Mario’s World

Recently I’ve noticed that a lot of trucks leave 1 door open while driving down the highways. This includes container trucks. And not all of them are empty. Any idea if this is some new rule? Or does it get too hot in there during summer?

The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is a very interesting offering from Microsoft. Basically its a free guideline on how to manage the IT service life-cycle … a Microsoft version of ITIL for MS products. I gave it a quick look over and it does seem to cover everything ITIL does but in its own way. Too bad our local Microsoft partners never mentioned this to us. Maybe they don’t know about it either. Then again, you might as well just adopt the more popular ITIL practices.

I tried their self assessment tool which I found boring and not so helpful. Maybe it was just me. Give it a try anyway and let me know what you think.

I came across this link with some interesting info on beards.

So, what is your preference when it comes to facial hair…

1) The jungle of beard covering my face man

2) The baby face everyday clean shaven guy

3) The well trimmed and styled piece of beard somewhere on my face dude

4) I’ll shave once or twice a week (if I’m in the mood) fellow – BTW, this is me

Check out this documentary by AlJazeera on the Sharks of Kuwait. I didn’t think there were many, at least not any big ones that could real do damage.

I just had to share this. Crowne Plaza London will introduce “Snore Absorption Rooms” this month. I bet Ro considers me the ultimate guinea pig for testing if this new technology actually helps.

Looks like they use a combination of 5 “anti-snoring” techniques/technologies to solve the problem. Wonder how easy it would be to setup something like this at home. I’ve copied and highlighted an extract from their site below…

“The room uses proven technology to help reduce the dreaded, repetitive nasal noise. The technology includes:

• Sound proofing on walls to absorb the loud frequencies, deflect the sound waves and minimise the impact of snoring. The walls use egg box style foam which reduces the noise reverberating in the room

• A specially designed sound absorbing head board that will work together with the sound proof walling to muffle the echo within the room

• An anti-snoring bed wedge which acts as a body pillow, encouraging snoring guests to sleep on their sides or upright. Lying flat on your back makes the base of the tongue and soft palate collapse to the back wall of the throat which causes snoring

• An anti-snoring pillow which uses rare neodymium magnets to create a natural magnetic field,  opening the airways and stiffening the upper palate which vibrates during snoring

• A white noise machine which is proven to help drown out the droning snoring noise and help sleep and relaxation“

A few months back I upgraded one of my experimental applications to work with touch devices like the iPad and iPhone. I’ve been in the mood to experiment some more with development for touch devices, in particular Android devices.  There are quite a few hardware devices out there, Galaxy Tab being the most popular …in Kuwait at least.

I downloaded the Android SDK and was surprised to find a pretty nice device emulator built-in. I managed to configure a virtual “Galaxy Tab” and test my old app. It was great. And I didn’t have to blow KWD 120/- on a new Galaxy Tab.

The interesting thing about this virtual device manager is that you can run multiple devices at the same time. It does slow down the machine drastically (since Java sucks), but what’s important is that its possible.

Now all I need is some inspiration to create at least one nice app on this platform.

This table is a very interesting depiction of Google’s developer APIs. Just like the periodic table from chemistry.

And looking at some of the individual elements, we have Android representing Hydrogen, Transit Feed representing Oxygen and Double Click for Publishers representing my all time favorite chemical element … Plum Bum (aka Lead).

We all know that sitting at a 135 degree angle is the best position since it relieves the stress on your back.

Well it seems that sitting more than 6 hours a day makes you 40% more likelier to die within 15 years than others who sit less than 3. Even if you exercise! This is the best reason I can find to avoid the daily long and boring meetings.

So stand up and continue reading at this link.

I just came across these airplane pics of Kulula. Great paint job! I feel more airlines should get creative like this.

I’m trying to imagine what something like this would look like in Arabic. Kuwait Airways, maybe a new paint job “تحلق 101” could be part of your restructuring plan.

Came across this funny comparison of organization charts in various technology companies. Amazon seems pretty old fashioned. Google seems very matrix. Facebook … well I don’t know what to make of it. And Microsoft …well that explains why there is a popup for new security updates every 2-3 days.