Item is already available for pre-order on Amazon, and ofcourse such quality only deserves the Bluray version. But BEWARE. I was surprised to see the item starred 1 only.

But if you look closely, you realize this is all because of the narrator. Oprah Winfrey? Seriously? There is no one else more qualified to narrate the most anticipated documentary of the year than her? The thing is good enough to stand by it self without celebrities polishing it, and what you want is the best in this field… Get the David Attenborough version.

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The wait is finally over, and as always, the last few hours were the most difficult. It wasn’t the purchase of the iPhone 3G S that was difficult for me, but rather clearing it out from the customs hands.

That’s right. All this and more for this mere device, alongside another small package of 5 solo items. Four hours of running back and forth under the sun, and some guys at the customs really knew what it was all about. “It’s the iPhone” they shouted. And it’s a single unit only, so I’m not sure what’s that fuss all about. Well actually I might know, but I will leave the reasons aside for now, since all the pain was gone once I got home alone with my packages.

Some people have been admiring the new iPhone 3G S after they upgraded from iPhone or iPhone 3G. Now imagine if you were moving from the windows based Tytn II, with all it’s bugs, slow response, and extremely annoying touch screen, to the new iPhone. That was a moment! And from the first 24 hours, here are my quick thoughts about it, keeping in mind it’s my first iPhone/iPod touch device, so some points are quick obvious and old. I’m just listing down here what I really liked and didn’t.

Pros:

1- The multi-touch screen and it’s fast and smooth response.

2- Browsing ofcourse is the best I have tried on any portable device and by a gap.

3- Camera in iPhone 3G S seems much better than my limited experience with iPhone 3G one.

4- Voice Control: With all it’s funny outcomes, this is still a pretty neat feature I am enjoying.

5- Compass and direction was fun, though not much of use for me right now.

6- YouTube streaming is quite brilliant.

7- Email client is really easy to use and fast. Now I end up waking at middle of the night to check my phone for emails rather than drag my self to the laptop. Is that an advantage or a bad habit gotten worse?

Cons:

1- App Store: To get 3rd party apps to your phone, you need to create an Apple account, and then register a valid credit card, based on which you will be taken to the appropriate country store. So I can’t even use the free apps before I provide a credit card, and after I did (with Kuwaiti credit card ofcourse), it forced me to Kuwait store, which doesn’t have Google Earth, and I expect many other good apps.

I’m sure there are plenty of tricks around it, but it was annoying by it self and meaningless.

2- BUGS: For some reason, I got to some screens like activation more than once. This is OK. But when I downloaded a collection of free 3rd party apps, all of a sudden none of them was working at all. They just load for fraction of a second and then disappear. Apparently a common problem that can be overcome by deleting the app and re-installing it. For 100 apps, that’s 100 delete and re-install. Enjoy!

3- Stupid Restrictions: This was typical in a message saying “This application is over 10MB. Connect to a Wi-Fi network or use iTunes on your computer to download …”. Now this can be acceptable as an advisory message, but why the hell would they cap an app download to 10MB in size, when I’m supposed to be paying for an iPhone 3G, and a cellular network with 3G speed then? This is a pretty common issue, and all the excuses I read are lame. We are paying the operator an awful lot of money for the 3G cellular network, and 10 MB is nothing for it. Probably one reason why I might end up jailbreaking my officially unlocked phone.

4- Battery: This is the worst thing. I’ve read about heating, I’m sure it’s there. But it didn’t happen when I was downloading different apps, playing the iPod, and tinkering with the phone while it’s on 3G network. Battery however is as they said exactly. You use the best of your iPhone, and it won’t survive through the day, perhaps not even half of it. I had it this noon at about 70%. At around 4 PM, with just some downloading and music playing, little browsing, it was near 20%. The recommendation from Apple to disable 3G network speaks stupid for it self.

Summary:

Overall I’m pretty happy with all that the iPhone 3G S can deliver. Bit disappointed with the battery life, but aside from that, everything else is fine. The remaining issues are solvable, perhaps through twisted methods, but solvable :).

Where I Got It From?

If you’re interested, I got my officially unlocked iPhone 3G S 32 GB from Australian seller named hi.gadgets through eBay for 300 KD ($1045) including shipping. I thought it would be smart to ask for Fedex home delivery shipping instead of sending it to my mail box, but it ended up in the hands of the customs, which seems pretty common for Fedex shipments over here. I heard Aramex shipments are less likely to be held by customs, so this will save you a whole morning, and extra payments.

So see if you can find a suitable offer, and try to use Aramex to deliver it to Kuwait.

