Burnnnnn!

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Kuwait/comments/1g3jo1/kuwaiti_vs_indian_a_message_to_the_average/

Another freelance webdesign and website coding project accomplished. Maybe I should do this full time? Check out this website I made for a relative.

www.bcccapital.com

I recently bought a video card from Professional Computers, the Sapphire 7870 ghz edition, and within two weeks of purchase I was getting random black screen freezes. I would be playing and them out of no where the screen would go black and the sound would loop. After trying everything to fix it myself, including switching the drivers and checking my cables, it kept happening. I took the card back to Professional Computers, told them what was happening, and even showed them two photos that I took of the computer when the issue happened. I was really on edge because I thought they would give me a hard time or refuse to return the card. They asked me to hand the video card over to the technician so he can test it out, and the technician said to call back in a day to check the status.

One day passed and I called back but the technician exclaimed that he couldn’t reproduce the issue. I told him that the issue happens randomly and I showed both him and the owner photo evidence. He then transfered me to the owner who told me I could come back for an exchange, upgrade (and pay difference), or a full refund.

Wow. I was amazed. This is completely not normal for Kuwait. It’s absolutely common to get into fights when trying to return something, but I was amazed by Professional Computers and their professionalism. They truly are professional. I thanked the owner many times and went back to the store and returned my card for a full refund.

I highly recommend getting your PC parts from Professional Computers because they truly uphold customer service satisfaction.

Professional Computers
+965 22611660/1 ext: 106/107
404, 1st Floor, Wala’a complex,
Bin Khaldoun street
Hawalli

I needed a tube amp. All the modeling amplifiers they sell in Kuwait just doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t have the tone, the character, and the sound quality a tube amplifier has. That’s why I decided to order this new tube amp setup. I went for the newly release Laney Ironheart Studio, a VHT 1×12 cabinet, and an Eminence The Governor speaker.

The Laney Ironheart Studio is killer. Lots of tonal options with a great clean tone and great rock and heavy metal tones. The EQ is really versatile with the ability to pull out the knobs and shape the sound even further. I’m still trying to find “that tone” with this beast, but I’m about 90% there. Even on <1 watt mode it gets loud enough for bedroom playing. Built in USB is a cool plus and while the re-amping feature is also cool, I don’t think I’ll be using it that much.

I purchased the VHT 1×12 cabinet because it’s the cheapest birch plywood 1×12 I could find and I’d rather get real wood than MDF. It was a annoying getting the back off to replace the speaker because they have a light amount of silicone to help keep the back in place, but after some elbow grease I finally got it off to replace the built in speaker with an Eminence The Governor. This speaker is very sensitive in regards to changing the mid eq setting and its warm compared to other speakers I’ve used in the past. I think I should break it in all the way before finally judging it, but it does have a beautiful roar when played through lots of distortion.

Really happy with this setup so far.

What you need before starting this: A white document from the Ministry of Communication stating that a box has arrived for you. A courier boy will bring this paper to your house when your box has arrived. Also make sure to have your civil id and a 1kd bill on you (you need it for a government stamp).

Also, it is highly advised that you start this process early in the morning. Try to reach the Ministry of Communication by 9am and you have a higher chance to get your box on the same day.

Step 1. Go to the Ministry of Communication – Keifan Branch which is located across the intersection from City Center Shuwaikh and next to the College of Education. It’s a big grey building with a huge tower on top of it; hard to miss. Below is an image of Google Maps highlighting the correct building:

Step 2. Enter through the front of the building and there will be stairs going down directly in front of you. Take them and when you get downstairs take a u-turn to the right. On your left will be a large open space with a handful of employees behind a counter. Simply greet one of them and hand them the paper you received notifying you that a shipment has come. They will take a couple minutes to find your box and bring it out.

Step 3. When your box comes out a second person who works there will have to check your boxes and will ask you some questions regarding what you ordered. When I went, the government worker asked me to translate my order receipt which I gladly did. He then opened up the boxes and checked each of my items to confirm what what was on my receipt is what I ordered and that I wasn’t bringing anything illegal into the country.

Step 4. The government worker who checks your boxes will then sign your order receipt and he will ask you to take it to an office nearby to a government official to have it signed. Once it’s signed by him, you will have to get another signature by another government official. Just ask politely where to go and who to get it signed by.

Step 5. Once you have the two different signatures, you will bring your papers back to the man who checked your boxes. He will give those papers to a secretary there who will calculate customs fee. The customs fee was 5% minus shipping costs. So I was set a fee of 10.550 for an order of 211 KD. He will write down all this information on a large sized blue paper and hand it back to you, along with your signed documents/receipts. He will then tell you to go to the Port Authority and get it verified and payed for.

