Month: August 2005

Google Talk

As expected, Google have jumped into the instant messaging and voice-over-IP arena with a new product called Google Talk.

I’ve downloaded it and played around with it a bit and tried chatting to a friend through it.

I like its minimalist interface and how it directly finds people who are on your email contact list and are online using Google Talk.

The chat interface is very simple and it’s simply all about text. There are no emoticons, nudges, winks, and all those other flashing and jumping things that other messengers have. It just gives you plain text, although it does recognize the popular emoticons and displays their text in blue.
I actually kind of like that. I hate talking to someone and being flooded by a bunch of smiley faces jumping around and making faces at me or some stupid animations coming out of nowhere.

But they could’ve at least put in some text styling options, which aren’t available.

Just like all other IM clients, it notifies you when you get an email in your inbox.

It doesn’t have a search engine box built in, which is weird, as you’d think Google would never forget to include that.

I haven’t tried out its voice capabilities yet, but according to Om Malik who did, the quality of sound was great.

For the tech people within you, Google Talk is based on Jabber, which means it’ll be able to communicate with other Jabber based clients such as iChat on Macs.

I’m not sure if I’ll be using it that often, but well I think it’s quite good for a first effort.
But it still needs some more features, that everyone got used to, to be able to go head to head with MSN, Yahoo or AOL messengers.

The Phantom Of The Opera

Yesterday, we watched the movie interpretation of “The Phantom Of The Opera”.
I’ve been wanting to watch it for a long time after all the good reviews I read about it on other blogs.

I’m a big fan of movie musicals, such as “Moulin Rouge”, “Chicago” and well from my childhood days “The Sound Of Music”.
These movies mix two of my favourites arts in a beautiful way: cinema and music.

Back to “The Phantom Of The Opera”, it’s a great movie. But how can it not be with such musical splendor and a great story behind it!
Eman and I have been humming the magnificent tunes constantly ever since yesterday, lol.

It’s a really well done movie, the directing, acting and singing, lived up to the greatness of it and presented it wonderfully.

Gaston Leroux wrote a beautiful story, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is a musical genius and Joel Schumacher made it into a great movie.

I really recommend this movie if you love both cinema and music. It’s just beautiful.

My score for it: 8.5/10.

6th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

Well, ok, I know it’s a bit too quick to have another one already, I mean this is the third meetup in less than a month, but well it’s the summer season and we all wanna have fun 🙂

Some Tunisians abroad, as well as non-Tunisian bloggers should be making it to this blogger meetup, so that should be cool.

The suggestion, it seems, is for Friday 26th at Sidi Chebaane Caf

Magnetic Cards to Enter Mosques in Tunisia: Not True!!!

While checking Google News today, I found a rather weird and alarming bit of news about Tunisia, taken from a site called Jihad Unspun.

The article claims that Tunisian Muslims must now carry magnetic ID cards to enter mosques for prayers.

It says, “According to Al-Hadi Mehanna, Tunisia

Touch And Feel 3D TV

Imagine watching a football match on a TV that not only shows the players in three dimensions but also lets you experience the smells of the stadium and maybe even pat a goalscorer on the back.

Japan plans to make this futuristic television a commercial reality by 2020 as part of a broad national project that will bring together researchers from the government, technology companies and academia.

The targeted “virtual reality” television would allow people to view high-definition images in 3D from any angle, in addition to being able to touch and smell the objects being projected upwards from a screen parallel to the floor.

WOW…
Japan is making all the world’s sci-fi dreams come true.
From robotics, to 3D TV, to communication technologies to everything.
They’re already living in the future, using technology that the rest of the world including the US will only get after a few years.

The cool thing though is that no matter how far they move into the future, they still hold on tight to their past, history and traditions; making a successful and beautiful blend.
I totally respect them and would love to visit Japan someday. I wish I get to.

The Market

Fruits & Vegetables in La Marsa's MarketThis
morning, while out shopping for some stuff, we passed by the Market in
La Marsa. It’s an indoor market where you can buy fruits,
vegetables, meat, chicken, honey, herbs, and a bunch of other
stuff.
vegetables, meat, chicken, honey, herbs, and a bunch of other stuff.
You can even find some pets sometimes like squirrels, hamsters, birds…etc.