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A relative of mine introduced me to this site a while a go, and I have to say it’s a must to check before you pick your seats for your next flight. SeatGuru is the site offering seating information for all major worldwide airlines. How often would you pick a seat thinking it’s good only to find out it’s near the jet engine, the bathroom, or there would be a better chair with more leg room just two rows infront.

The content is generated by online community, however registration seems to be controlled by the site owners to ensure content quality.

To use the site, simply search for your desired airlines, pick airplane model, and browse through the seats to find the most suitable.

NOTE: You may be tempted to try and search for Kuwait Airlines. Save your breath, you’re not gonna find it. This may seem disappointing first, but on a second thought, who is traveling on Kuwait airlines anyways? Service is bad, airplanes are so old, they are so expensive, and they have so few destinations.

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 Upon request from macaholiQ8, I am reviewing this LCD 46″ V-Series screen from Sony. I should note that I’m not the expert in this field, but it’s mostly an end user opinion of it. Below are the specs, and my opinion along with it.
Product Name:  Sony LCD Bravia KLV-46V200A

SIZE: 46″

Supported Resolutions: 480p, 720p, 1080i – This is the drawback for HD Gamers who mostly would want to go with 1080p. Even though for me, when I tried the 1080i, I did not see huge improvement over 720p in the picture quality, and neither I noticed any problems with motion in video games. For more information about the two types, read the post 1080i & 1080p.

Input & Output Slots: The device comes with the widest range of possible options you may think of for connecting external equipments.

• Side Slots: S VHS/Hi8/DVC camcoder & Headphones. So you can easily connet your camera to play videos, or your normal definition gaming device, e.g. Wii or PS2.
• Back Slots: Loads of slots are there. Most important are PC IN, Digital Satellite Receiver, Digital Terrestrial Receiver, HDMI-IN (1 only),  video game equipment, VCR, DVD Recorder, Hi-Fi audio equipment. Mostly, you won’t miss a thing. But the problem is, this LCD screen best fits on walls rather than TV stand, and once you do so, you will have to take the screen down every time you want to put or remove a new cable. And for that, it really takes two strong men to do. Your house mate won’t help much, I had to call my brother over to the house to get it down. The other option is, if you are so skinny, and lubricate your hand with oil, you might be able to slid your hand in the back and just get the cable in. I somehow managed to do that when I couldn’t wait any longer to play PS3 using the HDMI cable :). Point being is, I guess they could’ve made the wall hanger a bit adjustable to move back and forth when wanting to connect new equipments.

Viewing Angle: 178 Degrees. I’ve heard that others in numbers outdo this one, or that Plasma has a better viewing angle. Regardless of why you may want to watch the TV from such an angle, I have my TV in the living room, lay down in my bedroom and am able to watch it crystal clear though the door. I can’t wish for more than that.

Ghosting effect: Nothing yet.

Fast motion response: This one is usually a take against LCDs, but I’ve seen movies like Blood Diamond and Flags of our Father, watch soccer games, and played hard-core PS3 games with not a single problem yet thank God. Is this where the brand comes in handy? Maybe.

Additional Equipments: Alongside the LCD screen, I got the Sony DVD Home Theater System. It’s not cheap at all, but the great thing about it is, it includes 5 DVD-Exchanger with embedded sound amplifier. Also, the rear speakers are connected to the front ones via infrared. So no wiring all across the room is needed. If you notice the small deive on top left of the image, that’s the transmitter for infrared signal.

Why did I choose it?

Going through lots of reviews and comparisons between LCD and Plasma, while numbers in general favored Plasma, I still  inclined towards the LCD. First, it does not have the Burn-In effect, and it’s much more suitable for gamers. Even though I didn’t have any plans for games at the time, I knew I won’t be able to resist for long. Second is LOVE. That’s right. You move inside the showroom, browsing tens of different screens, not even knowing the size, type, or brand of it. And you find your self suddenly standing infont of one only, staring at it. Saying, this is the one I want. I kept doing this for maybe 8 months. Everytime I enter Sony shop I stand infront of the same one. I went then to public showrooms showing different brands. I somehow found my self staring at the very same screen. It got on the nerve of all people around me. I kept saying I want it, and didn’t get it. They just shouted back, just get it “Theba7tna!”. Eventually I did.

Isn’t it so romantic? Let’s make a hollywood movie. Better than the Titanic. Point I want to make is, browse through all kinds, and see the one that you really like. The one that really catches your eyes (and fits your budget!).

Hope this little was a bit of help for some, at least MacaholiQ8. If you have specific question, please fire away.

Useful Links:

Sony Bravia KLV-46V200A Cnet Review: 9/10 on Cnet. Not bad.

LCD and Plasma Pros & Cons: Pros & Cons of both LCD and Plasma.

