Google is smarter

So you probably heard of the ATP Tour Finals that ended on Sunday. I've watched a few of the matches and missed others. One of the ones I missed was Federer's match against Nikolay Davydenko in the semifinals. I wanted to know who won so I went and googled "Federer" and voila; it did not just return normal search results, it also put the scores of the last match Federer played at the top. Ain't that cool?

I was curious to know whether other search engines would do the same so I searched Yahoo and Bing using the same word but they both just gave ordinary results. I think this is one reason Google is good..Google is smarter :)

Below are screen shots of the results I got from the three engines

 

EDUCATION IN THE ARAB WORLD: PROBLEMS AND WAYS OF IMPROVEMENT

I submitted the following article on problems with education in the Arab world as a part of the application to the Youth café which is to be held by the Arab Thought Foundation in Lebanon on September 30.

Education in the Arab World Problems & Ways of Improvement

A very full stadium!

Egypt vs. Denmark
Semifinal Match Men's Junior World Championship
Sorry about the quality :)

We lost the match 21 to 27. I just liked how full the stadium was. This huge number of spectators might indicate that finally Egyptians are not focused on soccer alone. Or maybe it's just because it was free to go in!!

first attempts at data visualization

Today I was going through my folders doing some cleaning up and i found the two pictures below.

Two years ago i gave a presentation on Egypt, my home land, in the university of Montana. The exchange program i was there on required every foreign student to give two presentations on their home countries. It was a good chance for me to actually know more about my country. I went through a few articles on Egypt's history and what a vast amount of information I found!! There was no way I could talk about all this because the presentation had to be kinda short and I was to cover many aspects of what makes Egypt what it is today. I tried naively to summarized a history that spans over 12 thousand years in only 3 graphs. See the pics below and tell me what you think

parkour n NFL

that's how you use parkour skills in American football

Inbox zero!

I've blogged before about the too many email msgs I receive everyday and which pile up in my inbox to the point that I now have over 20000 unread msgs (no kidding). Here's a brilliant yet simple way to fix that issue:


If u'd like to see more on this go to www.inboxzero.com
P.S. Thanx a lot Shady for telling me about this :)

a diary entry..i guess

yesterday i stayed at home..updated my c.v. (finally) and sent it to Esraa (a follower of this blog) who works at the Nile University, a research university in Cairo. They need RA's on their data-mining research team. I am now waiting on them to reply. Later at night, my sister then came over with her husband. they needed to change from Ubuntu back to Windows. I've persuaded them a while ago to give Linux a try and they eventually found it to hard to get by on. I kinda see what they're talking about especially that none of them has a CS background. Anyway, i gave 'em an original XP CD which i've downloaded for free (coz i am a student member of the IEEE). They left very late as usual. i am not liking that i get to see my married sister so little. i feel i needed to spend more time and have more intimate talks with them while we are grown-ups and not kids anymore. Marriage changes personalities in a way..

today i went out with one of my best friends (Ahmed Farrag) along with a big bunch of his co-workers. His (soon to be ex) company organizes outing for the employees every now and then to get them well acquainted and bonded with each other and so. Ahmed invited me and his bosses had no problem with that. We went to Fagnoon, a place right on the outskirts of the city were u can do much activities. The place is basically open for everything u wanna do and they also have some programs. After some warm-up activities, we were divided into 2 teams. The team i was on went to do some art using metal ( mainly iron bars) and the other group did wood art. we did this thing called "fanoos" and in case some non-arabic speakers r reading this (which is not highly probable i guess), it's a kind of a lantern well known in Egypt as an icon for celebrating the month of Ramadan. We then had lunch which was made by one of the two owners of the company's mom. such a tasty food.

we had some random chats here and there and then learned ( or so we tried) to do pottery. it was fun. i sucked at it though. i really had a good time and got to make new friends.

i then went (as usual on saturdays) to play ultimate frisbee we were too many today (14) and that was good. the game was not that good though. the most important thing about ultimate frisbee is the spirit. players today were kinda harsh.people were shouting and swearing a lot. too many fouls were called. we just were glad when it was to dark to continue playing.

