Sometimes I’m paranoid as hell about my website and that something is slowing it down, but in reality I’m not really sure and its always a matter of trial and error. Recently I stumbled upon this testing tool from Pingdom, you enter your website and they give you the time to load, whats slowing it down, whats taking more resources to load, and lots of other details. You can see what is loading first and a variety of items which is very cool and keep on testing it every once in a while, I didn’t even realize my website is 1.8 MB worth of data to load back in the day that which is even more then a floppy disk. I liked how they organized the data and they let you organize the data, very useful free tool, and I keep getting 88/100 for my average score, not bad. Check out the tool linked below.

Link: Pingdom

I’m one of those people who are always skeptical about what companies say, so when WIMD was offering high speed wireless connectivity to homes I wasn’t sure what to expect from them. I spoke to an engineer and sales person, they basically said they would bring the equipment, connect it and try it out before they would bill me. The engineers came about 4 days later, they started installation, they had a few initial issues but after a few hours everything was ironed out. They use a consumer grade Cisco router that you can buy from any electronics shop like XCite in Kuwait but the Wireless Broadband is through Proxim.

They are using Wireless Broadband technology which has been tried and tested for a while now. It is excellent but there a few minor drawbacks, one of the major ones is that it isn’t consistent. So even if you have a 10 MB connection it can be 10 MB then drop to 4MB then back up to 8 MB then back to 10MB again, its just the reality of the Wireless Broadband Solution, but overall any speed even if it isn’t consistent is better then 1 MB. In my case it hit 20 MB so I went for the 20 MB package without a thought, I live off the internet and now I shall be very happy.

Requirements:

• Line Of Sight (Your house has to be visible to One of Their Towers)
• Close to a Tower (They have lots of Towers)
• You can mount a small tower to the exterior of the house

They are using Qualitynet as their backend provider, I think or hope they would expand on that. Now that people are starting to find out about them and they have coverage around Kuwait I hope they can still manage to provide the speeds they have promised even when their subscriber base increase dramatically.

Link: WIMD

Pricing:

• 6 MB – 325
• 7 MB – 355
• 8 MB – 390
• 9 MB – 473
• 10 MB – 523
• 11 MB – 590
• 12 MB – 660
• 13 MB – 730
• 14 MB – 800
• 15 MB – 870
• 16 MB – 940
• 17 MB – 1010
• 18 MB – 1080
• 19 MB – 1150
• 20 MB – 1220

Fasttelco has been going through some changes over the last 6 months and mostly for the good. One of thing they are doing that I like is that they are looking for creative Kuwaitis to joining their team and I like that they are looking for people with or without experience. Its good when companies such as these takes this step, and its the step in the right direction.

I only recently joined Twitter in April of 2011, a late baby boomer. And when I joined I felt lost in this huge realm of information not knowing what the hell was going on. But within a few months I figured out my way about and honestly I’m loving it. Different then the blog and you get to interact with people right away and get information quickly if you need it. Its like a burst of energy for me, and to me its an addition to what I do online. I do love blogging and I love what Twitter has introduced, and nobody can deny that it is a huge phenomenon in the region but I for one am enjoying it yet not taking things too seriously. A surprising thing that I heard recently is that we make up a small percentage of twitter but the more interesting part is that Kuwait makes up almost 20% of the activity of twitter in the region even though we are so little in comparison.

Now with all of this a lot of people use twitter for different reasons and in my opinion some people take it so seriously. I recently found a way to see who follows and unfollows me and I find it very interesting especially these bots that keep on following and unfollowing, and also people who unfollow, and thats about it for my interest. I recently had friend unfollow me and I called him up and told him that I caught him and laughed, he said he didn’t expect me to see that I did, he was somewhat embarrassed. I told him who cares I just found it funny and I was surprised that he didn’t unfollow, he said I tweeted too much! I just started laughing, but I realized that a lot of people really get insulted when you unfollow them when reality its nothing at all. Seriously with life online or offline people need to have thicker skin, this craze started with Facebook friend and unfriending, and now with the unfollow and follow, come on don’t take things too seriously.

@Z_District

GBI and FastTelco agreement – The agreement will provide FASTtelco with connectivity on routes both within the Gulf and onward to Europe. The GBI Cable System will provide FASTtelco with greater choice, value, diversity and resilience for their traffic.

Scheduled to it launch its operations at the end of 2011 and designed to operate for up to 25 years, the GBI cable system will connect to all the Gulf countries and provide onward connectivity to Europe and Asia. The cable system is designed around a core ring, which can re-route traffic thereby increasing resilience. With a design capacity of up to 5 terabits per second on certain cable sections, the GBI cable system will have the capability to meet the rapid growth in demand that has been forecast for traffic originating and terminating in Gulf.

For those who don’t know GBI or Gulf Bridge International is a multinational company established in the Gulf for the sole purpose of providing connectivity to all the international carriers and the Gulf Nations. Participating nations are Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Iraq. Basically large amounts of fiber connected by all these countries so if the cable gets cut you still have connectivity and its like negotiating with these large providers but with a lot more users then one ISP and big ISPs in the US, Europe, and Asia.

I have seen Fasttelco vastly improve over the past two years and especially the last 9 months. I have been using them and very happy with their service, and especially since they were the first to remove those ridiculous Data CAPs from the ISPs. And now with this addition it will help maintain their service, increase their capacity and provide them with a fallback plan if the cable in Gulf Sea or Mediterranean gets cut since GBI has a lot of routes and connected to a lot of carriers.

