Ro and I had a great time this weekend at the Ambassadors of Comedy show. We laughed so hard that at times our stomachs started to hurt! The show was organized very well.

Nitin, Dean & Aaron were great. Nitin hit home with more Middle East material. Both the Americans had a balance of humor between American politics (President Bush of course) and their usual Arab terrorist angle.

For most of us, Ashfaq, the emcee was probably the funniest of the lot. The crowds went crazy for him every time he came on stage. Could have either been his shiny silver jacket or that accent he was talking in!

Not sure if should be called garbage, but I see a lot of people just throwing away their old furniture near the garbage bins. And what amazes me is how meticulously these workers stack up the old furniture to make max use of the space on the truck. They even break up cupboards & tables to separate the wooden planks and squeeze more into that truck.

I bet most of it is recycled and some of it might end up at the Friday market after some re-furbishing.

I noticed a special offer today on the NBK site for Hotel Missoni in Kuwait. They offer a special rate of 79 KWD per night but the Missoni website shows the same room for 63 KWD. What’s special about this offer?

Very often, working on windows can drive you mad. Looks like these guys couldn’t take it anymore. They jut decided to burn the laptops. Must have been inspired by the 7 million tires burning in the desert.

Wonder if my company has any policies on burning laptops.

Actually it’s silly to burn the laptops just because the software sucks! Simply upgrade to Linux. It’s free and it works great.

I came across this video today. Reminded me of the time we watched one of them do about 3 paintings in 10 mins near the Roman Forum.

These street side artists are amazing. Usually, in 5-6 minutes they can dish out some pretty cool graphics. And only using a few cans of spray paint, some tissues and a few templates.

I had my yearly vehicle registration renewal recently and I was really impressed.

After getting my paper work stamped at the test center, I headed over to the Traffic Department in Maidan Hawalli. It was crowded just like all other government offices but the atmosphere was so different … so friendly.

I went over to the first counter to hand in my paper-work and noticed that all the staff there were very cheerful and friendly. All of them spoke “politely” (very rare in Kuwait) and in English (even more rare) to the non-Arabic speakers.

Then I took a seat in the main waiting room and this was the best part. Two of their employees were walking around with rolls of freshly printed “daftars” (registration documents), calling people by name, walking over to them and handing them their “daftars”. They were very jolly and kept everyone entertained with their jokes and other funny comments. Although most of it was in Arabic, it was still pretty entertaining for me.

If the attitude of staff in all the government offices & ministries in Kuwait were similar to this one, I bet all  expats would have a very different (better) opinion of Kuwait.

Good job Hawalli Muroor!

You can just tell how frustrated the guy who painted the sign must have been. Still he was polite enough to add a “please” in there!

Actually, I’m not sure if the “For God Sake” was painted on much later!

Does anyone remember playing Antarctic Adventure? Back in 1986, I was really addicted to this game. I would play it for hours on end on my MSX. Those were the good old days!

I decided to look up this game a few days ago and came across the DOS Game Archive, a site where it was available for download …for FREE. The program wouldn’t work on my Windows 7 machine so I did a little digging and found that DOSBox, a DOS emulator for Windows would do the trick.

The game, although simple, is still addictive …after 25 years. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of playing it after so long. Let’s see how long it lasts.

Pecha Kucha, which is Japanese for chit-chat, is a very interesting presentation methodology when you have a lot of presentations.

Every presenter has 20 slides each shown for 20 seconds and they auto run in the background. That way, in 6 min and 40 sec the next presenter gets to boot you off the stage.

Pecha Kucha Nights seem to have sprung up all around the world including Kuwait!

I wonder to what extent we can encourage more people in the corporate world to use a similar methodology. It’s good because you know that there won’t be more than 20 slides of boredom and there is a good chance you won’t fall asleep in 6 mins and 40 sec. And best of all, the presenters will have to stick to the point or get booted off the stage.

It’s a shame that very few people know to present at corporate meetings and how they love to stretch 30 min. meetings to hours. Frankly I tend to tune out in 20 mins or so unless the presentation is real lively.

We went for dinner to Jade Garden the other night and were quite amused by the live music entertainment. Every hour or so, 4 of the staff gather in the center of the restaurant on that little make shift stage and perform 2-3 numbers for their guests.

When I first saw them setting up the stage, I was expecting some very traditional Chinese songs considering the very traditional Chinese decore. But the more modern English numbers just add to the ambience.

The food was great as usual!