Invited to Obama's speech in Cairo

I received an invitation from the American embassy in cairo to attend President Obama's speech at Cairo University today.

it was good..i was a few meters away from where he was standing..i was lucky that an American security man almost sneaked us to the sixth row :D

the whole experience is some how unique.. i am telling myself i should not really happy that i saw him and Hillary and others in person but yes it was a once in a life time thing

I did not like that people were applauding every single minute and at every pause Obama made .. it happened a few times that someone shouted saying they love Obama..the guy next to me was American and he was applauding like this is what he was born to do :D he was really serious about it

The speech itself can be described as good..or most of it..some parts did not sound so right to me and ,as a friend said after the speech, he was more trying to when the hearts of Muslims than was actually giving a tangible plan of action..
well said speech anyway

the Egyptian security people were way nicer than i expected them to be..i was not searched at the entrance..just showed them the invitation and my ID , stepped through the metal detector and on to the speech hall.

talkToSelf 1

-you are so excited about blogging that you just wanna blog every single day. you better wait till you find something worth telling people about and then blog about it. But wait, I'm not blogging for people only; I'm blogging for myself too..I mean whether others are going to read my posts or not, I'm gonna continue to blog anyway and later when I get older I will look back and see what was keeping me busy when I was younger. mmm.. I guess I'll just blog about things EYE find interesting

-I receive over 40 new email msgs daily with a few of them requesting a reply from me. Sometimes I am busy and I just can't reply right away. Nah, you're just saying so you know you're not that busy. plus, when you go back and write a reply to message that you read before, you'll read it again and by doing that you just waste double the time you'd talk to if you replied the first time you read it

-Will you ever check out the bookmarks you've been collecting for years now?

-Will you ever study for an exam earlier enough? coz you don't seem to be willing to study the night before any exam. And it always happens that you get distracted by other -possibly important- stuff on that night or day before the exam.

Things I ran into this week

Edufire
This is an awesome website where you learn and teach language, business skills, Japanese manga and basically anything that can be learned over the internet. You'll find interesting classes for free as well as other that are not. The website is very simple to us.
www.edufire.com

Go zero gravity
I was so happy to know about this. This company commercially offers you the chance of experiencing weightlessness :). Ain't that just awesome? They take you on a flight and through a special maneuver you can experience zero gravity for about 30 seconds. That repeats from 12-15 times during the flight. The cost is under $5000 which makes me think I will do this even once in my life time
www.gozerog.com

Alhambra, Spain
Spain was a Muslim state for about 800 years during which Muslims built great civilization whose remains are still seen today. This website gives a virtual tour in Alhambra, one of the cities built during the Muslim era. Spain or Andalusia is on my travel wish list mainly because I want to see those remains.
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200604/alhambra/default.htm

Facebook stuff

Sometimes you just do not wanna comment on someone's status or picture on facebook although they might be interesting. That's just because you know too many people will put comments after yours and then you'll receive zillions of notifications about their comments.

How many friends do you have in facebook? Does the number represent how likable or popular you are? For me the answer would be yes, to some extent. I'd like to have over a thousand friends on facebook..that would be just awesome :D

I think I make like 10 new friends per month on average. Right now I have 257 which is too few I think. I wanna have over 500 people by the end of this year. You might think that friend count is trivial and only quality not quantity matters.. you might be right. But still having too few friends probably means you do not get along well with people. Lots of friends mean lots of experiences, news, cultures and opportunities especially if those friends were diverse.

Everyone hates the new facebook..I don't. I think it's comprehensive in a number of ways. I think the newest layout saves the time I use to take in the past to view posts and news of friends.

Having friends from different places in the world gives you your own news network.

Volatile interests!!

My interest in things is volatile. It happens so often that I get so excited about something i found and I keep on learning more about it and even try to do it myself if it was something doable and after a while I forget all about it as if it was never there. For example, blogging is something I started a long while ago. I like the idea so much when I first learned about blogs and spent days reading others' blogs and eventually created my own blog, posted a few entries and then it all went away. For months I stayed away from my blog and it seemed I have completely forgot about it.
And again, my interest cycle comes back to life after a while and now I am blogging more often that i used to but with the fear that one day i will abandon this habit once more. This is an interesting psychological topic for study I guess and there must be some writings about it. I'll try to read more about this thing if I only could phrase my case ( or symptoms if you please) in one sentence that would make sense. Any suggestions?

