I was a fan of Ninos since it opened up on the seaside, I enjoyed their food but I hated it when it go crowded. I would usually try going to at odd times to enjoy the food and not feel its too cramped, I probably haven’t been to the seaside location for over 6 years now. Since the opening of Ninos in Avenues I have been going pretty consistently, at least once every two to three weeks.
The best part is that even though they have been open for a while, the quality of food has not degraded, it still tastes damn good. I still order my Veal Limone with a side of pasta, and when I’m done with that meal, it doesn’t feel to filling. For appetizers I do like the Buffalo Wrappers and Chicken Strips. I had my magazine with me that time while waiting for people to arrive, I’m the type that wants to order right away.
It arrived exactly after three weeks in the lovely compact Dell box. I don’t think there is anything nicer then getting a new gadget and getting to tinker around with it. When I ordered from the person I gave the exact specifications but I didn’t say anything about the color, I assumed it would arrive black, to my surprise it was a dark red and I liked it.
Un-boxed it, pulled out the accessories first, happy to see the spare battery and all the other items. Checked all the CDs which were included, I always have the tendency to want to reinstall myself but Dell does a good job of not installing all the crap software HP & Sony.
I switched on the laptop and did the intial setup, got a clean machine to work with. I transfered all my files from my old laptop to an external hard drive and noted all the programs. First thing I do was install all the Microsoft updates directly from the Microsoft website with some of the optional items.
Program List:
- VLC (video Playback)
- Paint.NET (Free Photo Editing)
- CCCP (Video Codecs)
- Extract Now (Multiple File Extraction)
- Teracopy (FileTransfer)
- FileZilla (FTP)
- Windows Home Server Connector
After initial use the laptop gets about 4 – 5 hours of battery time, after a couple of days of use. Even at the lower power setting I get about 5 hours and 48 minutes which I tried it out while traveling, and even at this setting it is playing back 720p with no issues what so ever, and 1080p plays at 90% with a few hang ups on battery power. Overall the laptop is fantastic, the build quality is great, and I am still putting it through it’s paces.
Coming back home after a long day I want to sit in front of the computer watch Anime, surf online, catch up on some reading, and then look at the pile of books, magazines, and electronic items to the side. I’m keep thinking “if only the items can be organized in the way that I want it, and all the other rewiring done the way I know how but without me moving”. The only solution to this is telekinesis, because I can’t have anybody touching any of my things, I would honestly go mad if anyone moved my things, so I want to do them myself.
Simple tasks but they are all tied together:
- Reorganizing Books
- Removing Stereo, since I don’t think I have used it in over a year
- Rewiring Network – I have a new setup in mind, hopefully this piece of equipment won’t fail
- Reorganizing Shelves – So I find the appropriate area to place my new items
Some of these things have been sitting on the floor for over two months, I have been too lazy to think of where to start. Simply enough, I think I don’t know where to start because I want to do everything at once, which isn’t possible but I will have this unraveled at some point because its getting on my nerves.
(Fyi – For those who don’t know, Phoenix in the X-Men has Telekinetic Powers)
- 74 Tabs
- 14 Windows
(Click on the image below for a big picture)
<Between all these windows and tabs, Chrome was eating away at the power house of machine. I only built this machine a little over a year and a half ago with the best specifications, and with everything that is running, including an FTP program and a few other programs the machine is running on its last breath every time. I honestly like seeing when its about to crash, its interesting how they built the program to be independent of the other, and every once in a while the Shockwave plug-in crashes, but that doesn’t crash the other tabs. What I find surprising is that Google Chrome uses more Ram then any other browser, it separates the processes so you have many processes taking chunks of ram which add up to a lot, but Firefox takes one huge chunk. Overall I still think that both Chrome and Firefox are excellent browsers, with Chrome being the lighter and faster one.
I have been facing a number of problems over the past two months, which have caused my blog to crash the Dreamhost server. I complained to them a few times, and the DH Support said that the load is coming from my Plug-Ins folder but I wasn’t sure what was going on. After a couple of tries, trying to fix things I emailed Meshoo and Jackie asking for help, because it was driving me nuts.
It was upgraded to WordPress 2.71, it felt a lot more stable but still their were load issues in the server. I even stopped Google and Yahoo from hot linking to images to a degree, even telling the bots where to go for indexing. Their still were issues, and after complaining so much, Meshoo took it upon herself a few days ago to make a new clean theme for the blog. I just told her that it should be somewhat similar in regards to the color scheme, other then that I am open to her choices. After day of endless sleep this is the amazing work of art, I want to thank Meshoo for making such a beautiful theme as usual, I think its fantastic but she still thinks there are a few things left to work on. The best part about this theme are the Search and 404 pages, which can be easily found. The updated blog was up in less then a day, and through out the day today major tweaking were being done. I hope everyone likes the new theme as much as I do, thanks Michelle.
After having my Blackberry for a couple of weeks at this point, this is a simple evaluation of the Blackberry service and my phone the Blackberry 8900 Javelin. Overall I am happy that I made the switch at this point, I have got an excellent phone and majority of my friends already have it so its simple enough to ask a questions. I have a few essential applications but I’m not planning to install too many.