Step 6. Now you must go the Shuwaikh Port Authority. It is a large building on the road closest to the beach just past the Kuwait Mills in Shuwaikh. It has big spiral car ramps on either sides of it. Below is an image of Google Maps highlighting the correct building:

Step 7. Once parked, get to the ground floor, then go to the Kuwait International Bank on the ground floor of the building and ask for a customs clearance payment form from them. They will give you a form which you must take to any of the customs clearance offices on the first floor. I went to the office that is directly opposite the bank and a nice guy typed up all my information onto the form that the KIB branch gave to me.

Step 8. Take the form back to KIB and get a number to see a teller. Give him all the papers and your civil id and pay the customs clearance fee. They will charge you a 2kd fee for this service.

Step 9. Finally, head back up to the first floor and on the corner of the building there is a spiral staircase. Enter that area but go directly to the left to find a Kuwait stamp machine. If you can’t find it, simply ask anyone where the stamp machine is. Purchase a 1kd stamp and stamp it on the top left of the large blue paper that the secretary at the Ministry of Communication gave you. You are now done at the Kuwait Port Authority.

Step 10. Head on back to the Ministry of Communication – Keifan Branch and back downstairs to where you initially wen. Hand the man over the counter all your completed fee payment forms and signed documents/receipts. Once confirmed you can take your boxes and you’re all done.

Phew! What a fun day that was. It takes around 2 hours to finish the whole process, but honestly there’s no other way to bring in heavy musical instruments or amplifier cabinets without paying more than 100 kd in shipping costs. In total, it cost 19 kd from Thomann.de to ship to Kuwait, a customs fee of 10.550, bank fee of 2kd, and a stamp for 1kd. So I shipped two boxes from Germany to Kuwait containing an amplifier, cabinet, and speaker, both boxes weighing over 15kg each, for 32.500 KD and two hours of my time.

I really hope this guide helps anyone looking to get new musical instruments into Kuwait. If this guide does help you please comment below and tell me what you got! Keep rocking! \m/

Kuwait musical instrument companies ignore medium to high level musicians because they only ever bring budget instruments to this country. This forces us musicians to order instruments from outside the country. With the ever rising costs in shipping with Aramex or DHL, this option is becoming too expensive. Furthermore, we can’t order things like cabinets or amplifiers from the United States because the weight would obliterate us in terms of shipping costs, and the voltages of amplifiers sold in the United States does not match the voltages in Kuwait.

But I have found a cheaper alternative to ordering from the United States.

After careful research and diligent searching I came upon a musical instrument website from Germany called http://www.thomann.de/intl and I found out that they ship to Kuwait. They only charged me 19kd shipping for two boxes over 15kg each. I just went through the whole process of ordering with them, so I thought I’d give a guide to any local musicians who are interested in ordering guitars/amps/cabinets from them and what the process is.

I recommend you fully read the instructions before attempting anything to fully understand the process. Also, you need a bank account in a local bank to do this. I have an Al-Shabab account with NBK and it works fine. Also note that the whole process, from day of ordering to the day of reviving your packages, takes about 3 weeks and the packages will not be delivered to your house and instead you have to get it yourself, which I will explain how to do in part 2.

Step 1. Go to http://www.thomann.de/intl. The website will prompt you for your country, language, and currency. Pick Asia – Kuwait, and pick whichever currency is easiest for you to understand (I choose US dollar). By doing this, Thomann will remove all VAT from their products on the website, which is something that you will not have to pay since you are ordering and shipping outside of the EU.

Step 2. Put the things you would like to order into your cart. Be advised, you cannot order anything that is individually more than 20kg, for example, the heaviest cabinet you could order is a 1×12. 2×12 cabinets exceed 20kg and Thomann will not ship it. Your cart will then show you the total cost of all the things and the shipping cost which should be around 67 euros (19 kd).

Step 3. When you are ready, place your order. For shipping details, put the address of your house. Then it will ask you which payment method you will like. Note that Thomann does not accept credit cards outside of the EU and the only option that you can do is to do a bank transfer, so select bank transfer.

Step 4. You will receive an order confirmation email from Thomann which will show the total price, and stating all the necessary information required to do a bank transfer. Print out that confirmation email and take it to your local bank. Tell them you want to do a bank transfer to Deutsche Bank to a company called Musikhaus Thomann and make sure to include all the necessary information that is required to place the order, including adding a note with your order number and Thomann account number which should be in the order confirmation email you received. You will be charged a free of around 9 kd to do the transfer and it will take around 5 business days for Thomann to receive the funds. Also note that the funds have to be in your bank account for them to do a transfer.