LCD Vs CRT:  Even though I don’t see the need to compare it to CRT, the LCD points them selves are useful.

How LCDs Work

How Plasma Displays Work

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What I Currently Use:

• GIMP: The FREE open source graphics editor is not really as good as Photoshop, but does the job on many occasions. At least for a novice like me, it’s more than enough.
• Notepad+++: I added an extra plus here as this light-weight notepad clone editor is really good for quick file editing. Tab based, open source, add-ons, highlighting on various programming languages. Only place where it lacks is for framework based development, like Ruby on Rails. This is where Komodo Edit comes into picture. Komodo Free version was made public last year and I’m not sure how PC Mag guys missed it. It’s doing great for me.
• Launchy: Quickly from command line kinda interface reach all your apps, files, folders, and custom actions as well. It’s smart to know the preferred apps as well.
• Google Reader: Read all your favorite blogs and news sites from one place, accessible where ever you go. Tag and categorize the feeds, search through them as well, and share them.
• Google Desktop: The best and most efficient way to search all your computer, emails, chat, web history and more, on the fly. Alas, for some reason it doesn’t work on my home PC :(.
• Geni: Build your family tree. Share it with family members and let them add to your tree. Ofcourse, this could be a more serious privacy infringement than Facebook someday!

Trust me there is a lot more, but I will jump to a selected list of softwares I am yet to look into.

Interested In:

• ThreatFire AntiVirus: Seems to detect suspicious behavior and blocks it, rather than depending on virus signatures which is more of reactive approach to new viruses.
• EULAlyzer: This is quite smart thinking. It goes through those long Terms & Conditions detecting weird words. Like if a program involves installing ad programs on your computer, while we usually tend to accept all unaware.
• Hotspot Shield: Create an instant virtual private network (VPN) tunnel between your laptop and the router at any Wi-Fi hot spot to protect your data from snoops on the public airwaves
• Mint: Syncs with your bank and credit cards online, checks spending habits, and come with suggestions on how to improve your savings.Alas, no Kuwait bank supports those type of stuff, and my cash spending is considerable as well.
• Zoho: Very strong online word, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and more tool. Getting more popular every day.
• Remember The Milk: Organize and track your grocery items online. It sends SMS,email, and IM remainders. Forcing geek into family life basically
• Eraser: People think when they remove item from their recycle bin it goes ino a black hole forever. But they’re wrong. the system just removes the pointer to that file marking it as empty for future use. If someone goes and read those specific bits of data later on, he will get to your private information. Eraser lets you overwrite those private sensitive data by blank 1s and 0s. Basically a virtual shredder. It is slower than normal Delete though, so use it when you must to.
• ZamZar: Convert your files online from/to any type for FREE.
• GizmoProject: Skype competitor offering free peer-to-peer, over internet phone, and video calls, based on open standards.
• Prism: This is a new thing from Mozilla still in the labs. The idea is that you basically load a certain favorite web app of yours (Gmail in my case), and let it run like any other application on your desktop.

Well, don’t let me ruin your appetite. There is a load lot more to look for, based on your interests. Enjoy, and please, do share your insight on the tools you tried before.

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Anyways, next early morning a lady calls asking about the complain, and then she went on to explain that the Central Bank of Kuwait have issued that order and all banks must comply. I asked about what’s the time period to apply it, and why there wasn’t any prior notification. She simply said it’s a huge over head on us to call each customer to tell him about it, and we will be responsible during that period for any abuse of non-canceled cards. So the bank simply decided to throw the matter here on the customer, to let him figure it out him self (the hard way). I told her do you have any idea what would happen if I was outside, checking out of a hotel with a bill of 1000 KD when I found out about it? Ofcourse she replied with the usual “NO Sorry Mr we don’t mean to” kind of stuff they do best.

So today I went to showtime to pay cash after my credit card was canceled, and they confirmed they received large number of similar cases just this month. So if you are in a similar position, be ware. Since this is the Central Bank decision, why is it the bank that I hold guilty here? Well, in addition to not giving me any sort of notification, no phone call, no SMS, or not even a simple email, which can be automated if they heard of such technology, I have the following list of items as to why the bank could’ve been more considerate before canceling my card:

