Whenever I’m faced with paperwork, I find myself baffled over the multiple set of procedures and official documents involved just to get things done in this country. I am aware that this situation is being improved with “E-Government” systems, etc., but it remains that there are numerous times when I would drive all the way to some institute or ministry, in the heat, in the traffic, wait in queue, only to finally find out that I had been missing a certain document or that I hadn’t made a photocopy of something —what do you mean they don’t have photocopiers at police stations?!

Here’s a little productivity tip that should ease most of the tedious non-automated paperwork and help you get the most out of your time:

1. Scan the official items listed below
2. Print a copy of them (make sure they are to scale!)
3. Save all the images as JPG or PDF on a USB flash memory and keep it in your keychain
4. Keep a copy secured safely in your car compartment at all times

Official Documents:

• Your Civil ID (front & back)
• Your Birth Certificate
• Your Citizenship
• Your Passport
• Recent passport-size (4 x 6) photos
• Your CV or business card (you never know!)

You should be able to get by with these, but in some rare procedures your parent’s documents might be required, so it’s a good idea to have a copy of theirs too. But if they ask for the ‘original’ then you’re stumped. If you find yourself missing a copy of something, at least you can print it from your backup USB flash drive at the nearest copy center.

Let me know if I’m missing something in the comments.

Starting October until April 2010, NBK will launch the first EMV Chip compliant NFC Visa payWave mobile payment trial in the Middle East. The trial will allow 500 selected NBK cardholders to download their Zain Visa credit card account details directly onto their Nokia 6212 handset over the Zain network. Following that, customers can then make purchases at any one of the 100 merchant partner outlets at Kuwait’s largest mall, The Avenues by simply passing their phone over the Visa payWave reader at the point of sale.

More details.

Earlier last month, Barrak Al-Babtain of Re:Kuwait wrote a post about the “heartbreaking” state of Qortoba: an area that is outgrowing its population density limits. He goes on to say that this is very much comparable to cities of Madrid, Florence, and London except that we don’t have proper courtyards, gardens or parking space to gain any of the dense urbanism advantages.

A highly recommended read. Click to go to his article or check out his other architectural rants.

I was referred to this video from a friend. It’s a remixed musical medley of classic 8-bit Famicom/NES music including tracks from Mega Man, Fire Emblem, Mario Bros, Castelvania, Mother (Eearthbound), and many more. A must-listen for all old-time videogame players.

Number 08 quickly become one of my favorite tracks, although I don’t recognize the game. You can download the mp3 version here.

I just installed ClickToFlash, a plugin for Apple’s Safari web browser, that lets you prevent Adobe’s Flash from loading until you click on it (like Firefox’s FlashBlock plugin). The coolest feature though, is that it lets you load YouTube videos in H.264 with Quicktime (rather than Flash). To top it off, you can download HD H.264 (1280×720px) video as an MP4 file! Click the images below to see it in full size.

In case you were wondering, the Toy Story 3 Trailer video is here.

RX-78 Gundam – 1599 KD

As received by email:

Best Electronics is one of well-known mass home electronics retailers from Japan. There are many branches not only in Japan but also another Asian country such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and so on. The branch in Hawally is the first in the Middle East.

Anyhow, you can see and get various kinds of home appliances there. In the opening sale, you will see a GUNDAM figure! It won’t be real scale, but at least more than 3 or 4 meters! Concerning which kind of GUNDAM, I do not know, sorry.

The location of this shop used to be Al-Yousifi Panasonic Shop on Tunis street in Hawally. You can enter at 8:45 PM today.

The BBC has a hilarious TV Show called, Walk on the Wild Side where documentary footage of animals are dubbed with silly voices. This video got me laughing really hard so I had to share:

You can find many more on Youtube.

I created this short video after trying out LXDE, a light X11 desktop environment, on Ubuntu. It’s pretty fast, and uses much less memory than XFCE.

