Category Archives: Random

A sorry excuse of a blog post

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This is one of those posts where I tell you, my real or imaginary reader, a few things about nothing in particular.

So yesterday I loaded up my blog with the intent of writing something about that bike race I organized last December (and last February), or maybe a rant about a rather frustrating experience with an experiment in IT systems outsourcing, or even some more stuff about advocacy and social/environmental entrepreneurship (I just finished my MA in Economics in International Development, so perhaps I m currently more intellectually-conscious than usual?) . All the above listed topics either require brain activity to recall events or think deep thoughts. My feet were cold. I can’t think properly with cold feet. With such a lack of mental willingness to invoke deep thoughts or remember stuff then articulate all that in a blog post, I decided to do something else. I decided to update my blog’s software, and in the course of doing that  I totally screwed it up.

My first thought was: Ugh, not again!

It is said that Murphy’s Law was invented in airports. Well, web software gave us Murphy’s Law 2.0. I’ll spare you the gritty details but what I ended up doing is moving the whole thing to a new host (after 5 years of awesome problem free and money-free hosting) and starting from a fresh installation using a database backup saved from weekly autobackups I had, thankfully, set-up earlier.

I took the unsolicited opportunity to update my blog’s theme. This is the, you know, 2010 look…or something.

Mind you, it’s not that I blog that often anyway. As inconsequential as most personal blogs are, including (and especially) mine, it would suck to have it gone in a minor data disaster like that.

So anyway, I’ve noticed that I get a different song stuck in my head for about a week or so before another one sticks in its place. This week’s song is Pearl Jam’s Garden. Very abstract lyrics. Love it.

Speaking of gardens, riding through the “rock gardens” in a short section of trail that I newly discovered in Wadi Degla last weekend reminded me of how much I miss my (now sold) bike. Can’t wait for that new frame to get here. Which reminds me that I don’t have a fork for that frame yet. Bummer. Eying a “discounted” Magura that would still cost me slightly more than a full suspension service on my car even though it is a 2008 model on closeout price (or so claimed).

Twitt

Desultory harangues: Episode 0

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Ever feel like your brain is going on overload?

By that I do not mean your garden-variety, generic onslaught of information we are mercilessly assaulted with from every direction on a daily basis. Your brain instinctively prioritizes and sorts through the random distractions as you go about your usual business, without any real “conscious” effort from you. Not the pop culture slag deposited in your mind as you watch most TV shows and the drone-like mentality you experience as you receive the daily dose of news from the usual sources. No, I am not talking about the rotten shoal that has become what we call “entertainment” today (yes, I do realize this is a blatant generalization), which infuses a constant stream of serious idiocy into culture- any culture, that is.

What I am talking about is the unrelenting excess of your own thoughts. The mental supermassive black hole into which a convoluted jumble of randomness writhes wildly in the grip of reason. The more you try to extricate an ore of logic from the mess, the more it becomes intractably entangled and further coils onto itself, smothering any sliver of sanity.

So, does that ever happen to you?
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P.S. No, I am not going crazy, if that’s what you’re wondering right now. Well, maybe a few screws have come a little loose lately, but nothing a shot of espresso can’t fix.

Twitt

Campus Characters

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The Acerb Student: The girl in my Tuesday class is cynically obnoxious. She sits at the back, one eyebrow cocked in a perpetually inverted “V” and a single unchanging facial expression of scornful contempt for what is to her the shallowness of opinion and utter simple-mindedness of the rest of the academic weaklings who undeservedly have equal portions of classroom space. She responds to every single statement the professor makes (and he’s a top-notch academician by the way) with asinine usage of bloated vocabulary and silly arguments rife with obsolete buzzwords and zero-calorie statements. Please, lay off your fake intellectual angst and have fun with the rest of us.

The Seasonal Exerciser: Works out ferociously for about two weeks every semester. Comes in everyday for what I assume to be a two-hour workout, but I never actually stayed that long to verify it. He’s always in full battle gear: the elbow and knee pads, wrist wraps, gloves and bandanna. Works every upper body muscle he can see in the mirror from the front. Loads the barbells with too much weight, does a single rep, screams and grunts at the top of his lungs through two more half reps, then slams the weight on the ground and walks around the gym muttering something like “goddamn, I could totally lift this weight last week”.

To Be Continued…

Twitt

Real men build their own machines (or computers)

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So I just put together a complete, working desktop computer. Big deal, you might sarcastically think to yourself, but its not as easy as it sounds, at least not for a first-time PC builder. Truthfully, it was not my first attempt and assembling a computer, rather it was my first successful attempt at doing so. The first time I tried to accomplish such a minor feat I actually thought I had enough technical prowess to enable me to do it. But I should’ve known better. Putting a PC together might not seem as daunting of a task as it sounds, considering that you’ve got the nice illustrated manuals for all the components and tons of guides on the net to walk you through it. The fact is that, for someone with little knowledge of electronic components, there is about one trillion things that can go wrong during the course of building the PC, and if even you are comfortable with installing an fiddling with this kind of stuff (which I am, to some extent), you can unintentionally make a small mistake that will screw things up and send you right into troubleshooting hell. Some of the things that can happen:

  • You can short-circuit the motherboard or other components with exposed PCBs. I did that on my first time. When I thought I had put everything together and that all was ready, I hit the power button. LED lights flashed, fans whirred, and something beeped. But nothing else happened. Just a blank black screen. After a few days I discovered that I forgot to install one of the little spacers that separate the back of the motherboard from the metallic body of the case, and short-circuited the damn thing the second I hit the power button. When I told the story to a friend of mine who owns a computer hardware store (who originally offered to put together my new PC, which I declined. There is just no sport in that), he simply shrugged and said:



      “No problem. Act as if the the mobo was DOA and it had a damaged PCB so just ship it back and get an RMA”.