1. I have been a regular client of the bank since I started working. Only when I joined a KIPCO company I was forced to move to Burgan Bank (talk about some Anti-Trust here, but it’s not the U.S. alas) and they know it. Even at that time, my social and rental allowance used to go to NBK all the time. And all the time, my balance was smooth, no salary deduction, no loans, nothing.
2. I always clear my credit card before end of month, and it rarely touched 100 KD.
3. When they canceled my card, it had 17.5 KD on it, while my balance was going on steady 4 digits number for months. So they could’ve easily locked certain amount, lowered credit card limit temporarily, or call me to do something about it.
4. I have already joined new job and tied my salary to NBK. It’s just that the first salary takes time to come in.
5. I called the lady after to request a refund for my credit card, as it was canceled and I already paid for 1 year. 3 months left on the expiry date. I mainly called to see how they react not to bother for few KDs. Guess what? She never called back it’s been more than 24 hours and we are going into the weekend now.
6. A friend of mine who never had salary before still has his NBK credit card running! So it’s not immediate cut of all accounts, they could’ve tried to be more careful how they do it then.
7. They claim they are contacting their clients gradually regarding the matter. It’s been more than a week since my card was canceled and I am still waiting for this SMS message to come. Guess they used local mail instead. I will make sure my grand children read it.

So have you had any similar issue? If so, what was your bank reaction? I am hoping some banks took it on their responsibility to be a bit more proactive.

UPDATE: You can read this older post from K.TheKuwaiti with load of useful comments, don’t waste them. In summary, NBK employee got in defending his bank that they can’t call or notify each and every customer (not even by SMS), and others noted that Al-Ahli had a good customer service, they and KFH have both notified their customers by phone and/or SMS. I have to say, I am shocked by the two banks. As I know, Al-Ahli is pretty bad, and KFH usually are bad as well in those procedures. I was naive thinking they all should learn from NBK.

UPDATE 2: A friend of mine told me something that makes the matter worse. He said this law was made by Central Bank of Kuwait last year, and was supposed to be enforced this Jan or Feb. I am waiting for link from him, but he seems pretty sure, and if that’s true, it means banks had several months to prepare and notify customers, but they preferred to make the most out of it and then cut us off. I tried to search Q8Ba7th and this is the closest I could get. A news back in March 2007 where Central Bank ordered banks to treat credit cards like ordinary loans, and thus ofcourse, you need salary to have loans. The story also raises the point about non-salary income. Why would the government assume all people’s income is through salary? They want to encourage free open business and then they do this. So stock owners, real estate business owners, free lancers which sometime make loads of money are all cut off? So what should I do if I am doing free open business?

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Problem Cause: Media Player

Problem Solution: Remove media player

My Solution then: Remove whole Windows!

Now the problem is not over with your program shutting down. After that I usually start hearing my computer creating noise like it’s about to launch into space. Checking running processes I see lots of Dumprep.exe. A Microsoft non-essential process for 3rd party applications that writes errors to text file and request to send it to Microsoft. The problem is that these non-essential logging-only processes take over all CPU resources and just keep running until you kill them.

Funny thing is Microsoft have an article on how to remove it, but it claims that this is a workaround to overcome most likely hardware issues or damaged registry entry. It doesn’t explain however why the process keeps running forever and not die! I am following their article and yet the two methods didn’t help :P.

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I did actually finish reading my first novel from over a decade, except the one I got as a task in college which was ridiculous. I heard about it from a friend first and gave it a second thought. Several good reviews followed that I eventually went for it. The moment I opened the book I could see it’s the kind of small simply written, clean and tidy book without any drawings. A book that you can easily finish in one day. This was a bit of a relief for me, as I am a lazy novel reader and my eyes get tired from reading quick. The storyline is not something so extraordinary with lots of twists as in Harry Potter or many others. Yet, the real purpose behind the whole story is what’s amazing. I don’t want to spoil any part of the story on the readers, but the story couldn’t come for me at a better time. I am taking a risky move in an attempt to seek a better living and achieve a big dream of mine. Something inside me just keeps pushing and calling for that dream. I have decided to follow it. I have decided to pursue what the writer calls “The Personal Legend”.

I would definitely suggest the book for both motiviation and inspiration. After you go through the story, you make the choice of what you want to do with your life.

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Isn’t Gmail just an amazing service? It has spread so fast and became almost a standard. Just like Hotmail used to be in the VERY old days. Sad fact however, Google same as many other sites tend to keep away from customer emails as much as they can, although what drives company best is customer feedback. Gmail it self had massive customer feedback before it was launched. This was to help them address what people really need from their email service.