Season 5 of Khawatir (خواطر), a TV show airing on MBC this Ramadan, has been highlighting several interesting aspects of Japan. The host contrasts the Japanese culture, tradition, and lifestyle with that of Arabs and pleads us, the audience,  to follow their footsteps. I have to admit: I have experienced all the cultural shocks covered by the show and I am truly fascinated by Japanese way of life.

Watch more on Youtube.

Many months ago, I purchased a Midea air purifier from one of the Al-Yousifi branches. In addition to its affordable price, the device features a quiet-operation mode and efficient HEPA filtering. At the time, the salesman claimed it would take anywhere between 3 to 6 months (depending on usage) before the filter would need to be replaced. Well, I was so pleased with its performance that I recommended it to my family, whom eagerly purchased two more units shortly after.

Less than two months later, I was disappointed to find that the HEPA indicator had turned red, signaling the need for a filter replacement. I contacted Al-Yousifi and to my dismay, they didn’t have any at their storehouse. Mind you, Al-Yousifi is the only authorized reseller of Midea products in the region, so I couldn’t go to any other home appliance store. I thought of waiting it out; they’ll order new stocks soon and I’ll be able to buy new filters, right?

Wrong.

To this day, Midea products are being showcased —newer models too!— at Al-Yousifi branches, Carrefour, and other electronics showrooms with no replacement filters. In other words, the company continues to make fake promises by selling products that only last 2 months at best while customers are completely unaware of this.

Three perfectly good air purifiers are now made obsolete by this corporate scam. If you plan on buying any of their products, I highly encourage you to check with their supply stores and be certain about the availability of replacement and/or peripheral parts before taking the plunge.

Update: I have been contacted by Abdulaziz and other representatives from Al-Yousifi. They are offering to give me filters from their current models. I did mention that I want at least 3 so, I’m not sure how much this will cost me or them.

Update: I met with engineer Ayyad at the Service Center and he apologized for all the trouble I’ve been through. He also promised to have the HEPA filters delivered to my home as soon as possible at a discounted price, but as wonderful as that may sound, I hope that this incident does not repeat the next couple of months when I need to replace the filters again.

Synergy:

“the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts.”

I’m sure by now, many of you have seen the new theme for Kuwait Paper Dump. That design is the result of a long decision making process that my partner and I had to go through, but it was well worth the effort.

Just to give you an idea: we contemplated numerous functionality scenarios for of the site and tested for overall user experience. We had to decide on fundamental options like: two columns, or three? Bounded or unbounded layout? Gird or list view? Font sizes? Colors? Ad positions? I think you get the idea.

To build a useful website, content needs to load fast. Kuwait Paper Dump is full of images, therefore the theme must use as little graphics as possible to guarantee fast load times.

This was our initial wireframe. The graphics consisted of the site logo and small icons for metadata. It was fast compact theme, but there was too much whitespace. Once we added the navigational tools and included search, problems began to arise.

My friends and I had planned to go out and have dinner at the Argentinean restaurant, Gaucho Grill at the Palms Hotel. I was the first to arrive at 9 PM, and by 9:30 PM (thanks to Gulf Road traffic) we had all sat at a table and ordered our steak dishes. The place was half empty, but people came in and occupied the tables beside us soon after.

We were served with bread, drinks and starters while we talked and caught up with small chit-chat. We had several random discussions as we nibbled through the food and when we quieted down, we realized that we had finished everything and yet our plates remained empty on the table.

I tried to call the waiters for a beverage refill, but they all seemed preoccupied with other customers. One of them accidentally spotted me, came over to serve me, but didn’t bother to remove the empty plates nor glasses! “Excuse me, could you remove these please? We’re done. Thank you.”

We talked some more, then glanced around as the customers began to leave the restaurant and their tables were being cleared; they had already finished all their meals despite the fact that we had arrived earlier. The time was 10:50 PM and it was getting late.

“Our table has been empty. Where are our steaks?”, my friend asked the head server. “Five minutes!”, he nodded then ran off to a corner. This wasn’t the first time that we eat at Gaucho Grill, they definitely had better and faster customer service before.

