I think a lot of people have been waiting for the rain in Kuwait, it felt fresh today just after the rain. I know I’m one that love’s the rain, the smell just after it feels amazing, the cold is perfect. It has been annoying getting those short drops of muddy water over the past couple of months, I would take rain over the sandstorms,those sandstorms this summer were ridiculous. The weather has been fantastic in Kuwait for the past few weeks that I hate to be indoors because we never know when things might switch around and go bad very quickly. It’s even nice sitting outside with something warm to drink, maybe with a coal fire if possible, but I hope it continues for a while.
Left work at 3:00 pm, had a ridiculous headache and I was hungry as hell. I wasn’t functional from noon until 3pm, all I could think about was food and getting some sleep. As soon as I got home I had lunch, and passed out within 30 minutes. I woke up about 4 hours later not realizing so much time went by but the funny part is that I woke up hungry wanting more food, so I had dinner around 9:00pm. I think that waking up early getting a lot done over the past week has finally caught up with me and hit me on Sunday, I do like sleep but I also like to get a lot of things done during the week and weekend, but now I have a few things to do for this week. At least later in the evening I spent some time cleaning up, getting some paperwork in order, organizing the piles of things I have all over the floor, I always think that I will make time to organize my thing but there is always something that distracts me. I need to organize my music, I have a lot of new music that I need to put into a new play list and that will take no more then an hour, but still haven’t gotten around to it.
Sidenote – I took my Beemer to BMW for an Oil Change and check up
- Their quick service on Saturday is a 4 hour wait
- The Oil Change is 65 KD but Lexus is 27 KD, and their AC filter is 45 KD which is damn expensive
At least I knew the mechanic who is a good guy, he took my car quick and had it all done within an hour since it wasn’t much work for him. I got rid of all those annoying symbols coming up on the screen, now all I need is to drop the car at Al Falah Car Wash for a full detail so they can clean the leather.
At some point I think we have gone overboard with the amount of space we are consuming, but the best part is space keeps getting cheaper. There is about 24 TB sitting on the table destined for two servers, for K’s & myself monstrous server that we are building. This time its a server with a 20 HD slot WHS so it can be maxed out 40 TB and my current solution is running with 22.1 TB, so the numbers keep jumping up. The only large storage I trust is Western Digital Caviar’s, the Green are great for lower power consumption and lower heat, heat is very important because it affects the life of the hard drive and with that many in the same proximity that is a lot of heat.
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I have been using these headphones for a while now and they have been working great. They keep out the sound of the annoying safety videos on planes while flying, I can hear clearly on the motorcycle, they don’t irritate the ears after riding some time and you can clearly hear a nice solid base in the head phones. The one annoying part is the tips, when ever I pull them out o my pocket or out of bag there is always a possibility that tip might fall off and this time I ran out of extra tips. I went onto ebay to find some headphone tips, they sell them in bunches so I bought 10 pieces of the medium size for $11 from a supplier in Hong Kong since their weren’t that many other choices, I’m just hoping that they are the same quality and fit, I’m worried they might be fake or might cause irritation at a later point but I really like these headphones so hopefully this will solve my problem of losing those tips.
After several months now I have at last sold my car, the odd thing is that I never put it up on Q8Car, I wanted to but never got around to it. I tried selling it through one of those dealers in Sharq, but he pretty much tossed my car in the back of the lot for a while, he was even asking 200 KD for the sale if it happened, and he said that since it has been on his lot for so long that he had to be paid 100 KD which I refused since he didn’t bother trying to sell the car after all these months.