A spontaneous flow of events

A about two weeks ago, me and my friend, Ahmed Farrag, ran into this very cool group of foreign students; Bernice and Elroy from Singapore and a bunch of Japanese students. Fortunately, they were all leaving Egypt on the same day. Farrag managed to contact them and knew when they were leaving and wanted to go say goodbye at the airport.

The two friends from Singapore were leaving at 12:30 PM. Farrag went and I really wanted to but I could not cause I had important stuff to do. He was able to find them and talked to them but in the strangest way.

They were already past the customs check point when he called them and because he couldn't pass over they had to talk to each other with the luggage scanner in the middle :D He even put the souvenirs he had for them in the scanner and let it pass to their side so they could take them.

The Japs were leaving at 5 and Farrag decided to wait at the airport until they have arrived. I thought maybe I could finish my stuff and go wait with them and that's what I did. It took me so long to get to the airport because it was so crowded. I had my laptop with me so I thought why not bring it up and do some work and for the first time I used my laptop on a bus. It was good to make use of the time I spent on the bus actually but the road was like lumpy and my laptop was shaking too much. 

I finished some good amount of work though and I was happy about that.I arrived at the airport at 4:30 -too late- and found Farrag gone (He had to leave to work). The problem was his phone battery died earlier in the morning and there was no way to get hold of him or for him to tell me he would leave.

We were supposed to meet at the airport, meet the Japanese, go back to his work place where they were throwing him (Farrag) a welcome party to which he could invite people (me) and then go out. I ruined the first part of the plan by arriving the airport so late but I did not want to ruin the whole thing. I decided to go to Farrag's work place. I did know the where abouts of where he works but I did not know the exact address. I called a common friend and asked him and he told me where the building was. I went thinking I would ask what floor the company is when I reach the building and somebody would have the answer .

To my surprise, the building was composed of four different towers that just share one ground floor. Additionally, no one seemed to know what company I was talking about. Farrag's phone was still unreachable and the only way to find the place was to google it. I called my sister at home, gave her the name of the company and she googled it. She gave me an address and a phone number that turned out to be the ones I wanted. I called and talked to Farrag, finally. He came down to tell me that the party was over ( my second failure of the day). We then went up cause I wanted to 

see what the place was like.

I met his boss and the company's co-owner, AUC computer science graduate, Mr. Ahmed Marzouk. He was very friendly and a very interesting person to meet actually. We had an interesting talk about computer careers. I told him about my decreasing interest in working in the field of my study, CS, and he was telling me I should stick to what I have been studying for five year now. He referred me to Islam, a co-worker of his and maybe a co-owner to whom I am to see him some time in the near future, hopefully.

We left, me and Farrag to where we did not know but we were going to hang out somewhere. We walked up a bridge that goes over the Nile to stand by its fence for a little bit and enjoy the scenery. Ahmed was wearing leather/classic shoes and he did not want to walk or stand anymore so we went to El Sawy Culture Wheel, a culture center, which was right beneath the bridge we were at. You can have a nice view of the Nile from there, too.

We went inside and ran into two high school friends of his, both named Ahmed, too :). They were attending this concert at the place and I was not interested so we left them. We sat down and talked and then his two friends came out, they were not so keen on staying till the end of the concert. We all sat down chatting about random stuff. They were from different back grounds, mass media and pharmacy but it was good talking with them both.

I don't know if that sounded like an interesting day to you, but it totally was for me. I liked how my day was totally spontaneous; when I woke up I was not thinking I would have such a a series of event in my day. 

I met three new "potential" friends, had fun talking to Farrag, and I went to and back from the airport, like 32-kilometer ride, almost in vain but I did not beat myself up much about it (that's weird for me).. 

P.S. A few paragraphs of this post were written on a subway ride to college...I think I began to type on the laptop in pub. transportation :D

My day today!

Since I am the only male child my parents have, I am exempted from military service. I have to go through a pretty painful process for getting the exemption paper work done. So I decided I would start today. took all the pre-required paper work..stuff like my parents' id's and my sisters' birth certificates and went to where I should have got a family record..a piece of paper that says lists my family members names i guess. The place, which was totally empty on Saturday, was now so full that you hardly can see the desk where the employees who hand you the papers are behind.
Since I had a meeting at Cairo University's faculty of economics political sciences - FEPS-, I left and told myself I would go back on a later day.

