Category Archives: Random

McDonald’s New Lebanon Branch – Batroun


The McDonald’s franchise is opening up a new branch in the coastal Lebanese city of Batroun as part of what looks to be an aggressive expansion campaign.

The Batroun branch has been set at an old fashioned Lebanese house, completely renovated for this purpose, right on the main road.

The two-story house/restaurant’s interior is composed of state of the art equipment that contrast with the rustic exterior. I have to say, this is probably the most amazing McDonald’s restaurant in Lebanon, if not everywhere. It combines both tradition with the future.

But the question begs itself: how successful will this branch be in a city known for an overflow of restaurants that offer cheaper burgers and sometimes better food?

Don’t expect many outsiders to come to this branch. After all, other branches are only a ten minute drive away. This McDonald’s is for the people in Batroun, a not very populated city. Will the returns be enough to cover the cost? I doubt. It’s still a nice place to look at though.

Check out the pictures I took of the place while passing by:


13 Awesome Ads!

I’m no marketing expert, just a regular consumer. And when I come across very smart ads, I feel like sharing them with people.

Well, these are thirteen ads that I think are absolutely kick-ass! Let me know what you think.



Want A Google+ Invite?

I just got invited to use Google+ and I have to say, there is so much promise there.

It’s a great and smooth interface that combines elements from most known social networking platforms.

You can add people to circles that are categorized based on the degree of you knowing them: friends, family, acquaintance, etc…

Your home screen is a feed of everything that the people in your circles share. You can comment and interact with them on the home feed. You can also share things you like, specifying which circles you want what you share to appear to. In addition to that, you can categorize which stream you want to see by simply clicking on the circle you wish to check.

Moreover, there is a cool option called: Sparks. It basically allows you to pin interests on your profile so you can stay updated on everything that’s current in that field.

Also, another cool feature is hangout. It allows you to have a video chat session with a selected friend or circle, sort of like hanging out in cyberspace. Google+ also has a mobile app, although it’s not available for all platforms at this point so I can’t test it out on my iPhone. You also get to mute posts you don’t want to see by clicking on the arrow next to the post.

You can update your profile with a tagline that summarizes who you are. There’s a “Bragging Rights” section where you post things you’re proud of. Places You’ve Lived and Education are also included on your profile. You get to post pictures and videos.

Gtalk is integrated with Google+ as well, even for your contacts that don’t have Google+ yet.

And instead of the “legendary” Facebook like button, Google is introducing its +1 version, which is widely used on the social networking website twitter. You can check all the things to which you have clicked +1 directly from your profile.

Moreover, everything with Google+ is available to you at any Google page you visit: your notifications, a quick link to your home feed…

That’s pretty much what I’ve used out of Google+ so far. I’ll make sure to edit this post with any additional information. Now, if you want an invite, let me know your gmail email in a comment on this post.

PS: If the invite doesn’t work right away, try again at some other time. If you receive an email from me, then you are invited!

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Book Review) – Stieg Larsson

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the first book in The Millenium Trilogy by late Swedish author Stieg Larson.

Mikael Blomkvist is a man of many things but liar isn’t one of them. He wasn’t exactly being framed. His predicament was totally his fault but he should have known better. Sitting in court, receiving a three month sentence for libel against a Swedish business giant, he thought he had hit rock-bottom both financially and career-wise.

Soon after, Mikael receives the strangest job offer from the head of one of Sweden’s leading businesses, albeit being on its way down. Henrik Vagner, aged 82, wants Mikael to spend a year writing the history of the Vagner family in an attempt to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his niece: Harriet Vagner, some 40 years prior.

As they say, you can’t get a colder case than this. Harriet disappeared on Children’s day on the fictional Swedish island of Hedestad and even though an extensive search was made following her disappearance, a body was never found. So Vagner asks Mikael to attempt to find answers, as a way of closure for a man whose days are nearing their end.

But soon enough, Mikael needs help as he starts uncovering chilling new evidence that were overlooked in the original investigation. And that help comes in the form of Lisbeth Salander.

Lisbeth Salander is a 26 year old woman who has been under the auspices of the Swedish state since she was thirteen after being deemed unfit to look after herself. She’s 4’11”, flat-chested, has more piercings than places to put them and more tattoos than real skin. One of those tattoos is a dragon on her left shoulder blade.

Lisbeth also happens to be a world class computer hacker, able to go into any program or computer known to man and make it look as easy as counting from one to ten. She’s also excellent at investigating people and coming up with extensive reports detailing things they never told anyone.

Together, Lisbeth and Mikael start unearthing detail after detail about a chilling series of murders with a biblical element, all taking place in scattered parts around Sweden, in relation with the Vagner corporation. Who could the killer be? And how does Harriet fit in all of this? these are some of the questions they will try to answer in the book, even if their lives depend on it.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a top-notch thriller. It doesn’t have any dull moments and it engages you with the complexity of its characters. You get immersed in the detail that Stieg Larson provides in his description of the inner workings of Salander’s mind, who happens to have some form of asperger syndrome, or Blomkvist’s sense of guilt after his sentence, which nearly got his magazine “Millenium” to go under.

