Year: 2004

“Esther”, The artist formerly known as Madonna

Madonna has spent years building a reputation with her name, and now she’s changing it.

The pop diva has adopted the Hebrew name Esther. She says the move is in part due to her religious beliefs as she studies Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah.

Even though this is not as mad as Prince dropping his name and choosing a symbol instead of it, it’s quite bad.
Of course, Madonna as a person has all the right to do whatever she wants to personally, and it’s none of anyone’s business. I just think it’s stupid from a career/marketing point of view.

Madonna is a household name now. Everyone knows Madonna. She’s up there with a very few people who are known in any household from the kids up to the grandparents.

Madonna is a brand whether you like it or not. Any music with the brand Madonna on it is automatically a hit.

Madonna is a legend.

Dropping such a well known name and changing it to something else is a bad move career-wise, I think.

Of course, being a big music fan, I’ll know Madonna is Esther, and I know she’ll always keep pouring out that great music of hers, and that’s what counts to me. I don’t care what she calls herself in the end of the day.

But not everyone is like me, not everyone knows what is going on in the music world. All they know is they like Madonna and her music. Esther? Who’s that? Oh yeah, she sounds a bit like Madonna. Talking of that, Where’s Madonna? She’s the best!

Should We Dump Internet Explorer?

Just came across a post on Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer.

The main reasons stated are the security problems IE has and it’s non-compliancy with web standards. And I totally agree with those reasons.

But I would also like to add slow speed and lack of new features as problems I have with IE.

Tabbed browsing, fast page loading, popup blocking, skinning, extensions and more. These are all things that are very necessary in a modern browser.
IE simply doesn’t provide that.

IE is great for developers who want to get something working and who want to have extra possibilities that other browsers don’t provide. I used to love IE for that when I was in development.
But as a user, IE turns me off now. And I only use it when I really have to (Windows Update, certain websites, …etc).

My main browsers these days are: Opera and Firefox, with Opera dominating at work and Firefox dominating at home.

Outlook still rules as my email application though. There still is nothing out there yet that makes me want to change.

Skipping Summer

So we’re skipping summer this year in Tunisia, or so it seems.

Usually at this time of the year, the heat would be rising exponentially to reach it’s climax in August, we’d be sweating buckets, sticky with mediterranean humidity, gasping for air and dying for a good swim.

This year, this week, the weather is quite autumn-like; cold strong winds, loads of bucket sized rain drops and our jackets are out of the closets again.
In fact, yesterday it rained throughout the day and night. This morning we woke up to find water flooded streets and slow traffic jams because of it.

I’m quite sure though that once this low ends towards the end of the week, we’ll be going for a record heat ride.
Hold on to your clothes everybody, you’ll sure feel like tearing every bit of them off soon enough 😛

Techno-Lust

The Wall Street Journal have published a list of the top seven items of techno-lust.
Here they are with my comments on each one:

7) Cool new do-everything cellphone
A few years back, I was against cellphones, now I can’t deny a cool feature-packed cellphone is a hot item in my wish list.
People change, and I’m only human 😉

6) DVR (Digital Video Recorder)
Hmmm, not a must, but it would be rather cool.

5) The iPod Mini
Certainly want a digital music player. Not necessarily an iPod though.
I actually have a digital cam/mp3 player that my dear wife bought me. Only problem I have now is space. I need a bigger flash card for it.

4) Flash Memory Drive
Have had one from back when people didn’t know what the hell they were. I got it with my laptop. I’m outdated now though, mine has only 16MB, and people are going around with 256MB and 512MB drives these days.

3) A Really Big, Really Flat TV
Now this would be beautiful, especially for DVDs and movies.
I’m already a movie addict, and with a TV like that, God knows what would happen to me, lol…

2) The Apple Airport Express
Well this seems to be very interesting and cool. The idea of connecting a PC’s music library to the stereo and extending a wireless network is something I’ve been wanting to do for ages.

1) A Gmail Address
Already have one, and I love it.

[Via eclecticism]

Yahoo! 100MB Email

So Yahoo! has started offering 100MB Email space for it’s free email accounts.
A nice surprise I got this morning as I logged in to check my Yahoo! account.

I stopped using my yahoo account much mostly because of the size limitation. I mainly used it as a spam filter for one of my extremely spammed email addresses and checked it every once in a while.

But now that the size is better, I might actually use it more often for certain things.

I think we should actually thank Google for this, as it’s their GMail service that made free email providers jump to offer more space before it’s too late.

Btw, I just read that Yahoo! Mail Plus subscribers will get 2GB of email now, twice the space offered by GMail.
Obviously it’s a defensive move so that the Plus subscribers don’t stop paying them and move to GMail when it goes public.
Let’s see: 1GB for free, 2GB for about 12$, and it’ll take years for the average user to fill up even half a GB.
I still see GMail with a hand up over the rest.

Le Retour de l’éléphant

Ok, so I’m a book worm. I bought the book “Le Retour de l’Eléphant” (“The Return of the Elephant”) by Abdelaziz Belkhodja on Sunday, and finished reading it yesterday, Monday.

As I wrote yesterday in my Reading section on the left, this is a nice futuristic humourous fiction about a time when Carthage is the richest and most powerful city in the world again, immigrants come from the north to the south, Iraq watches over the embargo on the U.S. and the hottest university in the world is the University of Tozeur.

I like the humour in it, the idea and how the author is actually using a twisted future to actually portray and criticize how things are today in the Arab world and Tunisia.
Still, I don’t think the main storyline is strong enough. It would be a lot better if the story was worked on a bit more and given more depth and spice.

Still, I think this is a very good effort from Abdelaziz Belkhodja, and I really enjoyed reading the book.

I think it’s worth buying and reading, even if it’s just for the sake of dreaming and believing that there always is hope for a better future.

Hypocrisy…

The US Government’s Biggest Single Problem …

The biggest single problem the federal government has is its hypocrisy. It talks one way and acts another. It talks of spreading democracy while supporting dictators; it blathers about human rights while violating them; and it claims to promote the rule of law while scoffing at laws it considers inconvenient…

Charley Reese

[Via Je Blog]

Next Action Star

So, here comes another junk reality tv show. This time it’s Next Action Star by NBC.

NBC and producer Joel Silver are looking for the Next Action Star!
14 hopefuls are plucked from obscurity, sent to Los Angeles to compete to become Hollywood’s next “big thing”. They will be trained in everything from acting to stunts by the best in the business. Two winners (1 man, 1 woman) will star in Joel Silver’s first network television film, also airing this summer on NBC.

This whole reality tv thingie is getting way out of hand. Everything is becoming a reality tv show now.

The whole concept is pointless, useless, boring and stupid.
It builds on the voyeur sleeping inside us humans, and on the fact that it’s in human nature to want to watch other people and see what happens in their lives.
But it’s so fake and stupid, it makes me sick.

What next?
Maybe they should turn elections to a political reality tv show. Now that would be interesting for a change. Don’t you think?