I had to go to FEPS to meet with a group of NESA alumni. NESA -Near East/South Asia-is a student exchange program supervised by the U.S. dept. of state on which I went to Montana to study more than a year ago. We had to meet coz we want to organize a reunion for NESA alumni from all countries.

Originally our meeting was scheduled on 10:30 put it was moved to 12:00. Lucky me, I did not make it to the meeting place until a little after 12:00. I was planning on going to my college after but since we started the meeting after 12 and my college was like an hour away, my intention to go to college began to fade away.

FEPS is a very unique place. I think it holds a special place since it's the only place were politicians come from in Egypt. Well, the only government owned place coz I think people study politics at the AUC as well. Anyway, the place is cleaner than and building in CU or Helwan university i guess. It's definitely cleaner than my college, I can tell. Students seem to have more privileges here than anywhere else. The place is warm compared to my college. warm as in cozy. I like to be there, for short.

We had a decent meeting. People were brain storming for ideas and we came up with pretty good ideas i think (Thanks to Allah). The meeting was over around 2:15. Went to make "Al'dhuhr" prayer or whatever people write it in English. I was close to the faculty of engineering where a lot of my high school buddies went. So I decided to skip college for the day and go do something good with my day. I went hoping I would find people I know which was what happened.

I ran into a middle-school kid, Mo'taz, whom I have not seen for too long. I then met with my dear M. Osama from high school. We had a good talk about our graduation projects. My buddy Mahmoud Raouf was the next one I met. He has recently grown interest in photography and they now have this exhibition at the college in which he's participating with 3 of his works. Me, Mohammed and Mahmoud had a good time then talking about the pictures and other stuff too. I always like to hang out at their college. I feel I belong there as I originally wanted to do engineering after high school but my grades sent me to where I am right now: Computer Science. I think I made my peace with computer science but still it's like marrying someone you did not like and trying to grow feeling for them.

We went to have Al'asr prayer when I met Mahmoudy, a NESA ex-participant from 2008 which was a good thing too. After the prayer I decide I should go home and luckily Mahmoudy lives near by me so we went home together. As we were walking to the place where we could take a microbus or something back home, a colleague of his passed by driving his car. Mahmoudy shouted at him. The guy who was really nice offered us a ride and we accepted the offer.

I went home, ate, slept. I woke up at 10:30 pm. to find my older sister has stopped by. She was visiting my aunt who lives like 15 minutes away.

I don't feel so good about skipping college today but I think it was worth it. It was a good day today.

What's wrong with me?

I dunno why but I have been not so productive at all for sometime now and it's not like I mean it. It's just happening to me. I always want to do a lot of things and I tell people I will do them. Simply, what happens then I forget about these things..really I forget everything I said I would do.
This sucks. It ruins my image and people's trust in me and above all it eats me up inside and makes me doubt that I actually can do any good at all.

Typical scenarios of what happens involve:
Over sleeping.
Getting busy with one thing and having no time to do the others. I move those undone things to another day but as days go by and I completely forget.
Waiting on others to do their parts so I can do mine. They forget or whatever and I end up forgetting or whatever as well.
One urgent thing that needs to be done pops up out of the blue. Me panics. Me puts every other thing aside and works on the flipping thing.


What I tried to do about it:
Using a calendar: worked for two days only.
sleeping less: does not work. I feel exhausted and sleep even more the next day.
ordering things according to their priority: never worked.
--
I don't know how I could end this misery

Finest Presentation

So I have this softskills class and now we're doing presentation skills. I had to do a short presentation like 10 minutes long or something on a topic of my choice. 

I chose to make a presentation on computer typing as I recently ran into this typing website www.typingweb.com and I took the typing test they have there. I can't remember what speed I had back then but I am sure it was not very high, anyways. 

I think this presentation is the finest of all the ones i made so far in terms of organizing. It looks decent..to me at least. Tomorrow I am giving the presentation and I hope those who'll be listening will benefit from it. 

Below is the presentation slides posted on www.scribd.com

Typing Compressed

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