BlogAllAlong

So yesterday was the end of the Premier League season, one of the toughest soccer leagues in the world, and my favorite when I want to watch some soccer. I was shocked not to see any news about the match today in Al-Jarida newspaper, I checked it 3 times and even did a search online. The first thing that accured to me is maybe the game was late, but no. It was only 7 PM when the match finished. They had news about Italian League, which was only 1 hour before. Heck, they even had news about the Turkish league. Both Al-Watan and Al-Qabas had the news covered in details.

I’m not a big sporting fan, and I don’t watch more than a handful of matches per year. My post here is not just to fill in empty pages, and neither it is coming from an obsessed Manchester fanboy who wants to read his team news every where in the press. Rather, it’s for me a sign of how outdated and lacking some new comers in the newspaper industry are. You want to win customers, you have to give them what they want. I did post about their bad deliver service before, and how they fixed it later on as well. After which, I was really enjoying it for a while. But after today, I am rethinking my opinion about the newspaper as a whole.

Any news after 6 PM will have to wait 36 hours? Bad Call Really. Don’t expect any breaking news for the elections then.

Popularity: 36% [?]

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It’s funny how some people tend to rush, believe and spread news about what they want to be true. I just heard today and verified the story now. The fake story of Tom Cruise converting to Islam is posted on UnNews since last 1st April. And as it says at the top of the page, “This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-microsecond misinformation.”. When searching in English, I found some posts related to it, questions with negative answers. Do a relevant search in Arabic, I found hundreds of results at the top, all talking about the truth of Tom Cruise turning to Islam, with people blessing and praying for God. I tried quickly to search for posts denying the story, but couldn’t find any.

So I think it’s fact now, Tom Cruise is a muslim, whether he likes it or not :).

Popularity: 42% [?]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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I wouldn’t bet on it if I haven’t seen it. I’ve had one big order with Amazon recently, and thanks to the deteriorating shipping quality of Amazon the order got split into 3 separate orders at least! Alas, I am sending the shipments to my courier forwarding company in the US, Aramex, who have a very lousy customer service them selves. As a matter of fact, I would go to the extent of saying they don’t have one (Read Below update). Especially when they owe you money. Today however I received an SMS of the first part of my shipment, which was way too light. This is the message:

Notice something strange? The shipping cost is below the minimum 2.5 KD ($10 approx), and is actually below 1 KD. Not only that. It has 4 digits after the decimal! Kuwait small currency is fils, consist of 3 digits only. There was absolutely something wrong, but there was also a hope of price adjustment. Later on they delivered the small light package for 0.750 KD! I was surprised and happy to see even a slight hope of price revision from their side, as it’s really expensive for 0.25 lb item. I’m not sure what happened exactly, but I have another shipment that arrived with that one but was delayed for delivery (Kuwait wonders). Maybe they will sum up the charge when they ship the second item. I will update tomorrow when I get it.

NOTE: Contrary to what the message says and what you might think, the item is an iPod accessory and not decoration! Just to clarify I don’t go to the extreme of ordering decorative stuff from the net. I hardly take the time to buy my own clothes, let alone decoration.

UPDATE: As I promised I will update you on the outcome. It turns out the 0.750 fils was a breakdown for part of the shipment, and the second part with rest of the bill is coming today. I have stroke out the part about Aramex customer service existance as I have to say, I was shocked today I received a call from Aramex Shop & Ship manager wanting to understand the problem better and offer any help he can give. Just when I was seriously seeking an alternative to Aramex, the guy was so kind and listened to the whole list of items I had on Aramex, biggest was the case which cost me around 100 KD. It’s really nice to see some people taking the action them selves and calling the customer offering all the help they can give. We still have to wait for changes, but for now, I take my hat off for this guy.

Popularity: 58% [?]

(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Aljazeera Voting System fake?

I don’t post usually about politics, but it’s a special occasion where the responsible for death of millions over the past 3 decades, and even after his death, has been hanged to death. Not every day you see a president sentenced to death. Many philosophical minds start to argue now, and talk about human rights and nobles. How could the president be hanged, it was not a fair trial, and even the execution was a revenge.

I say to them, what do you expect? No heart feelings. All is well, we will just hang you because the judge said so. We forgive you for spraying halabcha with chemicals, invading Kuwait, taking on Iran in one of the most tough battles mankind ever knew, just when Iran was healing from internal revolution. And the hundreds of Islamic Shite leaders you murdered all forgive you as well. I will not say it was right how the US entered Iraq, and neither it’s OK for people to shout loud during the execution, but then name me one reason why Saddam Hussain should be treated fairly? There are hundreds of bodies laying in iraq waiting to be dig out, if ever. Body of my relative was brought to Kuwait last year from the Iraqi captivity during invasion of Kuwait.

Aljazeera now has a poll on whether you agree to Saddam being hanged, and before I even see the results, I knew it. Result is NO! It’s always the mentality of Aljazeera to take on sides. Anyways, I did my vote BIG YES, and just to test the trustworthy of the vote, I wrote a small script to post a 100 vote for YES. Not surprisingly the results didn’t change a bit. Percentages are exact the same, and number of votes didn’t change accordingly. I tried manual votes and View results. Within minute you sometimes see number jumping from 47250 to 47330, and then another refresh in a new browser shows lower number of votes again. I tried to refresh two sessions at the same time, the first was higher in number of votes than the second by 2!

Nevertheless, the difference in percentage is always the same. Lets do a simple math here to see why. With total number of votes 47300, and the percentage is of 3 digits, e.g. %37.8, it means that it needs another 50 votes for the change to take effect, which apparently it has. But still, the results remain the same. Either it’s a total game from Aljazeera site, and we have seen many posts with strange results in the past, or their posting solution is still in Alpha testing phase, so I suggest you keep away from it.

Popularity: 38% [?]

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