What Gmail and many other popular sites does is take the customer first through the common problems topics. If customer can’t find it, they ask him to try Gmail discussion group, if he can’t, he would go through one of the Help topics and then click Contact Us at the bottom as he can’t find what he wants. He is then taken to a page to choose what kind of support he needs:

Clicking Get Help with Technical Issue should open contact form. But I found out this is no longer the case. Click it and you are taken to the troubleshooting page, and from ther, you have to go through series of questions until you end up with final solution. Only some of the questions end up with possible contact form. Many others don’t have and simply consider the problem solved or asks you to go to the Google Groups to search for an answer. If you are lucky, you will either find your solution or get to the contacts page. But what if you’re not? I noticed also the contacts page has certain parameters attached to define where you came from:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=bugs&ctx=bugflow_chat12

So even going to the contact page from a different question may not give you the help you hope for and they might consider it inappropriate question. Now I can understand such companies receive massive amount of support emails, most already have been answered many times. But this is not a way to treat valid concerns. If you want to know why, search Google Groups for contact gmail and see what you get.

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Now, back to the subject. Following the power crisis we had last year, and very often a scheduled power and water cut on citizens was enforced, this year some people did not waste the opportunity and started a silly huge massive campaign called TARSHEED to increase awareness of lower power consumption with the slogan “The solution is with increasing awareness”!. This is a complete joke for me and a silly thing to say. Right now, you see those campaign ads in the street, on TV, newspaper, and the more silly thing is, on every Kuwait TV Channel you see this power-meter at the bottom-right:

So in case, for any reason that I can’t even find an example for, when you are watching Kuwait TV Channel, you will see a power meter indicating where are we on power consumption level. Yellow means beware, Red means turn everything you don’t need off! And they will start calling you to say your power consumption is high, lower it. Good God, what about your level of planning? Don’t you think it needs attention to? Now I won’t say the campaign did not make some people more alert, but the reasons I say it’s a joke is:

• Kuwait has %10 of world oil reserves and we have to worry about power!
• Kuwait is known of lending countries money and never taking it back. Most of these countries did not stood up to Kuwait during Iraqi invasion. Another thing to note. So we are not lacking cash money.
• Kuwait had built complete infrastructures and projects for neighbour Arab countries while they ignore their own.
• The Tarsheed campaign has a budget of 10m KD. Thats over $35.5 million dollars! Can you believe a country would spend so much to aware 2.5m people just to lower their consumption? Someone is making quite a lot of money from that campaign and the government mistakes.
• The increase in power and water consumption was known and ignored for decades. Few years back a group of consultants from outside were brought to study the power generation upgrade plans, and whether they were necessary or not. The report did not say they were necessary only, but they are not enough for the years to come. So what did the ministry of power do? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing.
• Now that it’s too late, power generations are air-shipped from all over the world, that the world’s largest cargo airplane landed in Kuwait Airport (somehow!).
• The companies who are coming for saving us are being penalized with thousands of KD for every day delay. Now that’s normal by it self, but if you are so much caring about deadlines, you got a hell lot to explain.
• Statistics say that most people in Kuwait don’t pay their power and water bill, and yet, no one gets cut from the services. Increased Awareness here for paying users is “Don’t pay for something you can get for FREE”.
• Result from not paying for years summed up into huge bills (even though prices are discounted for power and water)  and people started making legal demands in the parliament to wave away the current bills! Why, and for what good reason? And about the people who were good paying customers?
• The calls were heard and a credit of 2000 KD was made for every citizen for power.
• Few years later after giving 2000 KD credit, we find out we lost power even though we are regular paying users! Why? Because the people who were not paying for years are overusing it! Now we should all behave and reduce our power consumption! We have a saying in Arabic “You cannot give what you don’t have”. So why did you give credit when you actually lack the power it self? Just cut it from non-paying users. You will increase awareness of power value then. Problem solved! No need to pay for campaigns, make money instead.
• Tarsheed campaigns have guide rules: Set your air conditioning to 25 degrees C. Kuwait easily reaches 50 degrees at midday so what the hell would 25 degrees do me? I can turn it off and it will be the same inside.
• Campaign also asks: Do not use heavy power consumption equipment during peak hours (midday hours). So no PS3 or XBox 360 at the time. No washing clothes as well. No, No, No.
• Huge government and corporate buildings have all their lights on when they actually leave work at 2:30 PM!
• Most power consumption comes from oil factories and wells. The percentage of human power consumption is so low relatively that makes the difference so negligible.
• Tarsheed Ads in the street are in six different languages. Now in Kuwait, the two known languages are English and Arabic. If you don’t speak any of the two, you are most likely a low-income person who is trying hard to make some money to raise his family. Most those people live in groups and they will be lucky if they have a TV. Let alone that they are outside the house most of the day. So what good does the campaign do?
• Summer games are made and you can watch them on Kuwait TV. They play water contest games and in the end they ask you to follow Tarsheed in lowering water and power consumption.
• New tall buildings and large shopping malls are opening and rising every day. Kuwait wants to open to the outside world when it’s not capable of handling people inside it.
• The Ministry of Power in Kuwait have asked the Ministry of Education to postpone school openings  next year for 2 weeks for the temperature to go down a bit and avoid disastrous power failure. So now, the power needs controls education. And the power problem will not be solved until next year as well! Not even improved. Wonder if they will ask government to cut down working hours. That would be at least something useful :).
• When Kuwait is trying to install new power generators, people from inside tell, the problem is bigger. The infrastructure it self cannot handle that much capacity and needs to be changed!. This explains the request sent to postpone schools.

