – to you, the rating agencies and myself – to always run Berkshire with more than ample cash. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow’s obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night’s sleep for the chance of extra profits."

Where are all the Kuwaitis?

Here is a simple chart to tell you where all the Kuwaitis are:

Infraction People Have an Infraction

fThere is a group of dedicated Government employees that monitor the different houses and see if they are violating any rules set by them.

These rules include blocking the view of the road with vegetation such as the one below:

When this happens, they send their trusted bulldozer driver to remove the infraction.

These rules are very strict, no exception to anyone, except maybe if it is Taadeyat own base of operation which can be found here.


View Larger Map

Taking a closer look, what do you see ?

There is a long line of greenery blocking the view of the road. Now I wonder, will they send their bulldozers for their own infraction ?

Computers in Movies

I was watching this movie about this black ops military team that do an operation then things go wrong and now they want revenge, etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, the point is, they have this super secret encrypted hard drive, and they had to steal the decryption algorithm from this mega-corporation. So now this team are sitting in their room, and using a netbook, the geek from the team types a few commands and decrypts the hard drive in a matter of seconds. First point, you cant decrypt a complete hard drive using a slow netbook with the press of a button, you need to wait at least 20 minutes or more. Second point, I wanted to see what super high tech command he used, and here it is:

He used traceroute! HE USED TRACEROUTE! You don't use traceroute to decrypt a drive. I know this is just a movie, but please Mr. Producer, have a little imagination.

Kuwait House Blues

Once upon a time, I bought a house in Kuwait. There where no roads to this house and it was built in the middle of the desert. There where other houses around also built in the middle of the desert.

The house was sitting on a pile of sandy road.

The nice people of the Kuwait government decided to build a road in front of my new house and I was ever so grateful.  A road is much better for the car and for not getting sand in my sandals.

Unfortunately the freshly made road, was much lower than than the level of my house by almost two meters so I could not get into my house. So instead of complaining, I built a nice staircase going all the way down to the road.

All was well, I could get into my house, I had my nice government built road and it was a happy house.
Four years later, something shocking happened.

I come home and find a big yellow sticker stuck to my house, saying that I am taking land from the government and I should only extend my stair case by one and a half meters. If I don't, the government is going to come over with a bulldozer and scrape away my staircase.

That made me sad, my house was almost two meters above street level, and If I was only to use one and half meter extension for the stairs, no one could possible climb those stairs. It was a dilemma.

This story is not over yet, I heard that I am not the only one with that problem and that the nice people in the government are going to reconsider and let us keep our staircases so we can get into our houses.

Let us hope for the best, otherwise I don't know what can be done.

Kuwait in 1795

Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes

I will not claim to know everything aobut writing, but I will let the bestselling autor Stephen King tell you. The secret can be found here.

The Disparity of Labor

Click the image to enlarge

Source: Fixr

Best Way to Watch a Movie on an iPad

I downloaded a movie on my iPad and was looking for the most comfortable way to watch.
I tried sitting down with my iPad flat on the table but my back got bent worse than the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Next I tried sitting on the bed, but again I was crouching forward, and almost fell forward especially during the boring parts of the movie and my arms got tired holding the iPad.

Finally I found the perfect position.

Rest your head on the pillow, your legs bent, iPad resting on your legs and your hands holding it steady. Careful not to doze off.

Lightbulb Manual Page

lightbulb(1)                                             lightbulb(1)

NAME
     lightbulb - Convert electrons to photons

SYNOPSIS
     lightbulb [-wattage number]

DESCRIPTION
     lightbulb reads a stream of electrons from standard input and
     produces photons on standard output.
     Thus

         lightbulb <110_volts_ac >light

     The following options apply to lightbulb:

     -wattage  Sets the rate at which electrons are converted
               to photons.

FILES
     None

SEE ALSO
     xmas_tree_lights(1), streetlamp(1), led(2)

KNOWN BUGS
     lightbulb is known to fail unexpectedly after some unknown
     number of applications. Repeated complaints to the authors
     of lightbulb have failed to come up with a fix for this
     bug. The only known workaround for a crashed lightbulb is
     re-installation from a fresh copy of the source media.

NOTES
     I believe M$ Windows is based on lighbulb because they
     share the same bug - and the same workaround.