I took the car to a friend a couple of weeks back and said he probably has a few interested buyers. And true to his word the car was sold in a couple of weeks, wish I did that before instead of going to those sharq shops. I got a very nice price for it too, so I’m happy about the sale. We went last night to a insurance transfer company, to get the transfer papers, any one of those places by the Ministry of Interior in Kuwait City. After getting that done for 4.5 KD we headed to Ministry of Interior Personal Services in De’eyah. We took a ticket, and waited, there were lots of people getting civil ID paper work, car transfers like us, updating other paper work. There were lots of women working behind the counters, they were mostly scary cone heads as I like to call them. They had a ticker system where you wait to be called your turn, but that system only works when the women behind the counter click the button to go to the next number and a lot of them weren’t clicking it. There was one woman who really wasn’t doing anything at all but sitting there, right in front of us, she would act like she is doing something but she wasn’t for at least 15 minutes, I noticed her clicking the same buttons on the keyboard several times over 15 minutes. I felt like I was studying newly discovered creatures from behind a glass, you don’t want to make direct eye contact with them or it might be fatal. Luckily one guy was working there knew my friend so we managed to get that done quickly and so the new car registration was completed with a 5 KD stamp from the vending machine by the door.
It was strange seeing the Landcruiser and know it isn’t mine anymore, but at least I know the owner will take good care of the car.
Captain Planet was one of those shows that were supposed to bring a message in the early 90s to convince people to recycle and get kids to convince their parents. I was not one of those kids, and recycling in Kuwait was a joke so I was very skeptical but watching the cartoons made me feel guilty. I thought the Captain Planet was a wuss, and really what was power of the heart, Wheeler is the red headed kid who thought he was really cool. Did the show’s creators really think that we didn’t know “Gaia” was Whoopi Goldberg, even I knew her voice at that age, she was not a good looking woman and so that was a misconception. I hated the show more and more, even though I was watching it, Captain Planet really annoyed the hell out of me because most of what they were saying was crap. Even in Kuwait when they tried to start recycling and to help people to recycle it wasn’t too successful either, made me hate the guy even more. I thought any other comic book character could kick his ass at any point in time.
Link: IMDB
Went to Dubai for the day last weekend to test out the M6, which has had a few modifications made mostly to the suspension and a few other items. After a long road and arduous task they have finally completed this beautiful machine. The one problem with modifying a BMW is that the car has a lot of electronics, so you have to make sure you satisfy every sensor on the car after each modification and this is one sensitive car, if one thing is off the whole thing goes down the bin. So it took a lot of probing and testing to narrow down the main issue and develop solutions for it, on the way to that they fixed a few steering and intake issues I was facing and I still believe the V10 from BMW is there best creation yet.
I got a call last week from the guys at TAM saying my car is ready, and they asked if I wanted the suspension race tuned, I said yes please. So by Saturday it would be completed, I couldn’t wait to take it for a major test spin, and they were really prepping the car. They took it for a few test runs with each suspension tune, and took it to the track for a final test. When I got in on Saturday they tuned the car to my weight and asked how often I would have someone with me in the car to factor that in. Now this is the 2nd test run I have had since a few months back and I was worried it might but a little too stiff, but I was wrong it was perfect.
It was firm and perfectly stiff, comfortable to drive on the road and handled every horsepower it was spitting out. I finally got rid of that annoying body roll and fixed that understeer issue. The car turns when commanded, handles like a go-kart, and I was abusing it on the industrial area they had. The mechanic with me kept on telling me to go faster around corners, it seems he knows my car very well, he even complained about it being sensitive like a woman, I couldn’t help but laugh he knew my car well. I couldn’t have asked for anything better then what they have improved as well as other things in the car, then there was the other issues that they fixed. I am happy customer, and every time I went into TAM they have more impressive cars.
I pre-ordered Halo ODST over a month ago, and it was well worth the wait. I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t want to read anything that was written up about it, this is the only game that I finished since Halo 3, and I didn’t even manage to finish Halo Wars even though I want to. Incidentally I was playing KillZone 2 on PS3 to try it out and to hear what all the fuss was about but it doesn’t even compare to the Halo Series. after about 18 hours of intense gaming co-op campaign sessions on Halo ODST we surprisingly reached the end, I was really enjoying playing campaign mode on Halo ODST, it was better then Halo 2 and Halo 3.
