I did a little research and found a new app that allows you to find your stolen cellphone and allows you to wipe out all your phone’s data remotely if it is stolen. It’s called Lookout Mobile Security. Right now it seems to be free. I hope it stays that way until I get my new phone (Droid Incredible) in mail.

I had bought the stolen phone few month ago so I wasn’t eligible for a discounted upgrade and had to pay full retail price for the cell phone. Good news is the hotel agreed to reimburse me for the cost (a little over $550).

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I won’t get into the headphones features list. You can find that online elsewhere.

During my research over summer,  I went to Best Buy few times and tried the new Bose noise canceling headphones. They have a $300 price tag. In my experience many of the best electronic brands are often the brands that most people haven’t heard of. Names like Paradigm, B&W, and Denon are not exactly household names, but they are far better than Sony, Kenwood, and Bose brands.

Sennheiser is another one of those brands. They make mostly professional audio equipment such as headphones priced at over $1000. The PXC 350 is one of their lower models targeted at general public.It is priced at $325 but you can find it on sale for less than $200 right now.

The Noise Canceling

I absolutely love it. It blocks noise like no other. It is perfect when listening to audio books on the way to work or on the way back or when I’m just sitting at the coffee shop. I’ve also tested it many times on the plane. The best one was when I was on the plane from Cleveland to San Francisco. It was a 4.5 hour direct flight. The headphones were on my ear the entire time when I was listening to music and when I was sleeping. It greatly blocked the engine noise all the way and I never felt uncomfortable.

Over The Ear & Sweating

One concern with over the ear headphones is that your ears might start sweating on long flights and making the headphones impractical. That is definitely not the case. I had the headphones on during the entire 4.5 hour flight to San Francisco without any trouble.

My Unusual Use

I lived in Indiana when I bought the headphones and live in Ohio right now. One thing the two states have in common is the terrible cold weather. Back in Indiana, I often had my headphones on when walking to school every day. After a while I realized that I loved the sound quality just as much as I enjoyed the warm ear covers that the headphones had become for me.

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For example the culture code for shopping is “reconnecting with life”, the culture code for health is “movement”. The American code for cars is “Identity,” while the German code for cars is “Engineering.” If you haven’t read it, start reading it tonight.

While the book topics are simply amazing, since the first time I read the book (I’ve read it 3 times by now) I was anxious to learn how to find the culture code for other products/values/people that were not in the book. For example I wanted to find the American culture code for “Hookah” and see if it is any different than the Middle Eastern culture code for it.

I tried to understand how Clotaire Rapaille (the author of the book) found the culture codes that he did and tried to apply them myself. I surveyed customers, conducted study sessions with them, and analyzed the results. In the surveys and study sessions I asked three main questions:

• Try to remember the “First Time” you used the product in as much detail as possible.
• Try to remember the “Most Powerful Memory” of using the product in as much detail as possible.
• Try to remember the “Most Recent Memory” of using the product.

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I live in River Market Apartment complex in West Lafayette, Indiana. When FedEx delivers packages they give it to the leasing office and the tenants (we) pick it up from there.  After every package that we pick up we have to sign a paper saying that we did pick up a package that day. On Friday (the day after the laptop was supposed to arrive), I went to the leasing office to pick up my laptop.

The lady working there, Ms. Bunch, told me she had not received a laptop in the past couple days. She said “I’m positive I didn’t get a laptop, I would have remembered getting that”. I went upstairs to my apartment, looked up the tracking number on FedEx website and there it was: FedEx delivery confirmation with a signature of the recipient; and guess what! the signature belonged to a person name “Bunch“.

So I went downstairs with a print out of the tracking number and signature. Ms. Bunch then said, “Oh, I remember, yes I did  receive it, but I can’t find the package right now. I don’t know where it is.” She looked all over the office and couldn’t find my laptop. She never acknowledged that the office had lost the package or took responsibility for it. She even got pissed at me for being upset that they had lost my laptop.

I said to myself, they might have misplaced it and it will be found by Monday. So I picked up another package that I had over there, signed out for it, and went home.

I went back to leasing office on Monday to check for my laptop and Ms. Bunch told me (to my most utter surprise) that I had picked up a package on the Friday before and as far as she knew that was the laptop. She even brought the signatures book to show me my signature. I was furious. I still had the other package and tracking number sticker for the other package and it was NOT a laptop. It was a keyboard. The package was still not opened.

