New Reason to Love Apple Mail

For years I've been using Mac I never found a use for Apple Mail application (Microsoft didn't support this service for free and Gmail is just too simple and unique making you don't need to use it with any application).

Few months ago I found a tweak to run and import Windows Live mail directly to Apple Mail which made me use it frequently, though it has some flaws. It won't update your actual account (deleting an email won't remove it from your account in Windows Live server).

However, looks like Microsoft finally decided to follow the herd and bring that service up for free with POP3. It's very useful as I only have to check emails without having to wait for the attachments to load/download (it downloads everything simultaneously) though there's still no effect on the server itself when managing emails.

Setting up your Windows Live email with this method is quite easy...

1. Open Apple Mail and go to Preferences then go to accounts.


2. Add a new account "+".
   Type your name, email, password and click "Create".


3. Incoming server (POP): pop3.live.com
   Your username must be your email as username@hotmail.com


4. Outgoing Server: smtp.live.com
   Use your email as username and type your password in authentication box.

Now your email is configured. All you have to do is wait for Mail to import all your emails (takes a while depending on how many emails you have) then select them all and mark them as read or simply remove them and keep mail running to check for new emails.

Randomness | Part Trois!

Some of you might recall my Operation Redecoration. It took a whole month, around 800KD, and pain in the neck for sleeping on the floor to get it over with.

Fact: Kiss your room goodbye and get back to sleeping on the floor. You're moving to The Cage.

My first accident since I got my driving license. No casualties, just a small fender bender. My car came out clean but his car got a small scratch and I get the feeling he's gonna blackmail me for it.

Fact: There goes my clean record.

The temperature is over 50c and our ground floor AC broke down. Our brand new 10 ton YORK air conditioner decided to give up at the perfect time of the year with just a little over two years of operation. The maintenance department won't answer.

Fact: YORK AC and Al-Yousifi company = Fail. Buy Hitachi.

I would like to welcome a new and special "silent observer" here in my blog.

Note to self: Post moderately! LOL!

Quitting the Smoke, For EVER!

July 1, 2009. Today I will begin my second and hopefully last attempt in quitting my shisha addiction.

It's not really an addiction rather than a stupid way to waste my spare time. I have been indulging myself with it for too long and it's time for me to leave it for good before it's too late.

Thanks to my friend Bashar for helping me out with a script to keep me updated on how long I've been sober from shisha. The script is up and running on my blog side bar.

Wish me luck.

The Reason I Worked 24+ hours

Like last semester I signed up to work for high school examination control. It usually takes from 10am to 3~6pm depending on the amount of work/papers we have. This semester though, is a whole new story...

Everyone probably heard about examination leak that happened midway through the finals. Our job took another curve that day until yesterday, the final day.

Our day starts 8pm. We go to the ministry and stack the exams, collect them in boxes and mount them with iron and stamp them, then head back home at around 12~2am when we finish. Then wake up at 5am, go back to the ministry, take the boxes to our governorate, distribute the exams to each school, wait till 10am, go collect them from the schools and bring them back to examination committee, work on those papers till 6pm, wrap up everything, and head back to the ministry for more exams for the next day (start from the beginning of this paragraph!)

Some people said "Quit". Well it's not that easy. I have signed up for that job with my own will. There's no turning back.

About me getting paid. There's an "extra" payment but it's NOT something worth mentioning. I mean how much would a refinery worker get for that overtime? Probably double his salary. Here though, it's not even a three-digit number. :/

Anyhow... I'm glad now that it's over. It won't prevent me from signing up for it again though we just need to avoid this stupid exam leakage.

iPhone MMS Issues

Ok so the recent iPhone OS 3.0 update has a lot of features but the biggest hype about it can be concluded in four points...

• Bidirectional languages support


• Message forwarding


• Copy / Cut / Paste


• Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)

The first three work fine but MMS doesn't work every time. Turns out the MMS APN setting gets reset after a while.

Now I'm not sure whether it's a bug in OS 3.0 or if there's anything causing the problem but what I know for sure is that it just won't remain there; it simply disappears without any reasonable cause.

I tried everything to store the APN (mms.wataniya.com) but it just won't happen. Everytime I do I go back to network settings to find out it's not there anymore.

The only method I found out to keep it working is to restart the iPhone, go to Settings > General > Networking > Cellular Data Network and re-enter the APN again and NEVER connect the iPhone to anything, neither a computer nor WiFi network!

Anyone having the same problem?

UPDATE: Problem resolved...

To avoid this problem you need to enter the APN for both Cellular Data and MMS.