      Back then I had no idea what that meant, but I did as he said and got a replacement.

      • You can fry your processor if the cooler is installed incorrectly

      • You can break your processor if the cooler is forced on with too much pressure

      • You can force on a connector where it doesn?t belong. Most connectors are designed to be installed by a single correct alignment, thus be fool-proof. But fools are so ingenious.

      ...and the list goes on.


      So last week when I tore open the packaging of my shiny new hardware and rolled up my sleeves to assemble my new mean machine, a friend of mine – looking in horror at the exposed innards of my pc-to-be- said:


      ?Are you sure you know what you?re doing man? This is L.E. 6000 worth of stuff?


      ?Don?t worry, just watch and learn?


      Of course I wasn?t as confident as my external shell of calmness conveyed, but I wasn?t about to let that wimp say that I had someone else put together my new pc for me because I was to scared to fry L.E. 6000 worth of components.


      The moment of truth came three hours and a few cups of coffee later. I took a deep breath, connected the power and monitor cables, and hit the power button. LED lights flashed, fans whirred, and something beeped. A blank black screen was all the showed on the monitor?


      My heart skipped a beat.


      Then a bunch of white text scrolled quickly on the screen, and the simple yet comforting set of BIOS options came up. My blood circulation resumed.


      My friend had that look on his face that said he was about to blurt out a ?Told you so!?. I believe I would?ve clubbed him in the head with my coffee mug if he said it. I said ?Piece of cake man. Now lets put together your stuff?.


      Moral of the story? What do you know about yourself if you?ve never put together your own computer (or coffee machine or car engine?).


      Twitt

Not that anyone is hanging on the edge of their seat…

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..but I still haven’t got around to posting the rest of the entries from last summers trip to Europe. Hell, I almost forgot I even had a blog. The fall semester has started and its chockfull of fun: a full-time job and a full credit load. Probably not a good idea since I will be abroad for at least a month. Oh well. I am officially striking out the word “boredom” from my dictionary.

As for the rest Europe trip entries, I’ll probably just rip out the pages from my notebook, scan them, and post them here with a bunch of random pictures. Good luck with my handwriting. Not that anyone reads this. Well, I know of at least a couple people who check here every now and there is always the rare chance of a mildly amusing story amidst the crap I post here. But anyway…

This semester I am going all out techy. I am using a tablet PC to manage my utterly chaotic life. I don’t actually own the thing, since I currently can’t afford this kind of gadgetry goodness, but let’s just say its on an extended loan from work. I’ve actually had the thing for around 6 months now, but just recently I’ve begun to discover its wonders. So I basically decided to go paperless this semester. Almost paperless. I plan to accomplish this feat by using a Fujitsu Siemens P1510 tablet PC and a bunch of cool software apps. More on that later in a series of posts documenting the whole “paperless experience”.

On a different note, I came across this somewhere on Facebook. I consider it an addendum to my post on traffic in Cairo from way back:

1. Speed limits are just suggestions
2. You take the 6th of October Bridge to go almost every where in Cairo
3. You can see your school but somehow you’re not getting there
4. It’s faster to walk
5. You get stuck in traffic at all times of the day
6.There’s no such thing as a rush hour, Its a rush 24 hour
7. Its not actually tailgating unless your bumper is touching the car in front of you.
8. A yellow light means at least 5 more cars can get through.
9. A red light means 2 more can.
10. You can cross 4 lanes of traffic in under 30 seconds
11. Stop signs mean slow down a little, but only if you feel like it
12. A slow driver is someone who isn’t going at least 10mph over the speed limit
13. Someone has honked at you because you didn’t peal out the second the light turned green.
14. You’ve honked at someone because they didn’t peal out the second the light turned green.
15. Rush hour lasts all day
16. You know at least 3 alternate routes to avoid sitting at a stop light.
17. You refer to distances in minutes, not miles.
18. When you put on your turn signal to change lanes, the people next to you speed up.

All of the above is very true.

Speaking of traffic, I am currently on the hunt for a motorcycle. When telling random people I know about this, the range of responses I’ve been getting varied from speculation on how long it will take before I am hit by a truck, to facial expressions of real and uninhibited terror. I like the Honda Steed

Twitt

Sleeping student epiphanys

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Today in my International Business class (usually 120 minutes of pure, distilled boredom, but this particular class was rather interesting) the discussion revolved around the relative ease of starting and/or operating a business in different countries, and how you, as an international entrepreneur, might use indicators of transparency and ease of doing business to gauge any potential market before you actually jump in. So everyone was getting all sophisticated with cliche-ridden business lingo and citing outdated cases, when a student who usually spends most of class time almost sleeping came up with this “theory”: He basically said that when doing business in Third World countires, you should be looking for places where there is direct parallel correlation between the two above mentioned indicies. In other words, ideally you’d like to do business in countries which are high on both indicies (i.e. little or no corruption and a low level of bureaucracy), but you can still do business in countries with a high level of corruption and a high level of bureaucracy, since a little greasing of the palms will help get things rolling. However, should your business be cornered somewhere that scores high on one and low on the other will basically screw you. That is, in a low-corruption high bureaucracy country, that frozen fish shipment of yours will rot in its containers at the destination port while waiting for the agonizing customs clearance, and you can’t use bribes to get things done, thus your operations will eventually go belly up.

I thought this observation was funny and actually kind of true. Of course this guy was thinking on the assumption that business ethics are a constant.

Twitt