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.