I called River Market Apartment main manager and she practically gave me the middle finger over the phone and said she was not interested to look at my evidence.

Long story short I have now filed a law suit against River Market Apartments and am going to get my money back. Either someone in their office stole my laptop or they simple lost it. In either case they are responsible for it.

I will post periodic updates about the case.

If you plan on renting a place in West Lafayette, save yourself a bunch of money and headache and don’t get even close to these guys.

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• Our elevator has not been working for a week. It sucks when you live on the fourth floor and just did a large grocery shopping.
• Every weekend there are holes in the walls of the entire building from drunk kids
• There are security features on the entrance doors that NEVER work so anyone can walk to into the buildings at any time.
• There are no security cameras anywhere in the buildings (mail room area or the entrances or anywhere else).
• There are always trash in the hallways waiting to be cleaned.

More detailed post coming later.

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The folks at SuperMonko have developed the first (that i know of) iPhone Persian Poem app.

The app includes poems from Ferdowsi, Hafez, and Sa’adi. Right now all the poems are in Persian but they do plan on adding English version of them too.

Persian Poems lets you browse four complete poetry books, save favourites and even search through the collection. One thing that it lacks is a “Hafez fall”.

You can get the app for here.

The application is not free but it only costs $2.95.

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I’ve been using it for couple days and there is nothing that I don’t love about it so far. I work on the road a lot and use a desktop as my computer at home. I use the laptop in school and for my business.

The X200 is very light comparing to all laptops that I’ve had before. I got the 9 cell battery and the laptop itself replaces the space for CD drive for more battery so I can get a astonishing 10 hours of battery life out of it. That is amazing. Most new laptops don’t go over 4 or 5 hours.

• Thinkpad X200′s build and material feels very sturdy and strong.
• The full keyboard is amazing. There is no other better keyboard on the market for laptops. You barely even feel touching the keys and they get types. Yet, I never find myself pressing couple keys by accident at the same time. The pressure required for the keyboard is just perfect. I knew about this before as I had an IBM thinkpad laptop before.
• The red mouse button also adds a lot more productivity than the simple touchpad most laptops have. The X200 doesn’t even have a touchpad (just the red middle button and clicking buttons below the keyboard). Make sure you can work with it. Most people hate it the first two weeks and fall in love with it afterward.
• The no CD drive is a downside. I bought an external CD drive to install my softwares. However, the extra battery life and lesser weight makes it much worth it.
• The wall charger looks very well built too (unlike the ones Compaq or Dell offer with their laptops).

I will post more reviews as I use the laptop more often.

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Great Website

First thing, their new website is great. Good job. There are still sections of it not working and a decent number of typos in there, but overall I like the design.

Fairly Good Hookahs

I like the fact that they offer Starbuzz tobacco (at a little expensive price). They also make fairly good hookahs. This is probably their main advantage against Egyptian Cafe (the other hookah lounge in town).

Great Food

Their food was great when I used to go there and fairly cheap. I hope it has stayed the same.

Not So Good Music

Smoking a hookah is not about sitting down and smoking out of a water piper at all. It is all about the atmosphere, people with whom you smoke with, the conversations, and the atmosphere. The music at hookah is very loud at nights (when most customers go). You’d have to scream from your side of table for the other side to hear and the music is always the same Trance songs. You can go one Friday and be sure you’ll here the same songs next Friday and Saturday.

The rest of the issues below have mostly to do with the owner and the way the place is managed.

Just Because You Own the Place Doesn’t Mean You Should Manage It

The owner runs the place himself. At times he has hired “managers” but even when there is a manager on board he runs the place himself. That would fine (after all he owns the place) if he had the required skills to do so. During the times I used to go there I saw serious management issues. This included managing the staff, their timing, their incentives, as well as keeping a full inventory at all times and taking care of customers.

The owner rarely saw the long term affects of his decisions. He always looked at how much money a decision would make him in short term. For example, whenever he ran newspaper ads he looked at the weekend right after that ad to see if any more customers would show up and when they didn’t he would talk about how the newspaper sucked or how they ripped him off.