Step 5. As soon as you get home from the bank send an email to Thomann letting them know that you transferred the funds and tell them it’s coming from the bank you transferred from and it’s coming from Kuwait.

Step 6. After about a week or so, Thomann will confirm that they have received the funds. If they didn’t, which is what happened in my case, send an email to them asking whether they received the funds or not. When I did this it took them 3 days to get back to me and then they confirmed that they received the funds.

Step 7. After Thomann confirms they received the funds, you will receive an email with a shipping tracking number. This tracking number is useless as it is only updated once and does not inform you when the  packages arrives in Kuwait. Instead, you will wait around 2 weeks to receive a paper from the Ministry of Communication stating that a package has come to you. A courier boy from the ministry will deliver this paper to your house that you specified for the Thomann shipping. It took exactly 10 days from the day that Thomann confirmed that they received the funds to the day I received the paper from the ministry.

This is the end of part 1. Stay tuned for the next part which is the most fun of all!

My wife’s original Amazon Kindle Fire had started to see little use and was getting slow. I always found the original Amazon Kindle Fire to be slow anyways, and that proprietary Amazon version of Android had always irked me. My wife, who was the primary user of the Kindle Fire didn’t care as she mostly used it to read books, but lately it had been sitting around on the shelf without getting any use. Since I was bored, I decided to go ahead and root it and get Android 4.2 onto it (after asking her permission lol).

I Rooted and installed Android 4.2 Rom (same as Nexus 7) onto the original Amazon Kindle Fire. It is so much faster and better now and I compared it with a friend’s Nexus 7 and I can tell no difference. Obviously there is no camera or mic, but all apps are working fine and even games like Subway Surfers is running 100% smooth.

I was contemplating getting a Nexus 7, but now after doing this I basically got a free one.

1. I find that a lot of nicer apartment buildings only accept expats and will not accept any Kuwaiti tenants. This is outright discrimination. Every time I call up a relator the first question they ask is “Are you Kuwaiti?” So far I’ve been lying because I know that as soon as I let them know I’m Kuwaiti they won’t offer me the apartment/floor. It helps that I don’t have a Kuwaiti accent when I speak English.
2. I’ve called and talked to 10 different realtors and I can only describe their actions as “sketchy.” They never call back, they barely ever answer their phones and only call you when they feel like it (including when you have an appointment with them and it’s almost time to meet), and any emails they promise to send you with pictures of a place they will not send. So annoying.
3. The apartment searching sites like Just Landed and Re.Com.Kw usually have out of date listings. I sometimes just get the number for the company that is hosting a bunch of listings only to find out that 95% have already been taken. When I ask about it they say that they only upload listings but usually never delete them once they’re taken. Thanks for wasting my time thinking that the majority of the listings on the websites are available.
4. You have to pay commission to the realtors who are annoying to deal with. Usually the landlord is supposed to pay this fee, but in Kuwait they forward the payment to the tenant. You should never pay more than half rents commission, in fact you shouldn’t have to be paying anything at all but you can’t circumvent this payment unless you find the apartment yourself.
5. On top of that you usually have to pay a “deposit fee” which is 1 month’s rent up front to the land lord. They keep that deposit and give it back to you at the end of your lease.
6. In total you have to pay 2 month’s rent + 1 month’s half rent. So if your rent is 500kd, you’d have to pay an additional 500kd for deposit, and 250kd to the realtor, making a total initial investment of 1250 KD.
7. Whenever someone says “big,” just cut the size in your head by half automatically. Some realtors will try to sell me this “big” place and then when they show me the place I find it’s average at best or even small. Then they will try to pressure you into taking the place, which is seriously annoying.

So if you’re up to dealing with all this then have fun looking for an apartment in Kuwait. It’s been a pretty annoying experience with me, but actually out of the 10 realtors I talked to I met a nice guy who didn’t pressure me at all and was kind and courtesy while showing me 2 places in South Surra. His name is Robert and he works for Q8 Realtor. His number is 9722-4388 and I highly recommend calling him first before calling any of the other realtors. And don’t tell him I’m Kuwaiti (shh it can be our secret ).