I could go on and on with the list, but I am afraid I would not stop. I did not only come with problems however. I have a solution.

Solution: OLPK (One Laptop Per Kuwaiti)

The $99 One Laptop Per Child would work best for us here I say. Laptops are lower power consumption than PCs, but this one is even better. It has no power consumption and uses manual crank to charge it. So let’s do a simple quick math to see how this would work:

• PC along with it’s monitor consumes up to 175w. Sleeping time its 35w. Let’s say it’s 90w on average.
• 10m KD Tarsheed campgain -> $35m
• OLPC Price: $99
• Number of Laptops with Tarsheed budget = Budget Campaign / OLPC Price = 353535 units
• Power Consumption Saving = Average PC Consumption * # Units = 35.5 Mw.

Not bad at all when the guys freak out for 100 Mw increase. And it’s a permanent solution without any campaign headaches.

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Speaking of price. I don’t know about outside, but in Kuwait normal tickets are 2.5 KD ($9). You are not allowed to take any food inside. No water, or anything else. Not even a milk shake, which they don’t sell inside anyways. Going inside and wanting to enjoy the movie, the normal tradition is a soft drink and a popcorn. That would be another 0.75 KD ($ 2.6). Sum is around $12 for one person to see a movie. You spend that much to find out one third of the movie is censored. This is not a very special case I assure you. I still remember when I went to Crash. 3 Oscars, 8.2/10 rating on IMDB. Everyone who saw it in Kuwait said it’s completely pointless and sucks! Foreigns however defend it by heart saying it was a master piece. How come? Sandra Bullock, one of the movie stars only appeared in Kuwait theaters for around 5-10 minutes! The movie was completely shredded to small pieces and them summed up again. Quarter the movie was canceled. Want more? Recently I went to Ratatouille (I can actually spell it!) which is a wonderful 3D animation movie from PIXAR as usual. Again, a scene was deleted and I still can’t figure out what happened in that scene. But I keep asking my self: “What could’ve happened in Kid’s movie? How bad was it to remove the whole scene?”

But that’s not all that spoils the movies in Kuwait Cinema. So often I go to the cinema and the sound is not clear, screen is trimmed from both top and bottom, or you see some vertical lines as in the old days. Except for the fact that Kuwait is hot, and there aren’t really any varieties of family entertainment places, cinema would have been abandoned long time back. And even now, I am thinking about sparing some movies until I get the DVDs and enjoy them at home. If you’ve got large good display screen, and the appropriate surrounding system, just get the place quite and enjoy 10 times better show at home. Even if not, the least you would not feel fooled and ripped off.

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Online services is something that needs planning, stable implementation and rounds and rounds of testing. The way I see it, Government seems to have cut things short and ignored some critical parts. To begin with, we have the privacy and security of the systems. How can a person authenticate him self as the specific individual who is allowed to see the data, and how can we make sure no intruder or outsider gets also access to this data. The way it’s done right now is mostly depending on the person’s Civil ID number. We all know that this kind of information is not confidential. It’s something that identifies you, but it does not authenticate who you are. For example, the guy in the bank has access to thousands of Civil IDs. I was working in Kuwait University and I had access to hundreds of thousands as well. My employer has that kind of information. Many people just have it. It’s not something I can hide from the world. So imagine that by knowing my Civil ID number, you can see if I have speeding tickets, if I have gun license, my passport information, who I am ensuring, and lots of more information. It actually happened to me once as well. My uncle told my father you have a speeding ticket. Why should they know that? Maybe I don’t want them to know it.