We waited until it turned 11:20 PM and realized that if we were to ever get served, we’d be leaving the restaurant by midnight, and we simply didn’t have that much time on our hands. Our order was taken less than 2 hours ago and our table had been empty for far too long. “Yes, but there are many customers, and it takes time to cook the steak.”, they reason. “That’s true except people came in after us and already finished!”, we exclaimed.

We called the head server again and told them to cancel our dishes because it was too late and we had to leave. “Can we just have the bill please?” The server goes on to say that the food is ready and that it’ll be on the house, but we insisted that we must leave now.

We waited another 10 more minutes, but the bill also seemed to take its time to arrive, so we just left in the end.

Note: As I typed this, I read another complaint from the Fyonkat blog regarding their food being served cold.

Gaucho Grill really needs to sort out their service, otherwise more customers will walk out on them.

I’ve had my Gmail account since 2004, back when Gmail was invite only. Fast forward to present day, and I have this annoying little ‘invite’ box that sits on the side and does nothing useful for me. All my friends already have Gmail and those who don’t can register for themselves, so what’s the point?

For the longest time, I’ve been for waiting Gmail Labs to create some kind of experimental “hide invite box” feature, but I learned today that you can get rid of it really easily by using up all your invites. All you have to do is type a fake email (I used remove.invite.a.friend@gmail.com) followed by a comma and a space so that you can copy and paste several times and repeat until all your invites are used. Voila! :D

Update: It doesn’t work! I just got another 50 invites after an hour or so :( Gmail please fix this!

Update: I used up my new 50 invites, waited a couple of hours and the box hasn’t returned yet. Looks like it’s gone for good?

Update: It’s back. Curse you Gmail! >_<

April 14th of this year was the last day to attend the Tokyo Disneyland’s 25th Anniversary. We were lucky enough to make it on time and witness the exclusive “One Man’s Dream” show, and special parades. Here are some of the photos:

This may be a little late, but I just noticed this on Buzzberry’s blog: FAH wrote about his first experience waiting in line for the Apple’s 2009 World Wide Developers Conference. Shortly after landing in San Fransisco and checking into his hotel, he headed towards the Moscone Centre to pick up his entrance badge. The conference was scheduled to start the following day, but he was surprised to find the line had already started. He goes on to describe the rest of his time there, the people he meets, and a short TV interview he had with a reporter from Bloomberg. Click here to read the whole thing.

I’ve been asked to review the new website from NBK. Since other bloggers have already written their own impressions, I’ll keep it brief by mentioning some bullet points:

What I like

• The website is completely rewritten in XHTML
• It loads well on both desktop Safari, Firefox, as well as on iPhone
• The word “beta” in the URL has exciting connotations
• The website is now wider, center-aligned, and has interactive elements
• More graphical, including splash articles using a bit of Flash
• Branch Locator uses Google Maps
• Arabic is displayed correctly

What I dislike

• Too many different navigational areas
• It’s using ASP modules, but it’s not that bad
• No SSL certificate (should be https://www.nbk.com/)
• Some links and menu items are hard to reach because they change quickly on mouse hover
• The fonts used for headings and titles are too vertical and sharp for my liking
• No RSS feeds for news and events

Overall, a huge improvement from the current site. Let’s hope they upgrade the Watani Online interface too.

Here is a Youtube collection of the most famous arabic cartoons from the 90’s. For a long time, I’ve wanted to post these videos in one place and now I finally got them sorted and ready for your viewing pleasure. I know there are some missing ones —I’ll find and add those in later. My appreciation goes to all the uploaders in the Youtube community.

I hope you have enough spare time for these. Watch, reminisce and try not to weep :P

Bell wa Sabastien

Sally

I was checking the stats of this blog when I noticed a referral made from Alexa.com. According to the site, Anything Goes ranks as the 44th most popular website in Kuwait.

I have my doubts about the accuracy of these results as I know for a fact that there are other Kuwaiti blogs with richer content and more readers.

Heh, I’m more popular than Knet?

As received by email. Click to enlarge.

