Year: 2006

Paris, Paris…

So, here I am in Paris…
Yes, you read it right, I’m in Paris, France; The city of lights, romance, fashion and whatever else they came up with…

But wait a second, the last time I wrote I was mumbling about how the world has more billionaires now and us getting peanuts, now all of a sudden, I’m in Paris??! How did that happen?
Well, let me do a quick rewind then fast forward through the weekend.

Saturday was my birthday, yeah no big post about that this year, phone line is screwed at home, so no connection, so of course no post, plus I’m not sure I’d have posted about it anyway, I mean enough about that already. So, birthday; small gathering at our place with Eman’s parents and mine; gifts were mostly clothes.
Note to self: This is certainly a good solution to get rid of shopping, I have to either have more birthdays or more people at my birthdays.

Sunday: I woke up early, well relatively early for a weekend, got myself ready and headed to the airport in time for my flight to Paris.
I had a bad experience at the airport that I’d rather not get into now, but I made it to Paris in the end, where I’ll be spending two weeks training for my new job. So no, it’s no tourism travel, but I’ll be trying to wander around a bit and take some photos after work and on weekends.

I haven’t been to Paris for such a long time; last time I was like 10 years old or something, so yeah very long time.
This time I’m all alone, staying in a small studio the company rented in Barb

The World Gets 102 More Billionaires

As some of us have barely been breaking even since last year, 102 more people around the world have become billionaires. And I’m not one of them, yet!

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is still perched atop the Forbes list with a net worth of 50 billion dollars. That’s up three and a-half billion or so from last year. He’s been the world’s richest person for the past 12 years.

Forbes says there are now 793 billionaires, thanks in part to emerging stock markets overseas, including Russia, India and Brazil. The Czech Republic has its first billionaire ever. China now has eight, up from just two last year.

And what are we? Peanut-aires…
Oh well, I guess we should always thank God for whatever he gives us, even if it’s just peanuts.

[Source: Forbes, MSN Money]

Google Buys Writely

Confirming what I read on GigaOM a couple of days ago, it has been officially announced that Google has now bought Upstartle, the company behind the cool online word processor Writely, taking the search giant even deeper into Microsoft’s turf.

Writely is a web based, ajax enhanced application that lets users compose documents directly on the Web, collaborate on them with others and share them either privately or publicly. So with Google acquiring them, Google is going into direct competition with Microsoft Office Word, making it unnecessary to have an installed Word processor.

I’ve used Writely before, and in fact the blogging presentation we held in Zaghouan was mostly worked out through our collaboration on the document online through the site.
I personally think it’s a very neat tool and really well done.

It’s interesting how it seems that Google’s strategy, to strip away Microsoft’s stronghold on office productivity software, is by taking all these functionalities and making them available online.
We’re also hearing about new products like a calendar (CL2) and online drive (G:Drive) coming up soon.

But how successful would these really be?
I mean, other then the privacy concerns that everyone should have, especially after the US government subpoena to Google and the other search engines for their users’ search information, there is also the issue of having to always be connected, with a good connection too, to use and access all this stuff. This brings us to the issue of internet and broadband penetration and who the user base will mainly consist of.

Personally, I see this as being the way to go, as we become more and more connected, it’ll become more and more easy for our information to be accessible for us from anywhere we go, and at any time of the day.

links for 2006-03-09

What’s My Name?!

Having two names was never an easy thing for me, even though I don’t think it’s that complicated or weird. Plus it’s a very normal and common thing in Tunisia.
I actually see it as one name: “Mohamed Marwen” as a whole entity. Although I did amuse myself sometimes by thinking that “Mohamed” is the good side of me, while “Marwen” is the dark one.

Anyway, it seems that some people just need to have one name or else they get a system failure error somewhere in their mental address book.

So, as a child growing up in Zimbabwe, all my friends called me Mohamed because they thought it was my first name and Marwen was my second one. Plus I guess they found it easier to say than Marwen in english.

Then when we moved back to Tunisia, everyone called me Marwen. This is due mainly to the popularity of Mohamed as a name, so if there is any another option that’s the one they’ll go for. Still, some in the family called me Mohamed for no particular reason.

And then I went to Jordan, and that’s where the real problems started. When I’d meet new people, I’d start to tell them my name was “Mohamed Marwen”, but then to avoid the whole story of me having two names and why, which isn’t as common there, I’d just say “Mohamed”.
But, the problem is that some other people were introduced to me through some Tunisian friends of mine. These people would come to know me as “Marwen”.

So as if it wasn’t enough that some people felt I had so many personalities mixed up in me, I was also known to people by two different names, and they thought that I was two different people.

I remember once in university, two people were talking and one of them was telling the other about this Tunisian guy they know who’s called “Marwen”, and the other said they also knew a Tunisian guy whose name was “Mohamed”, and they were both talking about how they should meet these two interesting Tunisian guys.
As they talked, they found so many similarities between these supposedly two different people, and they started feeling a bit weird. By coincidence, I was passing by, and both of them saw me and were like “There’s the guy I’m talking about” at the same time, and then they sure felt a lot weirder.

Other times, I’d be with someone who knows me by a certain name, when someone else comes up and uses the other one, only leaving the first person feeling lost, confused, tricked even.

