+961

A Lebanese Blog

Month: June 2013

  • Social Media Awards Beirut official results in numbers

    sma

    The people behind the Social Media Awards Beirut took a great step towards being transparent by posting their official results in numbers in the latest issue of Cloud 961 magazine.

    The results show how many votes did every candidate get from both the public and judges, and final score was calculated based on the below formula:

    Total score = (Candidate’s public vote count / 2) + [ (Sum of public votes / 2) * (Candidate’s judges vote count / Sum of judges cotes)]

    Basically most results made sense to me except for the best fashion blog, where only 1 judge voted in favor of L’armoire de Lana even though she’s making a great effort covering fashion event both inside and outside Lebanon.

    Moreover, I was glad to see that 327 people voted for me in the best news blog category (and I’m truly thankful to each and everyone of them) even though I’ve never campaigned for votes and didn’t even nominate myself in the first place.

    You can check the figures on pages 10-11-12 of Cloud 961’s latest issue here.

  • In support of the Lebanese army

    I’ve been noticing some traffic signs and parking meter machines around Achrafieh with stickers on them calling to take a stand with the Lebanese army.

    park meter sign

    I’m all for supporting the Lebanese army, but isn’t that also considered as an act of vandalism?

    Second photo via @nicolasehnaoui

  • Tarzan is missing

    How does she come up with this stuff?

  • News coverage in Lebanon

    It’s funny how Lebanese news outlets publish whatever is coming their way when an incident occurs in the country.

    Here’s what Tayyar, ElNashra, and LBC posted about today’s blast in Taanayel.

    Tayyar.org:

    tayyar

    Elnashra on twitter: (A rocket!)

    “النشرة”: الانفجار في تعنايل ناجم عن سقوط صاروخ على الطريق الدولية

    Bassam Abou Zeid from LBC on twitter:

    انفجار تعنايل ناجم عن عبوة صغيرة استهدفت فان أبيض وسيارة ب أم زيتية زجاجهما داكن وقد سقط زجاج السيارتين ولكنهما تابعتا طريقهما نحو المصنع

  • Busted!

    Who’s that guy sneaking a peek at our national treasure?

    haifamjk

  • Hit-and-run woman driver kills a municipal police in Saida

  • Mobile phone prices in Lebanon increasing already

    mobile phones

    As you all know, and in order to stop mobile phones smuggling in Lebanon, the ministry of telecommunications is now requiring all traders to register the IMEI (a unique ID assigned to each mobile device) of every legally imported mobile phone or tablet.

    The collected IMEIs will then be used as of today June 1st to filter the devices that are allowed access to our mobile networks (alfa and touch). So typically speaking, a legally imported mobile phone with its due taxes paid will be allowed to connect to the mobile networks, while other smuggled ones will be denied access since their unique identifiers are not registered at the ministry.

    The weakest ring in the process is of course the group of people who will be responsible of the data entry of the registered IMEIs. Since they will be easily able to register and IMEI of some untaxed mobile if there was not much control over them.

    As a result, mobile phone prices ended up notably increasing over the last week. For instance, the guy who sold me my mobile was listing the iPhone 16 GB for around $650 since mid-May I guess, then he increased the price 2 days ago to $745. Logically due to the fact that the handsets he’s currently offering were legally imported and subject to some import tax.

    Everybody is eventually complaining about all of this, especially that it gets a bit complicated when you buy some used handset from abroad. And I know it’s wrong to complain about a price increase when it’s a result of complying with the government taxation rules, but still, a $100 increase totally sucks!