On other times, if someone was looking for a place to take a large crowd or event, not only would the owner not give them discounts or incentives, but he would talk about how he should charge them more because he is providing a space that they otherwise would not have. That would be true if he had no competition, but Lafayette and West Lafayette are certainly not short on restaurants. Lo and behold another hookah lounge opened in Lafayette called Egyptian Cafe about a little over a year ago and took almost all of the Hookah!’s regular customers.

Note: Newspaper and radio ads are to be run for long term advertising campaigns, not short term.

Educate Yourself, Read Books

If you do choose to run your own business/restaurant, accept the fact that you don’t know everything and learn. The best way would be to read books. I highly suggest the books listed on top of this page.

Don’t Be One Size Fit None

Hookah! tries to be a hookah lounge, bar, restaurant, and dance club. The owner wants the place to appeal to high rollers of town as well as students as well as Purdue professors. He wants to compete with the lowest priced bar specials on campus and constantly complains how his margins are not high enough.

The lesson is don’t be one size fit none. Appeal to few market segments, make them happy, and create more loyal customers (that’s where the real money is, not the impulse random customers). I suggest giving an international feel to the place and offer a lounge with cultural diversity and attractions.

Along the same lines another mistake is the choice of music at Hookah!. When I used to go there, international songs (Arabic, Spanish, Italian, etc) were the least number of songs played. It was always either same Buddha Bar CDs in the afternoon or same Trance music at night every night.  Customers go to a hookah lounge because they are looking for something other than average bar/lounge/club music and atmosphere. They are looking for the cultural experience. So why not give them just that with better music and decor?

Have a Business Plan

When I went to Hookah! I always got the feeling that the owner didn’t know how he wanted to grow the business and didn’t have long term plans. He would come up with a new idea every couple days and get really excited on how it would help his business improve incredibly. He sometimes implemented them and sometimes didn’t, but he didn’t have a plan on how he wanted to expand the business a year in advance. These impluse changes included small things like buying a Nintendo Wii for the place to a $6000 pair of disco lights to adding a whole new storefront and dance floor (probably over $40,000 cost) to the business.

It’s good to always be improving and thinking of new ideas, however there has to be a plan and good analysis behind it. To get into a new lease agreement for a whole new store front one needs to study the market very well and take into consideration the possibility of it not making money at all. I think the owner should have at least hired an analyst for this job besides asking the employees and customers as suppose to only the latter.

It has now been almost a year that Hookah opened its new dance floor (called Blue135) and I can say for sure that it has had much less success than the owner expected.

Value Your Customers

It costs 4 times as much to acquire a new customer than to keep one. I would say this is the biggest mistake that Hookah! has made and continues to make. They do not keep their customers happy or offer incentives for them to keep coming back. There is a culture of “who makes us more money right now” at Hookah! instead of “how can we create loyal customers who keep coming back”. I know people who easily spent $1000 a month at Hookah! and never got anything as simple as a complementary free hookah from the owner and if any of the employees did such a thing for any customer he/she would face an angry owner and possibly being fired.

On a personal note: I am Iranian and the owner is Lebanese. There were countless times that I went to Hookah! with my friends and the owner came up to us and complain how Iran is destroying Lebanon by supporting Hezbollah and how Iran is evil and all of that. Seriously? Did he expect us to write a letter to Iran and have it fixed? Or did he just want to make sure we wouldn’t have a good time at Hookah!?

Don’t Bad Mouth Every Other Business Around You

If you want to compete with businesses around you, be better than them and offer something they can’t offer; don’t bash them all the time and talk bad behind them to all your customers. The owner was always talking bad behind one of the local restaurants accusing some of putting water in their alcohol and others of hiring illegal workers and others of using the store as a front for other activities. I think it would have served him much better if he had even a few friends in the local bars and restaurants.

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- They made the club 24 hours now. you have to pay for a special key but that is understandable.

- They seemed to have hired new trainers. I will definitely try to work with one of them once I go back in a week or two.

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This is what I did:

1. Took the Memory Cards (RAM) out and turned on the computer. It beeped so the problem was not the motherboard
2. Put one memory card in to test. Turned the computer on and it worked.
3. Put the second one in, the computer didn’t work.
4. Replaced the second Memory card and we are good to go.

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