Say this is not enough? The MOI it self posted sometime back with a flashy sign an excel sheet with the full list of eligible voters with their civil ID. So pick your name from here and paste it there. It’s that simple! This is in regard of the MOI. For the Civil Service Commission, it gets even worse. Someone could be driving your future without you knowing it. You must sign there to specify your jobs. The only authentication again is your Civil ID. Provide it and you are good to go. Then you can see your information, available vacancies for you, and alter the jobs you want to apply for. Most these windows open inside an IFRAME. Open the IFRAME it self in a new window and you will see this:

My first program example “Hello World”. For non-programmers, Hello World tends always to be the first program you write. Just a dummy program to print this message. It seems the programmers were in a rush and just left the title as it is. Now as for the security, let’s say that soon the authentication model is changed, and a password is applied. Does that mean we are safe? Not without a thorough testing and revamp of the current security model implementation, No. You know why? Because if you open one of the IFRAME windows in a new screen, you will see this is the URL:

http://www.csc.net.kw:8888/csc/SpecialNeed.jsp?kk=13&cv_id=<civil_id>

Where <civil_id> is your civil ID number. Change it to any other person number and you got it. So it’s a matter of passing parameter only. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. I can’t say now they missed it because Civil ID is already the mechanism of authentication so it’s the same thing anyways. But at least make it not that obvious and a bit future ready.

Again, as I said before, things are moving forward. I just knew you can pay your speeding tickets online. Something many people would like to do. However I don’t see it moving in the right way. Specialists must be following up with the implementation and ensuring the security and integrity of the data. The ultimate solution in hope for is one secured login credential for all government services and sites. Not a walk in the park I know. But unless this security issue is addressed right now, more and more services will come and reside on the existing weak model implementation.

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The upgrade attempt and contact all happened on 10th Aug, and there was no feedback from them. Nothing until 13th Aug! That’s a long time for online payment support from someone like Google. But what was the email about?

“Order canceled – Because you haven’t provided valid credit card information in response to the email Google sent to you on Aug 10, your order has been cancelled.”

What! But I have already contacted them for support 3 days back. Why would they ignore my email and wait until transaction expires? This is really bad service I thought, but decided to give them another chance. I sent a follow up email the same day and up till now I did not get any feedback. See the log below:

I still remember when I heard about possible Google online payment solution, and then saw their demo for the first time. I thought WOW, this is gonna be good. I told all my friends about it. My first experience was bad buying from a merchant, and now this. For an online payment solution the two most important factors are: 1) security, and 2) customer service. At least I’m sure they lack the second now. Even though the process of registration and payment is very much convenient, probably the best I came across, it still doesn’t do me any good until I get my transaction through.

Mind you I am one of the biggest Google fans and I did not wish to publish something like this, however my experience did show me Google really needs to improve on their customer service level. They are holding up now because they are the # 1, but that doesn’t mean they should overlook customer service quality. You lose loyalty, customers will only wait until second best is there to try it. The Low and bad response is something, but in this case, it is complete ignorance I am sorry to say. It is really a do-it yourself self-service thing.

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• AdSense-Deluxe: If you are an AdSense user and frequently want to insert Google Ads within your post, WordPress editor by it self can get annoying in the way it manipulates certain scripts within the post. This plugin helps you organize the library of Ads you use and include them in your post with simple <!–keyword–> way.
• Anarchy Media Player: To allow easy embedding of videos inside your post. I still find problem with it however. I tried many solutions and figured the best way with my current WordPress release is to copy/paste embedded code from say YouTube and save at once. Any edit will require I remodify the code to be on a single line again. This problem does not seem to exist with WordPress 2.2 which is used to power my Daily Gizmos blog. However the list of not-supported plugins there is huge so the migration is not a walk in the park.
• Challenge: The protector of the universe.. Arr I mean my blog. It does not completely stop spam though, spammers still find their way through, but without it I get like 50 spam comments per hour.
• DoFollow: This is controversy. Google is completely against it. DoFollow removes the NoFollow from your commenter’s backlink. Meaning that the link will be counted by Google as a weighted link. The idea is that you did not chose to actually link to people who comment on your blog, i.e., it doesn’t actually reflect you were referring to them. It’s them posting, and many times just for the sake of backlink, that is true. So Google believes those links should not interfere with the site ranking weight. Others like Yahoo however don’t believe in this method and count all links, disregarding NoFollow attribute. I am having a second thought about it, but this is the issue of another article I will discuss it in detail later.
• FeedBurner Feed Replacement (Now called FeedSmith): This is a wonderful plugin. FeedBurner first of all is a site that will help you monitor and optimize your blog feeds. To do so however you have to map your feeds to them. This plugin does it in one click. Unfortunately this plugin is not WP 2.2 supported yet.
• Feed Footer: I am just trying out this plugin, and if you are reading my post through Feed Reader you should see a small Sponsored Ad at the end of the post. Many people (like me) like to read posts through RSS Reader as it’s much more practical. This however forbids blog owner privilege of delivering ads, unless they post incomplete RSS Feeds, which I hate to do. This plugin lets you make your readers happy while still get a chance to make some income.
• Google (XML) Sitemap: Sitemaps are easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that are available for crawling. For a normal site, this is possible manually. However with a blog, every day you are supposed to add a new page. So keeping up the Sitemap.xml file updated all the time is a tedious job. This plugin does it for you. On every new post, edit, or delete, this plugin builds the new XML Sitemap. You can also adjust the pages priority from a user interface. All you have to do then is tell Search Engines about your sitemap for better indexing. Use Google Webmasters for starter.
• Popularity Contest: This you can see at the footer of my posts. The popularity rank of each post based on number of views from main page, singe post view, feed view, comments etc. You get to decide how each factor weights in the equation. Ofcourse old posts will not have their history reflected here, but on the long run it’s good to have. Note to make however some posts have somehow strange results, like one that had %100 popularity, I don’t know how. Nothing special about it, and it’s like saying you got %100 votes in election. Not possible if you’re not alone.
• Sphere Related Content Widget: I recently disabled it to go easy on my blog response time. It got loaded with stuff it needs serious attention now. This plugin gives the user list of related articles to your post. The links are shown in new sliding window on click only, making it user friendly
• Show Top Commentors: Reward top commenting people on your blog by listing them on your side menu. Also, this most probably means that they are eligible to have the NoFollow removed, which the plugin does by default.
• Subscribe To Comments: Keep your users tied to the post. Alert them of new post comments by email. Pretty straight forward and useful. I was surprised how often people use it.
• WordPress Database Backup: For the bad days! Mostly you can do that through your host console as well.
• WP-Amazon: This is the strongest AJAX plugin I came across. It allows you through side menu in editor mode to include Images and links to Amazon with your affiliate id in it. This thing should be sponsored by Amazon it’s much easier and faster than using Amazon Affiliate site it self. You search for your item and is fetched on the fly with you affiliate Id added to it. last time I checked, it was not WP 2.2 supported as well :(.
• Wp-Cache: Some people have spoken great deal of this plugin, others and I have not see performance improvement of post caching. Either way, Do no come near this if you have Challenge plugin activated. I did so and ofcourse, the question got cached and displayed everytime, but the real answer is different. People couldn’t post anymore. Trying to remove did not seem so simple at all as well. Read my older post if you want more information on this.