Each time I’d have to go through the process of explaining how I have this compound name, that I didn’t know why the hell I did, and that they could call me whatever they wanted to. I had to have my receivers ready to be called by any combination of the two names anyway.

Now, there’s a new trend some people I know are starting, they’re calling me by my last name “Meddah”. That’s neat. As if I needed more names in the first place.
Oh and let’s not forget the people who choose to call me “Subzero” or “Subzero Blue”.

It seems the nightmare will never end…

Get Smarter In Seven Days

For those of you who are not in IT and haven’t had their brain cells fried up beyond repair with hours of code writing and debugging, it seems there’s a way to get smarter, and in only 7 days too.

Doing ‘brain exercises’ such as watching Countdown, playing Sudoku or taking a shower with your eyes closed can make us all up to 40 per cent cleverer within seven days, according to research by a BBC programme this week.

(…)

The programme found that a combination of techniques based on healthy eating, physical activity, sound sleep and stimulating your mind through solving puzzles and remembering lists makes people sharper, more confident and better at making decisions.

[Source: Guardian Unlimited]

Personally, the whole learn this in 21 days, do that in 24 hours, get that in 7 days, lose weight in 3 hours, blah blah concept is pretty much nonsense to me.
I believe everything is possible as long as we’re ready to put in the amount of work necessary to make it happen.

Continue reading Get Smarter In Seven Days

10 Other Things You Didn’t Know About Me

The blog has been pretty serious lately, so I thought I’d do something lighter and put up part 2 of the 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Me, and make more stuff about me available for public scrutiny 😛

  1. A number of people who know me think I have multiple personalities. I think that’s an understatement.
  2. You know that movie hitch? I used to do a similar job with my friends, giving them directions and tips on how to win over the affection of girls they liked or had crushes on. And it worked.
  3. I curse and swear a lot, especially when I’m with my guy friends. I’m trying to get that under control though.
  4. When I was a teenager, I used to daydream about ruling the world. I actually still do sometimes.
  5. I have “The Lord Of The Rings” trilogy books in both French and English, but I still haven’t mustered up the courage to go through reading it all. Shame on me, I know.
  6. I don’t have any phobias. I’m only afraid of stuff you should normally be afraid of.
  7. Two movies haunted my childhood dreams “House of Wax” and “Why Me?“.
  8. I didn’t believe in marriage, and wanted to spend my whole life as a bachelor. But then I met Eman and everything changed, as you might have already noticed.
  9. I’m quite dirty-minded when I want to be. I could turn almost anything around into some dirty-minded joke.
  10. When I was younger, I desperately wanted to become a singer. The closest I got was singing at a friend’s birthday party in the Hard Rock Caf

IT Memory Loss and Focus Deficiency Problems

Yesterday a friend and I were talking, and the conversation shifted to how it seems that we IT people start to suffer memory problems after some years in the industry.

As the years goes by, the projects pile up, the problems faced and solved accumulate, our heads are less and less able to retain information and we seem to forget things faster.

Not only that, but we also seem to get a focus deficiency of some sorts, because of which we sometimes just go through blank moments and lose focus on whatever it is we’re listening to, watching or doing.

I’m not sure if there have been any studies on this, but I confirm that I see the same symptoms in almost everyone I’ve met who has spent a good time in the industry.
That’s why the longer we stay working in IT, the more gadgets we need to remind us of things and to organize our lives, I guess.

Personally, I remember when I first got out of university and started work, I wouldn’t need notebooks or papers in meetings, because I’d just record eveything perfectly in my head and then go do it.

Now, that’s almost impossible, in fact it’s getting harder to even hold a 5 item shopping list in my head without forgetting at least 3 of the items. It’s pretty embarassing sometimes having to pull out my pocket pc at the little store to remind myself that I need to buy eggs or sugar or whatever.

Maybe it’s because of the fast pace of our work, the deadlines, the sometimes stressful nature of it all and the loads of information we get thrown at us out there, but it does exist and I guess the only way to get over it all is to take some time out every once in a while, try to do a soft reset and take it easy on ourselves.

After the 11th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

As a number of other Tunisian bloggers have written already, we had our eleventh Tunisian blogger meetup last Sunday.

The meetup was held at Latina Cafe/Restaurant in Les Berges du Lac. Turnout was pretty good for this meetup with 18 people showing up.

I’d like to thank Latina for their hospitality, for offering us free drinks and being so nice to us all.

Among the bloggers present, we had two guests: Mahesh Shantaram and a Tunisian friend of his, they both study professional photography in Paris, France.
It was great meeting him after the emails we exchanged before his trip to Tunisia. I hope we get to meet again soon.

A new blogger, Orchea, joined us in this meetup as well as one non-blogger, but heavy commentor by the nickname Brain.

The meetup was a lot of fun as usual, with us making a lot of noise with all our talk and laughing.
It’s a shame we had to leave early because we had some urgent things to do.

A great surprise I had at this meetup was when I ran into an old childhood friend by coincidence, who came to Latina with his wife and son for a couple of drinks.
We used to spend the summers together at my uncle’s place in Bizerte and so many years have passed since we last met, so it was really cool meeting up with him again. It certainly brought back a flood of memories.

According to Karim, the next meetup will be in the mountains of Zaghouan. Details will be shared as soon as they become available.

Will try to put the few photos I took at the meetup online soon.