The author writes down many of the main characters’ thoughts, in italics, throughout the book. These thoughts, along with the impeccable dialogue in which they are immersed, serve as a backdrop that enriches the story and breathes new life into it. Sure, many authors have used thoughts in italics in their texts before but those thoughts have never been as important to the development of the story as they were in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.”

Larson doesn’t shy away from being explicit in the book as well. There are scenes which are depicted with exquisite detail that they will shake you. The book’s original Swedish title was, after all, Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), which means the book has many physical, mental and sexual abuse scenes. They are depicted to the letter.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a must read to anyone who enjoys an immersing novel to entertain their days (and nights). It is a book that you won’t be able to let down. It is a serious page turner that is more a character study of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist than a cynical approach by the author to his country, Sweden. It is a book where little is at is seems. But one thing is most definitely clear: you do not want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo.

Our Experience With iOS 5

Ever since Apple unveiled the new iOS 5 features about two weeks ago, I was itching to try them out. The beta was released and I had refrained from updating, thinking it was too buggy. But I couldn’t hold out anymore and I took the plunge. And I have to say, it was a good decision on my part.

I am the type of people who hate jailbreaking because I don’t see its use. I was forced to jailbreak my original iPhone in order to be able to use it in Lebanon and felt its performance get affected a lot. Therefore, I refrained from doing so to all iPhone updates that I purchased.

And even though iOS had many shortcomings (no operating software is perfect after all), I felt it was enough considering what I used of the phone. Flash-based games or websites are almost useless to me and, well, I felt the negative aspects about iOS could be compensated for by the wide array of brilliant apps, most of which were free, as well as the top-notch hardware that was running the OS.

I’m almost against people who like to jailbreak just to get cracked apps for free. I’d rather pay $0.99 and keep my phone’s operating system intact, but that’s just me.

This post was written with extensive input from a friend of mine that I met because of iOS 5. David Schoborg’s input will be present along with mine, although his will also hold comparison to the other leading platform: android.

David:

Like Elie, when I heard about new feature set in iOS 5 I was quite excited. I have a pretty extensive history with Android, and was pushed into this Apple universe when my wife wanted a smartphone. I’m not just an end user, I’m a power user. I’m that guy that gleefully flashed ROMs, kernels and alike on a plethora of Android phones. Bricking my phone? A risk worth the reward. Yep, I admit it, I’m a gadget geek.

Her desire to join me in the age of mobile presented a bit of a problem. Was I going to be able to survive in, what I considered at the time, this dumbed down experience?

All in all, I’ve had a great experience with my iPhone and iPad. Great applications, great hardware, best in class battery life, but lacking in one major area: the notifications are the worst I’ve ever had to deal with!

SMS? I’m being interrupted. IM? Again, interrupted. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like having your camera app ready to go, getting ready to capture that perfect picture and being interrupted with an IM reminding you to pick up milk on the way home. Trust me, it stinks.

So, I resulted to jailbreaking my phone, because it was so bad that I couldn’t deal with it, especially after using Android, and enjoying unobtrusive notifications.

Then came iOS 5. I’ve been running it for 2 weeks, jailbreak free, and the little things here are what make it great. I’m going to share some of my experience with iOS 5 and compare it to my Android experience.

– iMessage:

I cannot stress how easy and smooth the whole iMessage process has been. You go into messages in settings, set it up with a simple click (yes, it’s an on/off button) and a few minutes later, you’re good to go. You can enable iMessage to work on many IDs: phone number, different emails and you can also set your caller ID to be any of those verified emails or phone number.


And then you just chat with whoever you want. In my case, I’ve been extensively chatting with Dave (our iMessage thread has like 500 messages so far). And the whole thing goes without a hitch (unless you factor in Lebanese internet but that’s not Apple’s fault).
This is basically how iMessage works. You type in the name of the person you want to text and the iPhone checks if this person’s number or email is registered in Apple’s database as a user of iOS 5. If the number or email check out, the phone switches to iMessage. It’s that simple. No extra iMessage application, it’s all integrated.

– Notifications:

Elie: Unlike popular belief, I was never bothered by the iPhone’s notification system. It could be that I never used – nor do I intend to – android but, even though it was intrusive, I went without a notification system for over two years with my original iPhone.
But when I started using iOS 5 along with its new notification system, my whole use of the iPhone got so much better. I no longer had to press the “dismiss” button whenever someone texted while playing Doodle Jump or Whatsapping someone.
There was simply a thin bar at the top of the screen with whatever notification I got inside it.

And if I missed the notification, I could pull a notification center screen from the top by dragging it down and it would have all my notifications there. I could simply click on one of them, go to the corresponding app and respond accordingly.

