Author: Mohamed Marwen Meddah

Mohamed Marwen Meddah is a Tunisian-Canadian, web aficionado, software engineering leader, blogger, and amateur photographer.

links for 2005-09-02

Lucie Silvas – “Breathe In”

The other day while switching through music channels, I came across a video for a song called “What you’re Made Of” by a new singer called Lucie Silvas.
I really liked the song and sent myself an email with it’s title and her name as a reminder for myself to check more of her music out.

Today, I got to hear her new debut album “Breathe In”, and I simply loved it.

Lucie Silvas is a highly talented British singer/songwriter, who has previously supported Macy Gray and written songs for Rachel Stevens, Gareth Gates and Liberty X.

She has a great voice, pure and powerful. It reminds me a bit of Christina Aguilera’s voice, only I like Lucie’s voice and style of singing better. She breathes a lot more life into her songs. In fact her style reminds me of the great Australian Delta Goodrem.

“Breathe In” is produced by Mike Peden, who has previously worked with stars like The Lighthouse Family, Des’Ree and Shara Nelson.

I really liked her music, lyrics and style of singing. I enjoyed the whole album.
My favourite songs on it are: “What You’re Made Of”, “Forget Me Not”, “Without You”, and her great cover of Metallica’s masterpiece “Nothing Else Matters”.
But in reality this album has no filler tracks, it’s all really great material.

I totally recommend getting this album, it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard this year.

My score for it would be: 9/10.
Yeah, it’s that good.

Blog Day 2005

Today is Blog Day 2005. But what is Blog Day?
Well Blog Day, the brain child of blogger Nir Ofir, was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.

With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. In this way, all Blog web surfers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

So, for the occasion, I’ve gone on and searched for 5 new blogs, from around the world, that I never visted before and that I liked, and here is my list:

– Zimbabwean Pundit: A blogger from Zimbabwe, writing about the political situation and news in Zimbabwe.

– ThaRum: A blogger from Cambodia, chronicling events from his life there and discussing various issues.

– Finland for Thought: A blog from Finland, by an American though, discussing politics, current events and culture in Finland and USA.

– Jarango: A blogger from Panama, who blogs in English and Spanish, and writes about lots of interesting stuff.

– Small Island Girl: A blogger from Trinidad & Tobago, writing about her life and dreams on a small island.

I wouldn’t feel fair without pimping some of the blogs I know too, so here are some links:
AquaCool, Haitham Sabbah, And Far Away, Saudi Jeans, Je Blog, 2:48AM, Savior Machine, Zizou from Djerba, Aron’s Israel Peace Blog, Mouse Hunter…etc.
Check my blogroll for more interesting links 😉

The Hobbit

Last night, I finally finished reading “The Hobbit” by J.R.R Tolkien, the tale of Bilbo Baggins and his greatest adventure. And what a read that was.

I have to thank my dear friend Saqf again for giving me this amazing book and encouraging me to read it right away. You rock man!

I totally enjoyed every bit of it. My imagination ran wild; middle earth was recreated in my brain with every tiny detail; I took the trip with Bilbo, the hobbit, Gandalf and their dwarve friends over and under hills, through forests, across rivers and all over middle earth.
At times I even was so sucked into the story, I felt like I was living the role of the hobbit.

The book is magnificently written, Tolkien’s style is just awesome, and at times it feels less like fantasy and more like myth or maybe even ancient history; it’s as if all this did happen a long time ago when the world was full of hobbits, elves, dwarves, goblins, dragons and more.

I totally wish Peter Jackson goes on to make a movie out of this book too.
It’d be one hell of a cinematic experience, I’m sure.

I totally recommend reading this book.
It’s simply beautifully amazing.

Show in Downtown Tunis

Show in downtown Tunis

Yesterday we went to downtown Tunis for a walk and to check out some books at Al Kitab bookstore.

We found Habib Bourguiba street closed to cars and lots of people were gathering in front of the Municipal Theatre there.
It turns out the Municipality of Tunis had organized a show by the students of the National School of Circus Arts (2 of whom appear in the photo above).
We stopped and watched for a while, it was really cool and nice. These guys are very talented and in really good shape.

After the show, there was a Rai concert, but we didn’t stay. We went on for a little walk, then sat down at a caf

10% Increase in Prices of School Books

For the new academic year, a rise of 10 per cent is expected in the prices of books in Tunisia.

La Presse, the daily Tunisian newspaper, reports that the increase in the prices of books is due to the improvement of quality of paper and layout. A team of pedagogues appointed by the Tunisian Ministry of Education revised the books and classes for the new academic year and have made some changes to make the books look “more attractive” for students.

Belgacem Lassouad, the director of the national teaching center, said that in order to improve the quality of the books, more colorful diagrams and graphs were added in particular to the science books.

Well I’m all for the Ministry of Education revising the books from time to time, updating them, making them richer pedagogically and making them more useful for the student.
I also do realize that using better quality paper, more attractive designs and having more graphics in the books does make their printing cost more.
But, I think a main concern should also be to keep the price accessible to everyone.

I know that the price of an individual book is only a few dinars and that adding 10% to the price of one book isn’t much of a difference. But multiplied by the number of books that students carry around on their backs to school, it becomes a significant increase, especially for the poorer families.

I guess what I’m saying is that of course changes need to be made from time to time, books have to be updated and their quality upgraded, and eventually this will mean a rise in their prices. But maybe this should be done gradually starting with the most important points first which are content and the way it’s presented.

Damn Find & Replace!

Today was a really shitty day!
I woke up, still in a good mood from yesterday’s meetup, and I thought I’d get online to check my emails and read the comments left on my blog.

I did that and all was cool.
And then I found this one blog spam comment in one of my old posts.
So, I did a search by the title of the post, which was about the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia. For some reason the search returned many results, so I wanted to search again and narrow it down, only instead of writing in the search field, I wrote in the replace field and I clicked enter.
I quickly realized what happened and clicked stop in the browser, but it was too late, every single post on my blog got screwed up and all the content was lost and turned into an endless stream of Adobe Macromedia shit.

I got in touch with my host in an attempt to find a recent backup to restore my database from, but they didn’t have any.

So, I had to re-import my data from a backup I had that was done in mid July, and I had to re-enter each and every post from then up to now, which is over 80 posts.

I’ve been working on it all day long and I just finished. I’m exhausted. And if I wasn’t as addicted to blogging as I am, I certainly would have quit the whole thing alltogether.

So, all the posts are here. But without the comments and trackbacks 🙁
I have the comments in emails that are sent to me, but I guess it’ll take me a longer time to restore those.

After the 6th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

We just came back from the sixth Tunisian blogger meetup in Sidi Bou Said.

This meetup was organized on a very short notice and barely 2 weeks after the last one in Kelibia, and as not many people confirmed their attendance, we were afraid there’d only be 3 or 4 people present.
Surprisingly and luckily, it was a great success and 12 people showed up.

We sat in a corner in the beautiful Sidi Chebaane Caf