Year: 2006

Michel Camilo – One More Once

These past days I’ve been listening to this album “One More Once” by Michel Camilo non stop in the car, it’s just amazing.

I got the cd a few days ago, after the guy I rent DVDs from gave me a taste of his music, and I was hooked right away. This album actually dates back to 1994, but has a fresh feeling to it that makes it as delightful to listen to now as I imagine it was back when it came out.

Michel Camilo is a pianist and composer from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His music is a great mixture of jazz, latin and classical music, and his technical ability as a pianist is just amazing.
He’s also a music producer, and has won several awards, including Grammy, Latin Grammy and Emmy awards.

I can’t wait to get my hands on more of his albums to enjoy more and more of his cool and refreshing music.
I definitely recommend checking his music out, it’ll lift you up and take you through a beautiful ride in the magical world of good music.

I’d like to thank my friend Tarek from the DVD store for introducing me to this great musician, and would also like to send a big hi to my friend Mite from the Dominican Republic.

Egypt To Censor The Yacoubian Building?

The Yacoubian Building, a movie based on Alaa Al-Aswani’s bestselling novel, is to be reviewed by the Egyptian parliament after 112 MPs demanded censorship of the homosexual scenes in the movie.
They have criticised the movie saying it defames Egypt by portraying homosexuality, terrorism and corruption.

MP Mustafa Bakri, who led a campaign against the film, said it was “spreading obscenity and debauchery”. He added: “As a citizen I felt hurt when I watched it.

This is complete nonsense and it makes me sick: all the novel and movie do is reflect, through the interlinked lives of the residents of a Cairo building, the true facts of the Egyptian, and Arab society with it’s good and bad; homosexuality exists, so does extremism, and no need to even mention the wide spread corruption.
So how is the movie defaming Egypt just by telling the truth?
Or do we only want to hear the good things about ourselves and hide the bad?

I think it’s about time our Arab societies stop turning their backs to the important issues and problems that lurk in them, acting as if they don’t exist, and try to face them head on, finding real and lasting solutions.

For those interested, here is my review of the book “The Yacoubian Building” in Arabic.

BillQ: Track Your Bills Online

billQ logoI just came across a neat new web2.0 app called billQ that enables you to track your bills online, through a cool ajax based interface.

I took it for a small spin, and I like it’s simplicity and it’s user friendly interface, pretty straight forward and to the point, as most new web apps are becoming, which is great.

The way it works is that you basically add bills to your account, can organize them by group, and then receive notification of upcoming payments you have to make by email or sms.
It also handles bills involving multiple people, by assigning a payment amount for a number of persons of a group, who get logins of their own, so they can check that they have paid their part.

Ideas, suggestions or stuff that I think could be added include:

– The bill repeat date only offers the options: daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. But the thing is that we sometimes have bills on other schedules like quarterly, or every “x” months. It would be cool if those would be taken into consideration.

– An amount for the bill has to be entered. But the thing is that sometimes you know you have a certain bill that comes every quarter or so, but you don’t know how much each bill’s value will be, but still you’d like to be reminded it’s coming.

– This would probably take it a bit into the money management software turf, but a few reports on how much a person is spending on bills, by payee and by group, could be very interesting.

– I know I’m being a bit picky with this one, but it’d be nice to be able to change the currency from the settings.

Anyway, overall, it’s a really nice and useful tool, worth checking out.

Human Unsatisfaction And Contradiction

People living in the city want to move to the country side, and people living in the country side want to move to the city…

People in their home countries want to emigrate, and people abroad want to come back.

Young people want to grow up, and old people want to be young again.

Working people want to retire, and retired people want to go back to work again.

And the list goes on…

It seems like unsatisfaction rests at the core of every human being’s existence. We’re almost never happy with what we have or where we are in life, we’re always creating something in our minds that we believe is better, even if it contradicts with an earlier belief, and even thought we’ve already been there and done it; we keep going on and on and on.
I wonder if that is what actually drives us in life, keeps us going and keeps up feeling this fake sense of purpose.

If you think of it more though, it also means that we don’t know what we want in life. It’s as if we blindly, randomly, almost madly steer our way through life, not knowing where we want to get to, emotionally moving back and forth between thoughts and wishes, and getting ourselves confused by our contradictions.

But, as “intelligent” human beings, shouldn’t we be able to determine what we want exactly out of life, and be able to plan a path to get there, and then be happy about it once we’ve gone through with it?

Tabarka Jazz Festival 2006

Tabarka Jazz FestivalIt’s that time of the year when the north coastal town of Tabarka welcomes Jazz musicians and fans from all over the world in it’s famous Tabarka Jazz Festival, and everyone has started planning for the concerts they’re going to attend.

