Mario's World

Was going over some of my great hacking achievements over the past few years at SWITCH. One of the best was creating the Sabre POS for travel agents.

MySabre from Sabre is a 100% web-based application for travel agents to book airline tickets, hotels, cars, etc. Sabre said their app would only work in IE on Windows. It needed 3 logins to get to the booking screen. All I wanted to do initially was to get it running on Linux to reduce costs.

I took it all the way. Got it working on a Thin Client (disk-less) Linux station in FireFox. I reduced the logins required to just 1 and got rid of all the excess app interface that agents kept complaining about. Reduced the initial load time from about 5 mins to just about 15 secs. All that in just 3 days.

It supposedly caused quite a stir at the Sabre Head Office back in Texas.

Today marks my last day of work at SWITCH as Manager Web Development. Too bad management didn’t want to continue in software development. It was fun while it lasted!

Its onto newer challenges now. Lets see where my new role in a new company takes me.

I took this pic of my workspace while trying out Microsoft’s Photosynth.

Seems there is a new delivery service for home-made Sushi in Kuwait [link]. I might try them one of these days.

I haven’t had Japanese food in a while but was looking thru my photo archive and found these snaps of Sushi I prepared at home. It was about a year ago I think. All ingredients from Sultan Center. I was a bit worried about preparing it with raw salmon, so I cooked the salmon. Better safe than sorry!!!

The pic above is a tuna version I think and the one below is crab.

I just love this video. And its quite true

My wife considers the Hummer H2 as the ugliest thing on the roads. And then she saw this monstrosity.

What is it with driving these things around? Its huge, ugly and is a nuisance driving thru Salmiya. The guy brushed against a parked Jeep Cherokee with the rear tire and the tire lifted the Cherokee for a few seconds. That thing is dangerous!

Of course, on the highway or open desert its a different story

Played my first ever game of Scrabble yesterday. Took about 2.5 hours and ended in a draw!

Ro and I were getting bored of UNO. So we went around looking for some board games. Too bad there isn’t a Kids ‘R’ Us anymore in Kuwait. Checked out those toy shops in Sharq, the ones in between all those car dealers and the mobile phones. Most of them just sell cycles. Found one guy with Scrabble, but they were all the French version. And he had a huge stock of them!!! Lotsa French scrabble players in Kuwait?

Then drove down to Souk Shark to check out Fantasy World. They got a nice collection of toys there. They could do with a better collection of LEGO’s. Found a nice Travel version of Scrabble for the same price as the standard. Good deal I think.

Hasbro has a nice online Dictionary and Word Builder. I put in my name in the word builder just to see what comes up. 31 combinations starting with AI - a three-toed sloth!

Well, here we are finally. My first ever blog entry.  Its 11:09pm and I just got this blog setup. A nice Goan Sunset seems fit here

I had this domain name lying around for the last few years and never knew what to do with it! I’ve used WordPress as my blogging software although Drupal is my favorite. I still gotta work on the theme and try out some of them fancy wordpress modules.

Looks like I’ll be setting up my wifeys blog next!