Click on the images to enlarge them. I’ve kept the commentary within each image to save time. Enjoy.

Note: This post literally took me 5 hours to prepare. My next post will just be a gallery with some description attached to the images, otherwise I’ll never get these done!

Asakusa

When we got to Asakusa, there was a guy running around pulling a cart. I think it was meant to attract tourists. Notice the Baskin Robbins?

A few minutes walk down the road from the station, you’ll see this. It’s a traditional market that leads to the Senso-ji Temple. Just look at how big the zebra crossing is.

Note: My hands have been tied from writing about Japan, so please bare with me until the next post.

Yet another inspiring email forward: Click through the images to see how you can make a soiled pot of flowers out of ice cream, cake and cookies!

As recieved via email: these images are of an undetermined Mercedes Benz car service center. The facility and its operations resemble that of a sophisticated hospital! Click any to enlarge.

Narita Airport

Around 5 PM on the 12th of April, we landed at Narita Airport. It would’ve been a wiser choice to land at Haneda Airport, but we didn’t realize that at the time. Haneda would have been closer to our hotel and its architecture is more artistic and pleasing to the eye. No biggie.

We walked all the way from the terminal gate to the customs. The queue was quite long, but the Japanese were organized and the line kept moving along smoothly until it was our turn to check in. They asked us to place both forefingers in small fingerprint scanner and press down on it so that it clicked like a trackpad button would do on a laptop. “Thank you”.

Hehe, shower rooms :P

Dubai Airport

The flight from Kuwait to Dubai was straightforward, and I would assume that most people have tried Emirate airlines before, so I’ll spare you the mundane details. One thing I’d like to point out though: business class on Cathy Pacific gets you a spot in the British Airways lounge.

Alright, time to board the gate. Head on to the next page…

Before I dive in and tell you about all the places that I visited throughout Japan, there are a few things you need to know/prepare for if you want to travel there. I’ll briefly go through them:

Budget

You’ll need a Visa, MasterCard or equivalent credit card to use throughout Japan. K-Net ATM cards will only work in limited locations such as post offices. After purchasing flight tickets and reserving accommodation, your primary expenses will revolve around food, transportation, tours/resorts (if any) and any other services or purchases made there. It is true that Japan is an expensive country to live in, but if you plan your trip and make reasonable estimations, you should be on the safe side of things.

Just to give you a rough idea: a small bottle of Cola —they’re made out of plastic, they don’t have them in cans— from a vending machine in Tokyo costs ¥120 or 350 fils.

Carry Your Passport with You

Don’t leave your passport in the hotel safety box; it is the only proof of identification that foreigners of Japan have. You are expected to present it to police officers or government officials on demand.

Hey everyone, 3baid’s here. My trip to Japan was nothing short of exciting and influential; I did everything from walking down the long street districts of Ginza and Akihabara in Tokyo up to climbing up the and hills of Nikko and Mount Fuji in Hakone. I’ve also witnessed the fascinating Japanese culture, both ancient as well as modern, mingled with the busy crowds of subways and spectated Buddha monks at some of their famous shrines, temples and castles.

In the coming days, I’ll post details and pictures of some of the highlight experiences during my stay there, so remind yourself to check back here later for more info.

Since last year, Kuwait’s Ministry of Communication has blocked Skype, a software program that allows people to make phone calls over the internet at a cost of almost nothing thanks to its Voice over IP technology. The reason being that this technology would severely impact, or even obliterate, the local telecommunications industry as a whole.

Just two weeks ago, Skype made its debut on the iTunes App Store and today it stands as the most downloaded application in Kuwait! What do you think the government will do this time? Could they deprive people the right to install certain applications on their phones too?

Some of you may still recall my post last November about the origins of the word “Estikana”. Well, this week, while wondering around Kuwait City somewhere about Al-Muthanna Complex, I spotted this cafe called, Eest Tea Cana. Does this affirm the theory behind the name? It clearly says “Cana” and not “Can”, so it still holds that this might just be one major typing error, no? :/