I loved how all the different fruits, with their rich and beautiful colours looked together side by side. It was like a carnival of colours painting an amazing portrait.
Everything looked so fresh, juicy and very delicious.

Something else I really loved is this old man who came to the market dressed in his full traditional Tunisian wear (Jebba, Chechiyya and all).
They pulled up a chair for him in the middle of the market and there he sat just telling the different guys from the different shops what he needed as they went and got it for him.

img src=”http://photos25.flickr.com/35630270_3e77bb46bd_m.jpg” alt=”Old Man in Market” align=”right” border=”0″ height=”240″ hspace=”5″ width=”180″>​​​​It’s so nice to see how this old man actually still has fun going to the market, how he wears his best clothes when he goes there, how
the people there treat him with all respect and friendliness.

This was how Tunisia was everywhere in the days of our parents and grand parents.
Now it’s just a sweet memory that we love seeing every now and then through an old person who doesn’t want to let go of the beauty of those days.

These days we’re all stressed, we’re all running out of time, we all can’t afford to go to the market and deal with people in a friendly way, we just need to get in and out of some mall where there is the least personal interaction possible.

I remember the days when I was a kid and I used to go to the market in Bizerta with my grandfather. It wasn’t just about getting fish, meat, vegetables, fruits or anything else for the house, It was a lot more than that, It was also about the social side of it, a market is a place where you’d see and meet people and friends and connect with them.

Plus, you never find the kind of stuff there is in a market in any mall or shopping center. It’s just not the same quality.

I personally am going to try to get down to a market from now on whenever I need anything.
I want markets to exist forever in Tunisia, and that they don’t get replaced by malls. I hope future generations get to enjoy markets just like we and the generations before us did.

links for 2005-08-20

Reading “The Hobbit”

As the reading section on the right column of my blog shows, I’m reading “The Hobbit” by J.R.R Tolkien.

First of all, a big thank you to my dear friend Saqf for this wonderful gift. I’m enjoying every second of it 🙂

It’s taking me a bit longer than it usually does for me to read a book because I barely find time to sit down and read these days. Anyway the book has truly sucked me in and I love it. The story is really cool and catching, and my imagination is working on overdrive.

Something I find really cool is that many of the characters also appear in “The Lord Of The Rings”, and unlike when you see a movie before you read the book, this time you’ve seen the characters in a movie about some story, and now you’re imagining them in another story, in other settings and you’re using your imagination to build this whole world around them.

One of the greatest things in fantasy books is how you get to create your own version of the world being described and of the different characters. But reading this book now, I have something to build on because of the great work that was done on “The Lord Of The Rings” movies.
Now we have a vision of how Middle Earth looks like; how hobbits, dwarves, orcs, goblins, …etc look like and it just enriches the story even more. It’s as if a big set of detailed photos was added to the book.
This is one of the things that is making me enjoy the book even more.

Another thing I love about this book is how some events relate to stuff in the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy. It gives a new understanding of some things.

I totally recommend reading this book.
You can expect another post from me about it once I’m done with it.

Btw, I watched “The Return Of The King” DVD again last night, and wow what a movie; I just love it!

links for 2005-08-19

“The Last Legion” Filming in Tunisia

Just a few days ago, filming started in Tunisia on The Last Legion, a Dino De Laurentiis movie produced by Martha De Laurentiis and Raffaella De Laurentiis, and directed by Doug Lefler.

The movie stars Colin Firth, Sir Ben Kingsley and Indian beauty Aishwarya Rai.

“The Last Legion” is an independently financed film produced in partnership with Tunisian Tarak Ben Ammar of Quinta Communications and British co-producers Chris Curling and Phil Robertson of Zephyr Films.

Part fact, part legend, “The Last Legion” is an epic adventure based on acclaimed author Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s international best-selling 2003 novel of the same name. The film is set against the fall of the Roman Empire in 470AD and its last emperor, 12-year-old Romulus Augustus (Thomas Sangster).

Over-run with rebellion, Rome is a city on the brink of chaos and destruction. Imprisoned by rebels on the island of Capri, Romulus, aided by the clever strategies of his teacher Ambrosinus (Sir Ben Kingsley) and the heroic skills of his legionnaire Aurelius (Colin Firth), escapes the island.

This small band of Roman soldiers, accompanied by Byzantine warrior Mira (Aishwarya), are determined to continue their mission to restore the Empire.

The movie’s release is set for next year.