If anyone’s got some comments on those, or further plugins to add, do share them please.

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<your name>/ KWI <your number>
147-29 182nd Street
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
United States

This is very normal people use it in Kuwait all the time. However this time the shipment never came to me and they sent me delivery notification! I checked and found out TigerDirect have shipped the item to the address without the code KWI … They trimmed it and sent it. I contacted them to explain the problem and they replied with the the Thank You we shipped it to this address:

<your name>

147-29 182nd Street
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
United States

Yes I know! That’s what I was trying to say. Incomplete means wrong address as far as I am concerned. And since Aramex (as they explained) receive the shipments as whole packages they have to sign and accept it, they can’t check each individual item. I said what the heck? Those TigerDirect people don’t know a thing about customer service. Amazon TO THE RESCUE! They replied and explained they will wait for the shipment to return for the refund, and advised to place a second order if I am in a hurry. OK I said. So what? I placed the second order directly from Amazon and got it.

Now it’s more than 45 days and still no money refund. Few emails went back and forth between me and Amazon, until their buyer-guarantee@Amazon.com replied and said the shipment was delivered and signed, we can do nothing to help! What on earth are those people talking about? The shipment was sent with incomplete details, you advised to put another order and wait for that one, now you simply walk away with it? I replied with a nasty email and got a (POLITE) reply saying:

“Greetings from Amazon.com,

We are sorry to hear that you have not received your merchandise
from order ###. The seller provided us with UPS
tracking ### that shows a delivery with
signature acceptance. Amazon.com is not able to resolve shipping
problems after delivery. The address confirmed by UPS is the same
as given for delivery. Please note the UPS tracking number above is
different than the one you supplied as yours had a couple of numbers
transposed. We advise you to contact your local authorities if
necessary in order to pursue this matter further. Thank you for
your understanding.”

Read the bold part and see how they admit the shipment was sent with incomplete details, and now I have to contact local authorities to resolve it! Quite contradicting isn’t it? And what pisses me off more is the address they use “buyer-guarantee”. So I place the order through your site, your reseller trims the address and ship it. You advise me to wait and buy new one, then it’s my problem? Aramex ofcourse is a different story, and say they will charge $30 (8.5 KD) to return the shipment, and that I need to get the refund from TigerDirect.

Now, everyone have taken his hands off and I am the only one who lost. I had no choice but to ship the item to Kuwait and now looking for a buyer. How ironic? I replied to Amazon now just to emphasize more the problem is from the reseller, he needs to address his problems. It seems Amazon are overlooking customers, or tend to think reseller problem is not theirs.

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