     It is important to ensure that the input stream is correctly
     formatted or the lightbulb may crash unexpectedly and with
     undefined results.

     Do not attempt to apply lightbulb's input files to other
     UNIX tools (esp. 'finger(1)'), however, lightbulb's output
     stream is fairly compatible with most other devices.

INSTALLATION
     Consult a hardware engineer.

PREREQUISITES
     Your operating system must support sockets and switches.

The Next iPhone

Gizmodo scoops the next iPhone, it comes with a front camera, higher resoltion display, bigger battery and looks better than the older iPhone 3GS.

More information here.

10 Things You should know about Starbucks

Here is a very interesting article about Starbucks. I will give the author credit so you can read the full article here.

Lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on Writing

Here is a great lecture from Kurt Vonnegut where he dissects the different ways of writing with blackboard illustration. You can find it here.

Cool Arabic Search Engine - yamli.com

I found this very cool arabic search engine called yamli.com , what it does is take your english text and transliterates it to arabic. This lets you search for arabic sites without needing an arabic keyboard. I dont know how new this is, but I like it a lot. Check it out.

According to my twitter buddy G_E, yamli is not really new, its only new to me. Thanks for the heads up G_E. 

Kindle for Mac Now Available for Download, or rather not.

I was going to announce that kindle for Mac was available from Amazon, then as I went to the webpage, I was told that it is not available for Kuwait, and I had to move to a new country. I know I could lie and say I moved to the States or some other country where it will let me download Kindle, but why should I do that? Its an application, just let me download it and sell me the ebooks. My money is just as good as anyone else's.

I tried to do the right thing, now let me go back to downloading torrents, its easier and available in Kuwait.

Here is a great book from Amazon to tell you just how you can download stuff also, BitTorrent For Dummies

I am not gone, I just discovered tumblr

Ok, I did not really discover it. Tumblr was there a long time before I found out about it, but it makes blogging so easy and fast and allows me to post a lot of nonsense inspirations very quickly. It is like twitter and blogger got married and their newborn was tumblr. You can find me on tumblr at donveto.tumblr.com .

I am not quitting blogger, just will be posting both here and at tumblr. See you all there, all three of you.

Love and Hate According to Google

According to google results found, here are some love hate statistics for different Arab countries. Bahrain and Oman come out first according to the love hate ratio and Kuwait is fifth.

	Love	Hate	Hate/Love Ratio
Bahrain	14,300,000	1,800,000	89%
Oman	13,800,000	1,760,000	89%
Qatar	16,700,000	2,820,000	86%
Lebanon	32,500,000	5,870,000	85%
Kuwait	25,100,000	4,560,000	85%
Yemen	17,300,000	3,910,000	82%
Jordan	74,900,000	17,300,000	81%
Saudi	40,500,000	11,500,000	78%
Egypt	30,500,000	9,470,000	76%
UAE	5,600,000	1,810,000	76%
Syria	10,400,000	4,090,000	72%
Iraq	83,000,000	46,100,000	64%

Note to all the statisticians, this is not an accurate report, just a compilation of google results made just for fun.

Airplane Security

Click Image to Enlarge

Pong Clock

Now thats a clock I'd love to have.

MONOCHRON - open source retro clock from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Too bad they sell it in Kit form and you need to solder bits together, more from their site here.

I Want The Love Marriage

The next greatest hit, I hope.

How to write an incendiary blog post

Perfect formula to writing an explosive blog post from the Boston Globe. Article is here.

Now sharpen your pencils, or rather flex your typing fingers and start shocking people.

Buzz - What is it good for?

Sung to the tune of War:


Buzz, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
Buzz, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y'all

Buzz, huh, good God
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

Ohhh, Buzz, I despise
Because it means destruction
Of innocent lives

Buzz means tears
To thousands of mothers eyes
When their email contacts are exposed
And lose their lives

I said, Buzz, huh
Good God, y'all
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again

Buzz, whoa, Lord
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

Buzz, it ain't nothing
But a heartbreaker
Buzz, friend only to the stalker
Ooooh, Buzz
It's an enemy to all mankind
The point of Buzz blows my mind
Buzz has caused unrest
Within the younger generation
Induction then destruction
Who wants to die
Aaaaah, Buzz-huh
Good God y'all
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it, say it, say it

