Kuwait has one of the most comprehensive set of laws protecting Tenants & Renters, its very clear what you can and can’t do. You can only raise prices over a certain period and not above a certain percentage. You can set the rent price at any price when you initially rent it out to a new tent but then you are locked in and its clear process, the laws are meant to protect the Tenant be it those renting an apartment or a house.

But with laws it about how they are applied, there are still those who get away with things which are very frustrating. Recently some of the apartments were purchased by a new owner and it seems they wanted to raise the prices and make some new modifications. A lot of people have been living their over the past two decades and one of them is a friend. The new owner has been systematically getting people leave by some very shady tactics, they would cut the power every few days and blame the Ministry when there isn’t any power outages. They would cut the water hours on end and say they would send someone. They took away the guard who used to live on the ground floor and is sort of like utility guy in the building, so no one is downstairs either.

We tried to contact a few people to see what can be done to help our friend but they said it involves going to the police station then filing in court about these grievances. There isn’t a part of the Baladiya (Municipality) that handles the complaints and issues. I tried even talking to a few people I knew but they said its very hard to prove and even if you get the owner it will just get more difficult with them. I was getting very frustrated but it seems that you can cause them issues as well in court but its a very very long process.

The only thing that we could do is help the person we knew to find a better place for the same price to live in. What is sad is that they have lived there for over 20 years and suddenly to face this type of harassment is extremely frustrating, I was hoping that we could do more, but they said it simple that they want a place to live not to have to fight every day and not feel comfortable at home, I couldn’t blame them at all but I was frustrated.

There has been a lot going on with ISPs the last 6 months and I was thinking what could the bill of rights of customers be, we are tired of fighting but we will fight for what is our right. Then there is the MoC which is truly a disaster with very little improvements to look forward to in the near future. But below is a simple customer bill of rights which I think is common sense.

• Appointments should be kept (Engineers should be on time)
• Installation windows should be no longer than two hours (Come on you’ve done a million times now)
• Get it right the first time (If there is a problem it isn’t our responsibility to figure it out)
• Deliver the speed we pay for (Thats just simple! If our lines can’t support the speed we paid for then refund us the difference to the speed that it can support)
• Our bills should be accurate (This one is clear)
• Don’t cap our bandwidth (Period)
• Equip your call centers to do everything (They should be useful on the phone not useless)
• Honor all your offers (Don’t sell us one thing and give us another)

Eid Mubarak to everyone, it has been a very interesting Ramadan, it honestly has gone by quickly and I did enjoy Ramadan this year but was missing a few family. Its only going to get hotter for the next few years but this one wasn’t that bad. Now to enjoy a nice four day vacation even though some of us have to do some work in the mix. I’m going to try to utilize as much fun and relaxing time as I can.

FASTtelco will be organizing an online gaming tournament on September 3rd at the Regency hotel, lots of local teams and famous teams from Bahrain and KSA will be participating in the event.

Registering for the tournament is on Thursday 25 -yesterday- and the games are:

• Call of Duty 4
• PES 2011
• Super Street Fighter

This seems like a very cool idea from Fasttelco and the gaming community, not sure what to do if you didn’t go to the Thursday registration I’m sure they have other ways to register. I know people that live by CoD and PES, Street Fighter is an interesting mix, I would have to play for 24 hours a day until September 3rd to be able to match some of these guys out there. The skills of some of the gamers in Kuwait is insane, the funny part is when I find them on Halo and going crazy. If you are into any of those games check out the competition.

Update:

Check the registration line below from The Regency! Looks like a lot of people already signed up!

Infinite Driver or some of you may know him as NegativEffect has an interesting photo competition going on. You have to take a very creative picture of your current phone to this very cool phone. John’s Phone is a back to basics phone, no texting, no apps, just a very basic cell which I think is a very cool idea. Check out the link for more details, also check out his website with a TON of amazing photographs.

Rules of the COMPETITION:

1. You must submit a picture of YOUR CURRENT PHONE in an Artistic or Comedic way.
2. The file must JPEG and no more than 1MB.
3. All photos must be submitted before August 31st.
4. The photos will be posted and voted on for the winner.
5. Send your photos to (infinitedriver@gmail.com)

Link: ID

Please help us find the below pictured lost dog as she is very dear to the owner. She was last seen in Mubarak Alkabeer on 16/August night. If you see her or find her please e-mail me at bohabis@gmail.com or call me on 99005794. I am willing to pay a prize for whomever finds her.

Ahmed contacted me and asked to post about his lost dog, if you have seen this dog please contact the number above. I hope someone finds his dog.

The first of the ISPs to come to their senses from this debacle, after a little digging both from the commercial and technical side Fasttelco are not applying any Data Caps, none what so ever, not even throttling torrents at this point. At first I wasn’t sure but from two different sources I thought it might be true, then I thought to test it out to verify the information. It seems something official might come out soon but at this point this is what I have managed to dig up and I hope they continue on this route.

I have started a 200 GB download plus one steam update and several other machine updates to test my Fasttelco 4MB Connection. I’m at 42 GB since I heard the news and it still fluctuating between 380 KBs to 490 KBs which is pretty good and I hope it holds at that. So it seems to be true at this point, I’m running Torrents, FTP, Software Patches and normal surfing, and everything seems to be working.

I was initially singled out by Kems for being an abuser even though I have been a loyal customer even at their very expensive days, and when they increased their prices. But it seems they seem to be stuck on Caps and continuing to apply it.

QualityNet has removed the meter from their login screen so you can’t tell if you hit your daily cap or not but they won’t clearly answer if it has been removed. I managed to hit the caps every once in a while whenever I go on my downloading binge.