I am very careful with my machines, I update them constantly and I do regular scans. Sometimes some software crashes or a machine crashes, that happens every once in a while. But I am very careful of what I install or download, so when something weird starts happening I go into lock down mode. The day before my machine was acting fine when the next day any website I enter gets redirect to “Yandex.ru/blahblahblah” I didn’t know why. Some websites would stay but regular websites get redirected.

Googling it on the infected machine was useless because it kept getting redirected so I used a different machine to Google if this happened to anyone. Turns out there is a hostile bot that hijacks websites and automatically redirects them to Yandex.ru which is a Russian search engine/mail provider.

First Step:

• Turn Off All Add-Ons on Firefox and Chrome
• Run AVG Virus Scanner & Windows Maleware Defender

Result:

• The scanners didn’t find anything and the websites didn’t find anything

Next Step:

• Update Windows, Firefox, Chrome, AVG Definitions, Windows Defender, Chrome & Firefox Add-Ons, Flash, & Java

Result:

• Still getting redirected

Next Step:

• Deleted All Cookies, Cleared All Forms, All History from Chrome, Firefox, & Internet Explorer

Result:

• Thing went back to normal

I won’t lie I was a bit freaked out after each step and I was getting pissed, I thought some random Russian was messing with me and I wanted to punch him. So these are the automatic steps that I took and luckily things cleared up. And usually if worse comes to worse, I would format the machine after trying everything, I would have gotten paranoid that somebody really got into it, but it didn’t reach that point.

Zain originally has a 40% or 60% stake in Mada Communications, and it seems they are in the works to make it 100% at this stage. Mada has gotten a lot of good press for their WiMax services which they launch just before summer and the turbulent times of the Data Caps. Overall people are happy with their current services with Mada, they do have their issues when they update the towers, some times it increases speeds and sometimes they decrease the speeds drastically. Overall I think they have somewhat evened out, getting between 5 – 8 MB which is honestly really good but not the initial 10 – 11 MB that we used to get. The way their current system works is that they have a unit attached to every Zain Tower in a concentrated area that they cover, and each one has about a 2KM radius, that is why it is very different from location to location. Their Mada also provides other services but thats for corporate services that they give primarily to Zain. So it makes sense that Zain wants to buy them out but the question is will things change for the users?

Now the item in Question… Data Caps?

Since Zain has them, will they be applied under new management, what are exactly the implications we face. I’m not sure if the management will change but I do know how Zain are about their branding, what is theirs has to adhere to their rules. The system that Mada uses won’t put stress on Zain’s current 3G data network so I hope that they would let Mada’s current policies of no capping to continue and hopefully expand on it. Its always good to see services improve and expand and I hope its the case with this.

Group On has been talked about for the last two years, the next big thing in the web, the ones who refused Google, the ones who are going to take to the next level. I didn’t get how exactly they were making money or what they were doing, and then they got a lot of negative press, they lost their top management within months and the CEO and Chairman were till their messing about. From the hype of being of an untouchable company turning down a Google buyout of $6 Billion and then falling from grace with the expectations for its market cap had fallen from $30 billion to closer to $10 billion. There is big story behind the scenes, check out the story from Gawker from the link below.

Link: Gawker

Over the past decade I think people have somewhat gone crazy with Social Networking! I remember when Hi5 and MySpace were all that people talked about in Kuwait and thats even before the marketing companies in the middle east caught on, and MySpace is somewhat dead, and I don’t know what people used Hi5 for in the first place.

To tell the truth there is a lot of good that everyone is able to get out of some these social networking services, in Kuwait Facebook is a fantastic tool for supporting small businesses or big businesses to get in contact directly with their customers to get their feedback, and Twitter is an excellent for fast and short communication or throwing out ideas and getting instant reactions.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Tumbler
• FourSquare
• Get Glue
• LinkedIN

Luckily I’m not on very many social networking sites and only recently got on Twitter a few months back and I’m happy I did, but at the same time I got on board with FourSquare and GetGlue and that was insanity for me. I would check into so many different locations on FourSquare and so many different shows on Get Glue, it was pure insanity, I wanted to keep my numbers up, I wanted to be come Mayor, I was obssessed! I would keep checking in with whatever I was doing constantly, it was like I was on crack or something, seriously addicted. At one point it was just taking too much time and too many times doing it, I even figured out small loopholes in it and how to trick it, but luckily by summer I gave up on the useless ones, they were pointless. There is a point to some of these social networking sites, you get tips from FourSquare when traveling and see what are some interesting shows with Get Glue but I just stopped them because it was taking too much time. I’m not getting on Facebook or LinkedIN anytime soon, probably because I see how much time people spend on them and I barely have enough time as it is.

Google Reader is my favorite RSS Agregator out there, my source of information, an organization to all the chaos that faces me on the interweb and now they ravaged it, Google what have you done. I feel like it has been stripped of its powers now longer in control of itself, an autonomous portal on the web. They wanted to streamline their products and at the same time killed off one of its best features, sharing with your friends. There are some people that I always share with on GReader that I don’t socialize with them online, always showing interesting topics that I might not have seen. I’m a fan of Google Plus but doesn’t mean everything has to be shared through, make it an option, not mandatory!

What I Dislike Severly About it:

• No More Friend Shares
• The Monochrome Colors On The Left, I Want My Colors Back
• Feels like its flat