Buzz, huh
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

If you dont know the song, here it is covered by Bruce Springsteen

French Spiderman Climbs Burj Khalifa

So Alain Robert aka The French Spider Man decided one day to climb Burj Khalifa, and he did.

iPad Addons I want to see

The iPad is out. I wont repeat all its lovely features, you can always check them out at the Apple web site. I personally like it, a lot of grumbling is going on about how closed it is. Gadget geeks compare it to a laptop which it isn't and complain about its closedness and no multitasking. These critics are missing the point, the iPad is an appliance, that does all the functions it offers in an intuitive seamless simple way. When you buy a TV, you don't expect to hack it. The same applies to a washing machine, you don't want to tweak its spin cycle. The iPad will apeal to the greater non technical masses and I feel it will be a big success especially at the very reasonable price point of around $500.

There are some add ons that I would love to see on the iPad, among them are powerful but tiny speakers, the sort Bose excels at. The speakers in Apple laptops are ok, but I need a powerful bass and high decibels of sound for my music.

It would be great if my iPad can act as my master remote, I got my TV remote, receiver remote, DVD system remote, satellite receiver remote all lying next to me. I want to get rid of these and just have my iPad be my remote with a simple interface and some TV programs pulled of the web to not only select the channel I want to view but which programs I want to see.

A high powered projector would be awesome too, I can display the movies I play on the wall with the high powered speakers blasting away in 5.1 emulated surround sound.

I want a printer on the iPad. I even figured out a way of putting one on it. You place your specially treated sheet of paper on the screen, and then the screen blasts the paper with laser or ultraviolet and it imprints on the paper. Voila, instant software printer. (If anyone takes this idea and makes it a product, I want my cut)

I want a scanner on my iPad. Again the concept is simple, just place your paper on the screen and the paper is scanned in your iPad. Now how to do it is slightly tricky, but I am sure the geniuses at Apple can figure it out.

Put in a Camera for all the Internet geeks complaining and crying for one. I personally can't see myself or other taking the iPad and pointing it at something or someone to take a picture, it would look very silly, but the masses have spoken so give them a camera.

One thing I do want is the iPad to be waterproof, so I can read it while floating in my swimming pool, or in my bathtub. I also need the iPad to be buoyant, so in case I let go of it, I don't want it to sink to the bottom of the pool and have me diving for it.

Problems With Google Reader

I am having problems with Google Reader, some of the feeds that I subscribe to dont appear and I get the message "You don't have permission to view this feed." 


I looked around and found a solution. instead of using http://reader.google.com, use https://reader.google.com


You are welcome :)

Age is Just a Number

A lovely video, just watch



People In Order: 1. Age from James Price on Vimeo.

New Kuwaiti Traffic Fines and item 7

Here are the new Kuwait traffic fines.

I am sure you have all seen them before since, just like me, I got them in an email forward. Did any of you notice item 7 ? Very strange. I took a pic of it here, just in case they fix it:

Questions that need answers

Here are some questions that need answers:

1. Why do people jump up as soon as the plane lands and is still moving towards the airport, standing up and grabbing their bags and squeezing together like sheep? It takes almost 10-15 minutes before the doors are even open after landing.
2. When there is an awkward silence, someone must check his / her cell phone although it did not beep or ring or shake or flash.
3. You rush into a room in your place, then you stand in the middle of the room not knowing why you where in such a hurry to go there.
4. When you trip and fall flat on your face, the first thing you do is quickly look around to see if anyone saw you fall on your face, instead of checking any damage to yourself.
5. Why do we drink vile disgusting tasting stuff like Grapefruit juice or Green tea religiously just because someone somewhere said it was good for us?
6. This raises another question, why do things good for us taste vile and disgusting, why isn't milk shake and an extra everything quarter pounder burger not good for us?
7. Ever sleep in the afternoon and wake up when it is dark and you don't know what day it is ?
8. Why do we walk around the house when we are talking on our mobile, although we where sitting down just before  the mobile rang ?
9. Why is it when we are greeted by someone and we don't recognize them, we pretend to know them and become Sherlock Holmes trying to pick up clues in what they are saying to remember who they are ?
10. Why do people ask about your family and how they are when they don't even know them or even care ?
11. Why does a phone ringing take first priority over a room full of people you are talking to right in front of you?

Here are the Doors, telling us "People are Strange"