Since I started playing guitar over 10 years ago I’ve been hooked on Ernie Ball Regular Gauge .10 strings. After initially trying Fender and GHS strings, as soon as I put the Ernie Ball strings on I fell in love. I loved the feel and good intonation that the strings gave. Seven years later and I find myself still using Ernie Ball .10 strings, but when I went to change the strings on my guitar I discovered that I ran out of my sets. I always order them from the U.S. because they don’t sell them here in Kuwait, but the local music store Salmeen Musical Instruments had a bunch of D’addario and Thomastik-Infeld strings for sale so I decided to experiment with different sets. Here are my findings.

D’Addario Nickel Wound XL Regular Light Gauge .10-.46.

Same thickness of strings of the Ernie Ball Regular Slinky I’ve been using for years. Felt great and honestly I couldn’t tell a difference compared to the Ernie Ball strings. They feel great, have good intonation, and sound good. In terms of longevity it’s about the same as Ernie Ball strings. 5/5.

Thomastik-Infeld Superalloy .11-.52.

I got these thicker strings because I wanted to try C standard tuning and thought the thicker strings would help reduce string floppiness. I didn’t realize it at first but this set had a wound third string, which is a first for me on electric guitar. I’ve heard about other players using wound third strings, but that was mostly in jazz playing, but I still said yallah let me try it. When I first put the strings on they felt really good. Dare I say they were slinkier than D’Addario and Ernie Ball strings, so I really liked them at first. Flash forward two weeks later and the strings were already feeling dead and all that slinkiness went away and the strings felt horrible to play on. At first I didn’t mind the unwound third string but once the strings were broken in I found it a bit harder to bend on that string. I didn’t like the strings and I don”t think I’ll be going with this brand or gauge again. 1/5.

D’Addario EXP Rock/Blues Set .11-.49

Coated strings are a bit of a controversy in the guitar playing world. They sound and feel new for much longer compared to regular strings but a lot of people find the feel and sound to be off on them. That was certainly not the case with this set. They felt and sound the same as uncoated D’Addario strings and the cool thing is two weeks on and they still feel and sound new. I really liked the string sizes on the bass strings with this set, but I felt the treble strings are a bit tougher to bend because they’re .11s. Because of that I only half liked this set. 3/5.

D’Addario EXP Super Light Top/Regular Bottom .09-.46

I was a bit hesitant in getting this set because I never liked the feeling of .09 treble strings, but since I haven’t used them in years I decided to give it a go. I strung my RG570 up to E standard for this set (I usually play in D standard) and surprisingly I liked it. The bass strings are what I’m accustomed to because the gauges on them are the same as regular gauge strings, but only the treble side was the same gauge as light strings. On standard it’s got good tension with a slight loose feeling so it’s easy to get those big bends in, and legato is very smooth. For E standard tuning this is a great set but I’ve yet to tune my guitar to D standard to see how it feels. The treble strings may feel a bit floppy in that tuning. 4/5.

This has been a fun experiment and I’m surprised by how good some of these strings feel. I think I personally still like .10 regular gauge strings, but I still want to try out a Heavy Bottom/Regular Top .10-.52 set. Unfortunately, Slameen Musical Instruments doesn’t have that set in stock so I may just buy two sets of strings and mix and match.

As soon as Dark Souls was released in Oct. 2011 I bought it. I really loved Demon Soul’s and I beat that game probably 30 times, so when the sequel to that game came out I had to get it!

Dark Souls had that same difficulty level as Demon Soul’s: You are expected to die. I really enjoyed that aspect of the game because it made me work really hard to beat it, which made it feel that much more awesome when I actually beat a boss or got through a tough part. But something weird happened. I got bored of Dark Souls really quickly. It may have been because I played Demons’s Souls way too much, or maybe I just got over frustrated, but I just dropped Dark Souls and never finished it.

Flash forward to Feb. 2013. As I was going through some video games trying to find out what I could play I saw Dark Souls. I felt horrible for never finishing it and when I saw the game I got the urge to pop it in and try to beat it this time. While I was playing it was like I played the game a thousand times already. I remember EVERY detail and EVERY boss fight and how to beat it. Maybe because when I last played it last time I died so many times that it burned an imprint into my brain. The worst memory of all was having to go through Blighttown again lol. I remember I died there many many times. But interestingly enough, I didn’t die a single time in all of Blighttown this time. I breezed through many of the bosses and didn’t feel the game was difficult this time around. I finally got to the final boss and only died once against him before beating the game.

I was really surprised at how easy the game was this time. So I guess the moral of the story is if a game is too hard, put it down for a week or month and then go back to it. At least I can now say I beat Dark Souls!