What’s different about Halo ODST is that you have a sort of Night Vision system which works great in the dark and your fighting monsters that you can really kill, not those sludgy creatures that get annoying, even if they are tough they die after some bullets. The game feels more refined and its nice that there is a really well made story line attached to the original Halo. I just hope that Bungie keeps on making Halo games with different stories and hopefully move forward with it, its once of the few games that I have ever kept on repeating.
Now for the stats, I have done decently well but fallen far from those who are living online and killing non-stop and refining their skills. In Halo 3 I get anniahlated pretty quickly, except if I have rocket launcher so thats a different story. Halo ODST doesn’t have direct multiplayer but it has Firefights, which are swarms of killing those monsters again again, wave after wave of monsters getting tougher every time and you only have so many lives, weapons, and health packs. That is turning out to be very interesting and I’m thoroughly enjoying it, but I need to get some practice, you can have it co-op with two players and you can have more players in the firefight if your friends join you from X-Box Live, but I am still getting used to it.
Overall Bungie have made an amazing game, there was just so much that was done, but I was hoping for more so this time around I’m going to play on a harder setting. They have done such a great job with other iterations of Halo that we expect and want so much, and I was hoping for the multiplayer to be upgraded with some of the game play from the campaign which gives you night vision at night, enabling you to really shoot better. If you haven’t played it then you are missing out.
I had a very simple Friday plan, it was to do everything that I wanted to do and get some things done but no real work was to be done. That was simple plan for the day and at the top of my list was to wake up early, enjoy the weather, and ride. The best part about riding is enjoy the empty streets, and I was getting reacquainted with my machines. Later on in the day it was a True Blood and Halo ODST session, we really spent most of the day indoors trying to do as little as possible, move as little as possible. Some times you really do need one of those days, and we really got caught up with True Blood and we had some Basking Robins after lunch which perfectly hit the spot. Then later on in the evening we installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my friend’s machine which he is going to use as a media portal, and that was some serious piece of hardware.
A great combination for a Friday to relax:
- Riding
- Food
- Video Games
- Napping
- Hardware Configuration
Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for choosing Aramex as your transportation partner.
The Kuwaiti Customs Authority has recently notified us that all courier shipments containing non-documents shall undergo customs inspection upon arrival at Kuwait airport. While Aramex shall continue providing its clearance services, we are unable to provide a specific time frame as to the duration of the clearance period, which may exceed five working days. Aramex therefore encourages all its customers who require speedy clearance to collect their shipments’ documents for self-clearance at the Aramex Ardiya office.
Should you need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us on + 965 1820011.
Best Regards,
Aramex Shop&Ship Team
What this sounds to me is that Aramex is trying to make an excuse and basically says that we will take your money to bring your packages to a certain point but your better off picking it up. One note, I have done clearance by myself before and its hectic there and you can barely find the clearance people from one Ministry to the other, for example you need clearance from the Ministry of Communication when ever you bring an odd piece of networking equipment or server and you won’t have time to get it back to clearance, and recently they lost a package of mine after I got the clearance. These guys don’t have a clue what the hell they are doing, I’m not blaming Aramex but that is a very cheap ploy on their part to exit from the responsibility. They are providing a service and people are paying for it, even after increasing their prices they say this after all that people have gone through with their deliveries. Most of my packages get stuck in custom clearance in the first place and I wait for it to be cleared because if it gets lost its not my fault. Also I don’t think customs will be able to handle the volume of packages that come in from all the different courier companies on a daily basis from Kuwait Airport, I have seen how many staff they have and if one guy goes to work you would be lucky. I remember my server taking over two weeks to clear and thats with me calling them consistently, I wonder how long they will try stopping every package before going to back to normal and leaving the items. About a year ago these guys pretty much let everything through without a headache and in reality if people just pay the fee they owe then that’s fine, why does it require clearance, let people just pay the tax for it.