The schedule this year is as follows:

08/07/2006: Neilo FEEL Project (Tunisia), IVISIONARI (Italy), Stanley Clarke & George Duke (USA)
09/07/2006: Karim Ziad (Algeria/France)
11/07/2006: Tigrita project (Poland), B Connected (Switzerland)
12/07/2006: O.Loundstreman Orchestra (Russia), Randy Weston (USA)
13/07/2006: Nabil Khmir (Tunisia/Holland), Mem Shannon (USA)
14/07/2006: Tiefland (Austria), Popa Chubby (USA)
15/07/2006: Sunshine [Abdou Selim & Judy Blair

A Tunisian’s Life In Debt

It truly amazes me how many Tunisians live their whole lives in debt; I don’t think there’s anywhere in the world like it.

A regular Tunisian does the following:
– He starts off with a loan to be able to get the list of demands required for him to get married.
– He takes a big loan (even double loan) from a bank to buy or build a house, that he spends over a third of his life paying for.
– He takes another loan to buy a car.
– If his wife is naggy, he’ll have to go for yet another loan to get her a car too.
– He has to go into more debt every holiday or occasion, by either going for another loan or borrowing money from family or friends to buy clothes, gifts, sheep or whatever else.
– He takes smaller bank loans to buy luxury house items and appliances, that he could certainly do without.
– He can’t just accept his situation and stay at home at summer, he has to borrow some more money to rent a house in some touristic beach area for at least a couple of weeks.
– As if that is not enough, he also does his best to get enough money to travel abroad for a nice shopping spree every now and then.
– On a more responsible note, supposedly, he has to go into more debt with the bank to pay for his children’s tuition fees, especially that he wants to send them to study university in France or Canada.

And the list goes on and on, and our average Tunisian spends his whole life sinking deeper and deeper in debt, trying to pay back his dues until his dying day, in more occasions than not leaving a burden for his children to carry on after him.

It really strikes me, especially that there is nothing I hate in life more than being in debt. How can these people go to bed at night with the heavy burden of so many debts weighing on their shoulders?

Why can’t people just live according to their finances? It’d help them make their financial situation better with time, and enable them to do more and more in a safer and better way.

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

I just finished reading “Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell.

The book is about the kinds of decisions and snap judgements we take in the first fractions of seconds we’re confronted with something, how that happens, and how we have this hidden ability to “thin slice” situations, mind read the people in front of us and react according to a wealth of information that is stocked away behind a closed door in what is called our “adaptive unconscious”.

It goes on to tell us to trust these snap judgements of ours more often, and that sometimes they result in better decisions than if we take a lot of time and go through much anaylsis. Still the book shows examples of how that can go wrong, and why. Which leads us to how we can somehow train and develop these snap judgements and make them better and more efficient.

The book tells all this through results of research and real life stories that are woven very nicely together, in a way you won’t get bored.

I bought this book from the book fair, and it was the title that actually pulled me in. I’m not usually into reading these types of books, but still I found this one very interesting, as I do believe in what it’s trying to say, that a part of us, our “adaptive unconscious” as it turns out to be, is able to analyse a situation and reach a correct decision a lot faster than it would take us to think about it consciously and decide what to do.

These snap judgements or gut feelings or whatever you want to call them have come in very handy to me over the years, although I sometimes let myself get carried away by the idea that I have to think things over more before taking my decision, which only complicates things and gets me confused.
So from now on I think I’ll be trying to develop and trust those judgements and decisions more in my everyday life.

Crime And Redemption

A couple of days ago, I was watching “A History of Violence” featuring Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris and Maria Bello, and it got me thinking about crime and redemption, which actually also reminds me of the movie “Redemption” featuring Jamie Foxx, which is based on the true story of Stan “Tookie” Williams.

I’m actually a bit torn between my thoughts on this, and haven’t reached a satisfactory conclusion.
I mean, if a person commits a crime or even leads a life full of it, but then realizes how wrong he was and tries to move on and build a new clean life for himself. How do we treat that person?

Jail is after all a correctional institution, but what if that person has already found out he was wrong, felt guilt and sorriness for it and is correcting himself? Do we still need to send him to jail?

On the other hand, what about the people who suffered from that person’s crimes? Don’t they deserve to see him punished? Don’t they need to feel protected by the law? Doesn’t the government need to send a clear message to other criminals out there? Isn’t it only fair?

But is it fair then for people to brand the person as a criminal for the rest of his life and not give him a chance to rebuild it and become a better individual?
I think by doing that we’re only pushing them to remain criminals, as we don’t give them any option to be anything else.

We all make mistakes, ranging from the smallest to the biggest, but a lot of us realize their mistakes, maybe get punished for them and then take care not to do them again; so we shouldn’t be marked with our mistakes forever.

I guess in the end, the law should be upheld, and criminals should be punished no matter what, but after they do their time, we should make sure that they’re really set free, not just physically but in every way, and that we give them all the options to rebuild their lives and get fully re-integrated in the society.

links for 2006-06-29