Hamad Darwish - The Kuwaiti Vista Artist is giving away his wallpapers that did not make it to Vista

A little more than a year ago, I wrote about Hamad Darwish. Hamad is an amateur photographer that got contacted by Microsoft to use some of his photographs on Vista. Yuo can find my older post here.

Now Hamad has a site and is giving away the his photos that did not make it into Vista. You can get these beautiful pictures here.

Jerry and Bill Ad number 2

Another Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfield ad.



You must admit, they are entertaining. The older ad is here.

3baid explained the first ad in a way that made sense by saying, "It's basically talking about "flexibility" and then Jerry asks if we'll ever see something that "works" the way it should and Bill gives the ok."

Can Someone explain this ad for me ?

It has got Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfield meeting in a mall, after that I don't get it.

Long Busy Week

It has been a long busy week and I have not updated my blog as much as I would like to. I hope to get a good night sleep today and update it tommorow with some interesting posts. I bought an HTC Touch Diamond and have been trying it out for the last week. I also had a lot of interesting email conversation with my friend MQ about the Diamond versus the iPhone. I will post these emails after I edit all the typos and make it readable.

Here is a short clip of the HTC Diamond being used for sending a text message:

BREAKING NEWS: Microsoft buying Yahoo.

Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo. Offer, half in cash and half in stock, represents 62% premium

Microsoft is buying Yahoo. More here from Marketwatch.


Will the new name be Yasoft, or Microhoo! ?

Powerpoint Tip

Everyone knows PowerPoint, it is the ubiquitous tool from Microsoft that allows you to give presentations. Walk in any airport lounge and you will see salesmen and consultants tweaking their PowerPoint presentations to their potential customers.

Contact any vendor and tell him you are interested in their products and they will email you their latest PowerPoint presentation promoting their best and latest features.

A PowerPoint file is saved with a PPT extension which allows you to load it and edit it if needed. Sometimes, PowerPoint presentations are saved in PPS which does not allow you to open the file, it will just display the presentation to you thus protecting the contents from being copied or changed.

On my home laptop, I do not have Microsoft office installed, instead I have the freeware OpenOffice. I recently opend a pss presentation and using the OpenOffice equivalent to PowerPoint called impress and to my pleasant surprise I could edit the presentation.

So next time you get a PowerPoint PPS saved file and you would like to steal borrow a slide or graphics, open it with OpenOffice and take all you like.

Microsoft Rules - or - 10 Facts about Microsoft

Microsoft announced quarterly revenue of $14.4 billion and net income of $4.93 billion. In other words, Microsoft’s daily net income is about $55 million. That’s $55 million in pure profit every 24 hours. Do some quick math and you’ll learn it takes Microsoft only about…

10 hours or so (yes, hours!) to exceed Red Hat’s quarterly net income of $20.5 million.
four days to exceed Research In Motion’s quarterly net income of $187.9 million.
four days to exceed Starbucks’ quarterly net income of $205 million.
one week to exceed Nike’s quarterly net income of $350.8 million.
two weeks to exceed McDonalds’ quarterly net income of $762 million.
two weeks to exceed Apple’s quarterly net income of $770 million.
18 days to exceed Google’s quarterly net income of $1 billion.
23 days to exceed Coca-Cola’s quarterly net income of $1.26 billion.
five weeks to exceed IBM’s quarterly net income of $1.85 billion.
10 weeks to exceed Wal-Mart’s quarterly net income of $3.9 billion.


Source: TechIQ

Microsoft does iPhone

I am still away but I had to post about this. Microsoft releases an iPhone like interface for its PocketPC OS. Check it out in this promo video here:





Microsoft also launched an independent company called ZenZui to run the show.

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.