Moreover, the lockscreen allows you to answer specific notifications by sliding across them.

And David agrees with me as well.

David: In all honesty, iOS does a better job than Android here. The concept is similar to Android, creating a notification pulldown from the status bar where you can see what’s occurred, and deal with it on YOUR terms. You drag down from the bar, and it’s all there.


What I like about this approach more is that the notifications give you more information that what you currently get from Android. You can read the first few lines of an email, message, or that alert from CNN that used to interrupt your round of Angry Birds, can now be read and dealt with at your leisure.

Also, you have a couple of Apple provided widgets (Stocks, Weather) that are pretty helpful as well. Weather is finally geolocation aware, so no going in and switching cities around to figure out what the weather is going to bring.

Ultimately I hope Apple gives developers access to produce widgets as I could see this being really useful for them in providing more functionality for their apps.

And what’s even cooler? You get this on the lock screen too.


You can slide to read the incoming notification, or deal with it later. No more having to open the email application to see what’s been delivered. This is something Android doesn’t offer currently, and is very helpful to see what’s happened, without having to unlock the phone.

PS: The style of notifications you get on the lockscreen for receiving a text has changed with iOS 5 beta 2 to something that looks like this:

 

– iCloud:

I have yet to fully harness the powers of iCloud, mostly because of our ridiculous internet. But I can see the potential. The other day, I downloaded the Lebanese iPhone camera app Dermandar on my Mac. Then, moments later, I saw that it was downloaded on my iPhone as well. I also set up an @me email, which I have yet to use extensively as I’ve gotten way too used to gmail for my liking. But, hate or like iCloud, the potential is definitely there. How Apple advances with this will determine whether this is something people will love or not.

David, on the other hand, isn’t as positive about iCloud.

David: Apple also introduced iCloud with iOS 5. iCloud promises “cloud services done right.”

I’ll have to disagree. Don’t get me wrong, there are some really nice additions, but I feel it ultimately falls short.

Having contacts, calendars, and documents able to be backed up and synced in the cloud across all of your iDevices is great. However, anyone really interested in this is already using Google via their mobile sync for iOS to accomplish this task.
Photostream is my personal favorite added feature. It’s similar to Google, backing up your photos in the cloud, but I just love the feature of adding a folder to the PC or Mac and the photos just show up. (They sync when you connect via WiFi and then are permanently backed up on your personal computer. The last 1000 photos are backed up in the cloud, unlimited on your PC/Mac.)

iTunes in the cloud is basically allowing you to re-download the songs you’ve already purchased to your other devices on the account, or back to your phone. Let’s be honest, this should’ve been in place already. It’s nothing more than a glorified history of your music purchases.

Where I think Apple really missed the mark is with the iTunes Match service. For $24.99 a year, anything in your iTunes library on your PC/Mac is able to be accessed in the “cloud” via your iDevices, even stuff you haven’t purchased from Apple. Sounds great! (I have over 20,000 songs that could potentially be offered to me even though I’ve only purchased literally 30 of those through iTunes)

Here’s the problem.

Let’s say you are out and about with your iPhone. You look at the selection on your phone, nothing’s doing it for you. So you reach out to iTunes Match to grab a song off the cloud that’s on your library at home. Stream it right? Unfortunately that’s not the case. You have to fully download the song. Compared to Google Music (beta) and Amazon’s Cloud Player, it’s really a disappointment in comparison.

I, personally, see David’s point with iTunes Match. But we need more info about the service to fully judge it. If Apple will in some way “iTunes-ize” all our songs and we get to keep them after the year is up, then I think iTunes match is a great service. If the songs get deleted after a year, then I think streaming them would have been a much better option.

Other notable additions include the total integration of twitter in the iOS which I’ve only used so far to tweet a few pictures. Wireless syncing is also there and it has been activated in beta 2, as were OTA updates.

However, something that wasn’t advertised and that I found was interesting, especially while making calls, was a pop-up screen about how unsecured my call was.

Not sure if this is only exclusive to my Lebanese carrier but I figured it’s worth to note the existence of such a thing.

David: WiFi Syncing and No PC set up are in iOS 5 as well, and honestly, these are long overdue: a nice enhancement, but nothing groundbreaking. Being able to back up into the cloud and restore your settings and app data is great too, but again, a little late to the party.

All in all, I think iOS 5 does somethings better than Android, it’s also falls short in some, particularly the cloud offerings.

iOS 5 brings some much needed enhancements, offer some really cool new features and shortcuts (You can now get to the camera from the home screen by a double click of the home button. Yay!), and bests Android in notifications.

It’s a worthy upgrade that all of you should jump on as soon as you can.

And here it is folks, our experience with iOS 5 so far. And as David said, the moment the update is available for the public, you absolutely need to update! It’s that awesome!

David can be contacted via his twitter account or his Facebook account.