Mario’s World

This was the first computer game I got addicted to back in 1985 with my first MSX computer. Found a MSX emulator for the N900 and immediately remembered this game.

I found this video on YouTube with a funny documentary on the game.

Alghanim has this twisted and bronzified Cadillac at their showroom. Most visitors paid more attention to this old beauty than the newer offerings. Its pretty cool to have these antiques around. I guess Alghanim can afford to with such a spacious showroom.

Electrozan is selling this gadget for KWD 40/-. The label says its a Pizza Maker. But the “HP” branded gadget looks like a printer/photocopier. Perhaps, it copies pizzas?

This time around, the “Salary Search” from Bayt.com is ridiculous. The figures are all there, but the presentation is terrible.

“Post your salary details anonymously to get FREE access to Bayt.com’s Salary Search”, but when you do post your info and try to access the salary search feature, you need to “Upgrade to Power Search” to view any info other than the title and salary. The “free” information without “years of experience” or “company industry” doesn’t give a proper picture of the data.

In any case, after going over the data entered for Kuwait, the figures basically say that I’m underpaid.

Overall, Bahrain seems to have the best average salary followed by Qatar, UAE and finally Kuwait. Not bad for the tiniest country in the Middle East!

I like these new catchy “check list” ads by Zain at the airport.

Hotel Booked

Car Rented

Cash Exchanged

Roam with Zain

Good to Go

On the other hand, these ads make more sense only on the way to the airport, not on the way back from there. Most people would have already booked their hotel, car and picked up cash! Still, I like the concept a lot.

I wonder how often women try to clean out their purses! Ro called up in the afternoon wondering where she lost her keys (again)! Luckily before I got into the car to drive all the way home to let her in, she found them in one of the million compartments in her purse. When I got back I joked that her lost spectacles might be in there too so she dug in and pulled up a lot of “lost” items. The office key, key from our previous flat, the spare key, a bunch of tablets, some jewelery, a rosary, perfume, usb stick and a lot of change. And this was just in one “hidden” compartment of her smaller purse!!!

Apps on Facebook have been around for a while now and one of the more popular apps I’ve seen my friends and office colleagues on is Farmville. Everybody is trying to be a farmer.

I was least interested in this app but about 10 days back I decided to check this out and created my own farm. Its actually a very nice game. You can plow your field, sow crops and harvest them. As you get more XP (experience) you can upgrade your farm size and add more stuff to your farm like stables and houses.

This game does need your attention on a regular basis since the crops wither if you don’t harvest them. The trick in getting the most out of the harvest is to plant crops based on your free-time schedule. After breakfast, lunch time, tea time and after dinner. Choosing the crops depends on whether you need more coins or more experience and a simple excel sheet can sort that out for you.

I think a great feature they could add would be the ability for multiple people to farm the same piece of land. I’ve noticed that a lot of my fellow farmers have slowly lost interest in the game after crossing level 30. Lets see what happens when I do.

Overall, if you need some time everyday to take a break from your busy schedule or to just go to your own world/farm, this is a great little game.

If you have a barcode scanning software on your cell phone, point the camera at the image above and click. Its actually a link to my blog.

This is an amazing barcode. You can create you own at this link.

The idea of this barcode is to have it on t-shirts, posters, magazine where people with an active net connection and the barcode scanning software can click a picture of it and automatically navigate to your website. In offline mode, it can also be used to just contain text, a phone number or even a pre-coded SMS!

I think this could be used as a fantastic support tool. One page of barcodes printed with some text by each of them (like server not available) and the sms will go to the right person immediately.

The N900 from Nokia is termed as an Internet Tablet with phone capabilities. Wide-screen, touch-screen (finger and stylus), sliding QWERTY keyboard, GPS, Wifi, FM transmitter and receiver, 5MP camera with a Zeiss lens, TV out, 600Mhz processor, OpenGL graphics support, 1 GB ram, 32 GB storage, app store, email client, FireFox browser and it runs Maemo, a flavour of Linux. Which means full hacking capabilities!

And best of all …its now mine!!!

Thanks Ro!

Well, I thought I already posted about this last week but since I didn’t, here it is.

The not-so-great InfoBiz exhibition took place last week. As usual, there were more cell phone companies than technology companies displaying their wares. And the most eye catching stand was the Wataniya one. They were probably the only ones who took the effort to look hi-tech. Sadly most of the stall was used as a stage to blow balloons for children. Well, at least they had some fun!

Seems there were a few good deals on broadband connections. A few good deals on phones. And a lot of fake look-a-like products on sale.

I especially liked the large interactive touch-screen displays at the Wataniya stand. First time I’ve seen a projection touch-screen in action.

BTW, the cops were showing off their new state of the art cars. Its going to get more and more difficult to avoid speed cameras once their new cars with mounted speed cameras are on the road.