As I said before the MoC is just as much as fault as the ISPs, and the announcement made months ago by the MoC and the Member’s of Parliament is just BS as usual and I didn’t expect much from it. It sort of “I will believe it when I see it” type of situation. Even when you tell ISPs that the MoC said they were supposed to stop all sorts of Caps from 1st of August as promised from the front pages of Al Watan Newspaper, Al Aqabas Newspaper, and Al Rai Newspaper, they just tell you that it was just an article in a newspaper and no law has been enacted and the ISPs were not contacted. The MoC promised to lower prices to ISPs so that in return they would lower their prices but that hasn’t happened yet either.

• Fasttelco – No Caps
• QualityNet – Still applying Caps
• Kems – Caps still seemed to be applied
• GulfNet – Still crap and the worst of the bunch, avoid them even if your connection is free
• Mada – No Caps and I hope that continutes

More will be forthcoming in another post.

FASTtelco has launched GAME PAL a new 1Mb and 2Mb broadband service aimed at online gaming fans. The super-fast broadband packages have been introduced to cater to all the gamers around Kuwait. Subscribers can take advantage of choosing either 1Mb or 2Mb downstream speeds. FASTtelco’s 1Mb Game Pal service allows you to play the latest PS3 and Xbox 360 Games FASTtelco’s 2Mb Game Pal service allows you to play the latest PS3, Xbox 360 and PC games. So say GOOD BYE! to lags and delays and join the first and only service dedicated to online gaming in Kuwait… GAME PAL.

PRICE DETAILS:

• 1Mbps Game Pal service – 189KD/ yearly
• 2Mbps Game Pal service – 269KD/ yearly

SALES: 1838485
CUSTOMER CARE: 22256696

The most important part for online gamers is to lower the ping of your connection, this the case with XBox Live, PSN, World Of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and any online game. Fasttelco partnered with a company in Europe that runs game servers and now have a dedicated link from Kuwait to thier game server farms, the service will also reduce the ping time for games played on US game servers. Surprisingly the biggest gaming server farm is located in Northern Europe and they host all of the Blizzard servers, I hope that they have connected to that company to provide this service.

The torment that many went through during the Gulf War is still felt to this day by many people. And now we have to live with the Iraq that has come out of Saddam’s ashes, I for one was very happy that they took Saddam out but I knew that Iraq would always remain an issue because of their severe instability and internal issues. Kuwait suffered greatly from Iraq and to this day they do not want to pay the financial damages which Kuwait incurred, and that isn’t even close to the damage suffered by the Kuwaiti people. Kuwait hasn’t been the same since then, it did change and we persevered during that time. I won’t forget seeing CNN with the map of Kuwait and Iraqi invasion written on the screen, I didn’t understand what was going on but I thought it would be solved right away, I thought to myself why would Iraq invade Kuwait. And these days I wonder about the younger people who were born during or after the Gulf War who don’t have a sense of it, even though we were young I remember it vividly as it brought our families together and our parents tried to make it as normal as possible for us even though we knew it wasn’t. They took us to every rally, every protest, and I was so proud to Kuwaiti and so many people wanted to help us, I still have the pins from the marches in my drawers. I remember we loved that the British and US Armies went in and so many countries supported it us, I was shocked so many Arab countries supported Sadam, I found out the meaning of hate at a very young age.

Then when Kuwait was liberated I was so happy but they said that we couldn’t go home just yet, I missed Kuwait a lot. And then when we got back it was all black, it was dark, it was daytime but the sun was blacked out. Then I learned what the meaning of scorched, because Sadam’s last order was called Operation Scorched Earth, they set fire to every oil well as they exited Kuwait destroying as much as they can as they left. I remember going to school wearing a mask for almost a year and it was strange looking up to a dark sky. We were so happy every time they put one out and so many braved people from so many countries risked themselves to put out the fires, it was a painstaking process. But even now 20 years later we see the results of all that pollution and chemical weapons that were left in Kuwait and what damage it has done, now more then ever there are so many cases of Cancer and so many illness popping up at a very high rate in Kuwait it is terrifying. We all loved having our country back and building it back up again, I just hope that people have not forgotten. I for one haven’t.

Kuwait used to be the center of the Middle East for Music and Television, but it seems we have fallen far from that pedestal. Kuwait used to be ahead of all the countries in the Middle East when it came to all forms of media but over the last decade in a half Saudi Arabia, Emirates, and Qatar have far surpassed us in media, production, and broadcasting. There is still some what of a TV industry in Kuwait and the talent is even being bought by other countries in the region. I for one don’t have much time to watch TV during Ramadan, working late until an hour before futoor so always cutting it close, and then going from dewaneya to dewaneya in Ramadan with the family at night leaves you very little time to watch all these shows. Previously I haven’t seen any Kuwaiti show because they are rather depressing, I recently just saw a few shows and I was very much disturbed, no wonder there is a lot of bad press about Kuwaiti TV shows.

The Simple Breakdowns:

• Girls – They are over dramatic, depression across the board, painted faces making them look like clowns
• Boys – Shallow drug addicted kids who care about nothing except getting the girl or money they want
• Women – Scheming evil creatures who just want the money, or battered house wives
• Men – Abusive, Drunk nonstop or weak men who just hit women or steal the wealth of other families any way possible

This is the repeated theme that I have seen in quite a few shows, and I was going mad, these shows were so disturbing they were going to give me a seizure. In any country there is a variety of shows and themes, but in Kuwait this seems to be the recurring themes. We are not like this and this does not portray our society as whole and it isn’t the limitation of our creative talents in Kuwait. The moment I start seeing these shows it reminds of some one scratching their hands on a blackboard. We are not like this at all, and we have a lot to be proud of and a lot of different stories to tell on TV.