The Great Part
- Bandwidth Optimization – You get connected very quickly and easily, this is without using the 3G network only EDGE for now
- Overall Cost Reduction – Less calls just BBMs
- Smooth Operating System – The system of the 8900 Javelin is stable and smooth, much better then the Bold which hangs often with people
- Great Web Browsing
- Synced with email – Gmail or otherwise, if you read it in your Blackberry then its read in your Inbox when you open the browser. Connection through IMAP which is setup manually rather then the automated setup which goes through POP
- Instant and easy connectivity – Everything is updated without a headache, Weather, Google Latitude, Emails, and other things
- The Battery is decent, compared to the Bold its a lot better. From what I’ve seen with friends the Bold doesn’t always last the whole day sometimes half way through you need to charge it. After about a full 12 hours of usage the Javelin is at about 25% – 30% of its power. This includes messaging all day, on the phone, web surfing, and taking pictures which isn’t too bad. The only thing is that you have to charge it through Mirco-USB
The Other Side
- One things is that if you are trying to transmit too much data it doesn’t receive information right away such as sending multiple pictures through BBM, there are a few minutes there when you don’t receive anything but suddenly you get lots of BBMs which were pending
- BBM – It is one reason to switch to Blackberry if you know enough people who have Blackberry’s and to my surprise I know more people then I thought who have BBs. But the bad part is that if you are used to the instant gratification of this communication system you really get annoyed when the system goes down. It happened once and I was surprised how annoyed I got at the damn phone, SMS just doesn’t cut it anymore
It has been a long time since we have had rain in Kuwait, and that fun hail storm the other day. There is something that I like about the rain, it feels like the air was cleaner. I do enjoy driving in the rain, so Friday morning I woke up to go riding and found it raining outside, that didn’t really stop us. We still went to breakfast, and I do love driving in the rain. The best part was the empty streets that early in the morning, I was enjoying the drive and the music as I was driving to the Avenues, every once in awhile the tail of my car would slip out on a turn and it is fun to control that. Even breathing that fresh air felt nice outside, and it wasn’t too cold, just cool enough.
Over the past couple of months I have been frequenting hospitals, sometimes in the ICU and other times in different wards. I don’t know how much longer Kuwait can go on like this without having a new hospital. All these hospitals just refurbishing the front of the building and taking donations for the wards on all the different floors. Amiri hospital has been fixing its wing for the past two years and the same thing for the elevator without any results, does it really take that long? I have to say that there are some really good doctors in the hospitals but you can even tell they are mistreated, and they bring in mediocre doctors from outside of Kuwait for the sake of quantity and on contract so they can use them as they please. The worst is the Ministry with their permits, there are private hospitals who want to get better equipment but they aren’t given the permit for it even though it is extremely beneficial for all people, I have heard of private institutions in Kuwait who works in government doctors to scan their patients at their facilities when its an important case or the wait is too long at the government facilities, an example is the MRI scanner, a private institution wants to pay for a high end MRI scanner but the government won’t let them for one reason or another except the same as their’s which is of lower quality, a high quality MRI scanner means better details and being able to see things clearer.
The nursing is another blunder which is appalling in Kuwait, the most important part of the successful surgery is the recovery which involves nursing and their is no adequate nurse training in Kuwait or advanced care.
I think all this frustration stems from what I have been dealing with as well as the cases I see in front of me when I am in the hospital. Most hospitals feel like military bunkers with tiny windows and are depressing in Kuwait. Politics takes a precedence over real medical care and you can see that clearly but for how much longer.
I face a big problem with my blog over the past few weeks. It has been crashing every couple of days for a few hours a day. I wasn’t sure what was going on, and I have stopped hot linking of images from Google and Yahoo but still something was going wrong. I was in a state of panic with all that was going wrong at the same time, I expected the database to crash at this point as well, but I knew I was over reacting.
Suddenly when it crashed yesterday all my plugins were gone and I started getting a gigantic wave of spam comments. With the help of Michelle the blog has been updated from 2.5 to 2.71, and all my plugins have been reinstated. I’m thinking about a theme upgrade at a later point and making it mobile friendly (iPod Touch/iPhone/Android). Also at last the video embedding has been fixed, I think it was a problem that I was facing, this time around I tested it with IE, Mozilla, Opera, and Chrome. Even the flash problem with the picture uploader in WordPress seems to be working at this point, which is great. I have had problems with it for the past 5 months and at last its working. I still don’t know whats the cause of the recurring crashes, they told me its some script thats running on my blog, but I don’t know how exactly to figure that out but for now everything seems to be back to normal.
I have gotten caught up with a lot of TV shows over the past couple of months. There are a lot of good shows and some shows I haven’t been able to watch since I got caught up with the others. Since I have managed to watch a lot of shows, I’m just going to write quick opinions about the shows, if you want more info you can click on the name to find out more information.
Current TV Shows – What I’m watching on a weekly basis
- Fringe – Best of the new breed of shows, keeps you on the edge of your seat.
- 24 – Jack – No more needs to be said
- Lie To Me – A great new show about a man who can tell if your lying from your facial expressions
- The Mentalist – A man helping a federal agency with all the cases they face
- The Unit – Special forces unit and this season is the best season of this show
- Smallville – I am hooked on Smallvile and can’t wait for Clark to fly
- 90210 – Drama in a Beverly Hills highschool, always fun
- Burn Notice – A secret agent trying to piece together his life while stuck in Miami, action packed
- Trust Me – Two guys in an advertising agency who always have to complete their tasks and facing competition internally and externally, pretty damn funny
Funny Shows:
- The Big Bang Thoery – I laugh so much it hurts, really
- 30 Rock – Alec Baldwin is hilarious
- Chuck – Chuck just can’t seem to stay out of trouble, a very easy and light show to watch, and he has a bunch of funny guys he works with.
Back Burner: – Shows that I watch but I have them on pause for now
- Battlestar Galactica – Waited until the season ends to watch it all one go!
- Friday Night Lights – Story got a little lost but I will watch it later
- Gossip Girl – I do like this show but I’m caught up with other ones for now
Pending Shows – Good shows I heard about but I have yet to see: