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Miguel d’Escoto’s Inclusionasry Logic of Love:
As world leaders continue to dish it out on hot global affairs during the 63rd session of the General Assembly, I found myself re-reading Miguel d’Escoto’s statement upon assuming the Presidency of said session on September 16th. Strong words. The world would be a much cooler place if just 10% of what he’s calling for ever materializes anytime soon. Not that I am cynical or anything, but…heck, I am cynical.

Excerpts:

This is the suicidal madness in which we find ourselves. Wake-up calls, whatever their form and no matter how brotherly their spirit, always make some people uncomfortable. However, in view of the dangerous excesses of human behaviour, these wake-up calls are imperative. Our basic problem is an ethical problem. Simply stated, we are not treating each other or the natural world as we should.

.....

In addition to the capacity to forgive, we must all rediscover our role as stewards of planet Earth. Little by little, we humans, especially those of us in the West, have rebelled against our vocation of stewardship, our reason for being. We have increasingly turned into arrogant landlords, believing that we have absolute rights over what has been entrusted to our care and management for the good of all

......

At the United Nations, the word “democracy” is becoming increasingly empty, with no real meaning or substance. Take for instance, the 45-year-old United States embargo against Cuba. Even with a majority as overwhelming as 184 votes to 4, this patently unjust and universally repudiated embargo remains firmly in place. If the opinion of more than 95 per cent of the membership of the United Nations can be so casually ignored, of what use is this General Assembly? This is a question that deserves some thought. How can we be content to say that we have democracy simply because we have the “one nation, one vote” rule? What good are votes if they can be ignored or have no real consequence?

.......

It is all well and good to preach democracy, but it would be better still for us to put it into practice, right here, at the United Nations. It makes no sense to wage wars of aggression that kill hundreds of thousands of people with the purported aim of supporting democracy, while at the same time using every imaginable means and pretext to prevent a process to democratize the United Nations itself.

.....

A couple days go on my 80-minute commute back home, the train was somewhat crowded (not rush hour crowded). I was seated (unusually), had the headphones on and was consumed in reading something. You know how narrow subway seats are, and there is barely any space between your seat and the next, so you’re basically squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder with whoever is seated on either side? It was like that with a guy who was really into his music to my left, closed eyes lip-syncing and all, and a girl in gym cloths to my right. But then half the number of people on the train disembarked at some station, including Mr. Music Fan, and I moved to the now empty seat to my left in order to, you know, make some space. That’s when the girl to my right turned to me and said:

Subway gym girl: Are you mad at me?

Me (looking at her, then behind me, than back at her): Excuse me?

Subway gym girl: Are you mad at me or something?

Me: Ahh..umm. No. Why would I be?

Subway Gym girl: You moved away.

Me: Umm, just making space, you know.

Subway gym girl: Okay.

Me (stupidly grinning now): Okay.

So three people who do not know each other told me that I look “exactly” like one of their friends (in one week). Two showed me pictures of my look-alikes. Scary thing is: these guys did look like me (well, the two I saw pictures of at least). Hmm. Bummer. So I am not a unique snow flake. And neither are you.
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You shower using a sponge? That’s weak. Real men use Axe’s “shower tool!

So I was buying toothpaste or something at some supermarket, when something on the shelf caught my eye. Something dark and ominous in a sea of pastel-colored, perfumed liquid soap containers. Upon closer inspection, the object in question was identified to be Axe’s Detailer Shower Tool. It’s black and red, with what appears to resemble propeller blades on the edges. Because real men use nothing less than a tool to clean up. Not a sponge, not a loofah, but a friggin’ tool.
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P.S. Fellow UN intern Rebeccah has a blog which you should check out.

Picture source: http://flickr.com/­photos/inflite/­2419329769

A river of faces flows

A swarm of hands hold on to a bar

Headphones are your best freind

From Blog stuff

Day three of my second week in New York city where I am interning at the United Nations headquarters. I arrived here on September 12th (direct business class flight..those frequent flier miles are actually useful!) to a rainy, windy NY, which is a good break from the stifling heat of the Cairene September.

I applied to this internship last July. I figured it would cool to intern at the UN and see New York again, this time for a little longer. Initially, I thought that even if I get an acceptance I would have had to do some intense expense management since the internship is unpaid and I have to take an unpaid leave from work, in addition to a leave of absence from school, which means one more semester plus a summer session of juggling a full credit load and frequent work-related travel to finish my MA. I got the offer letter in early August and thought “screw all that, I am going to New York!”. At least it looks good on a resume, and I did need the “break”.

So, internship schmenternship. I didn’t really know what to expect and honestly,  didn’t want to expect anything. I share the “interns office” in a quiet, windowless room (see above picture) on the 37th floor of the Secretariat building with two other interns, both Rebbechas (what are the chances, huh?) from Sweden and the U.S. This fall, there is 200+ interns assigned to various UN departments and offices, an during the orientation session, we were told that we are very lucky because this is going to be the last significantly large class of interns to be taken for a long time, the reason being  that the Secretariat building will be torn down from the inside and completely renovated; a plan that is going to take about 7 years.

Things started a little slow (maybe too slow) but are starting to gradually pick up in a very unexciting way. Although just familiarizing oneself with the one billion and one acronyms people here use took up most of the first week. My computer induces bouts of “tech rage” that I try to keep under control for the sake of sparing my fellow interns a slew of expletives that I would otherwise direct at the stupid heap of scrap; it crashes if I do as much as type too fast. You’d think the U.N. would have decent machines! Ahh, amid all the excitement I must remember that this is the interns office. No expectations, only experiences. Besides, I signed a confidentiality statement or something like that and I don’t think Ban Ki Moon would be happy if he read my blog and found me badmouthing UN computers. That would be bad.

I am staying in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Manhattan is right across the George Washington bridge. The morning commute is about 75 minutes: two subway trains, a short bus ride and a 15 minute walk. Don’t mind it as long as the iPod is juiced up and piping the tunes and I’ve got something to read. I did some unintentional sightseeing though getting off at the wrong stops then wandering about thinking “this does look familiar”on the first few days. Loving New York in all its crowded, dynamic, refreshingly cosmopolitan and overcaffeinated glory.

Highlights of the week:

The General Assembly: It just started this week. Security is  as tight as an iron vise ( and that’s probably an understatement) in and around all streets leading to the UN headquarters building. There are multiple I.D. inspections starting 3 blocks away from the entrance to the Secretariat building, metal detectors, dogs, cordons, road blocks, route detours, intense-looking secret service agents and cops…the whole nine.

A morning with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad: Today I attended a “briefing session” with none other but President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of The Islamic Republic of Iran at the Grand Hyatt New York. The ballroom was packed with at least 500 interns and students.

From Blog stuff

The Iranian ambassador to the U.S. gave a short speech, and so did a couple university professors, then the man himself spoke. This was followed by a Q&A session in which he skillfully demonstrated the fine art of “political answers”, with a few gems of wisdom here and there. The session concluded with a photo op frenzy and Ahmedinejad inviting all attendees to go out and have lunch in any NY restaurant of their choice, and the Iranian Embassy is treatin’ (at which the ambassador joked “..but nothing too expensive!”).

The guy blogs too. He seems to suck almost as much as I do when it comes to updating his blog though; his last post is dated December 2007. C’mon, dude.

Celebrity spotting: Who needs to go to Hollywood? The U.N. headquartes is apparently celebrity-infested these days. Saw Micheal Douglas and a couple others during a cermemony on the occasion of the International Day of Peace, and today a fellow intern saw Jude Law walking around the Secretariat building.

From Blog stuff

That’s about it for now. Over n’out.

Rollins quoting his Cairene cab driver:

Driving in Cairo is like a video game: When you make a crash, do not worry. Put in another quarter, and keep driving

First off, I am not really an avid consumer of potato chips, neither am I in the habit of making random observations on food, but this is more of a by-product of my increased consumption of a particular variety of sandwich I’ve been ordering rather frequently from a local cafe/eatery as of late. The sandwich is delectable, but they throw in this sorry excuse for a bag of chips. Now, I am neither a picky eater, nor a complete health nut (but I am still not fond of putting crap into my body), and I can hear you say “Just throw it in the trash, duh!”...but this being me – and as a general rule of many bullshit rules I go by - if it is food, it must be eaten (if not by me, then by someone, or something else, much to the misery of visiting friends and the delight of my dogs). I just don’t throw out food except when a certain amount of visible fungi/mold/bacteria colonies can be observed by the naked eye on the surface of said food (now something is feeding on it, then it’s okay to throw it away. bacteria can still eat in the trash). But I digress…

The brand is called “Lion” made by Leader Foods. The bag includes an average of 12 sodium-marinated, overcooked chips (yes, I’ve made multiple counts and took an average. Commentary on crappy stuff must still be properly documented).

To eliminate any qualms about any gastronomic misjudgment I might have made on this questionable potatoesque substance, and in the interest of eliminating potential criticism of my opinion on grounds of taste-bud bias, I decided to run the “dog test”. You know how people sometimes say that something is so bad that you wouldn’t even feed it to your dog? Well, lets test out the degree of crapyness as measured by a dog’s undiscriminating palate.

To perform said test, I enlisted the help of Stella, my 14-month old German Shepherd. Stella’s eating behavior can be likened to a high-volume vacuum cleaner. Nothing edible -or inedible for that matter – is spared the wrath; lettuce, cabbage, meatballs, dog food and small timber panels are all one and the same in her quest to totally devour whatever is in her immediate vicinity. Hence my amazement to see Stella’s reaction to the open bag of Lion presented to her.

She ate the bag and left the chips. Yeah, this stuff is so bad you wouldn’t even feed it to your dog.

It’s moving season. My university is moving campus and I am moving house. My office, apartment and car are all full of boxes of various sizes. A sense of temporariness is infused into familiar spaces, and there is an urgency to just move and get it over with. Nevertheless, it is refreshing. The inevitability of change feels surprisingly good. Granted, the warmness afforded to us by familiar spaces is to be appreciated. However, I find that staying too long in such spaces (my apartment, room, office, etc) cloys my mind into a subtle state of dullness resembling some form of conscious hibernation (how’s that for a great line of bull!). The intellect is lulled into what I would term as a state of “environment-induced hypnosis” due a lack of mental stimulation by what have become an overly familiar and intimate environment.

It might be a right-brain thing, or it might be just me. The fact remains that moving shakes thing up a bit, at least for a while, until the surroundings become excruciatingly familiar again.

On a differnt note, I am just glad that I will finally be able to find a parking spot on my street.

This a reply that I made to a mailing list discussion on  the Wikimania 2008 conference I attended recently. I do realize that not having the entire thread would take it out of context, but the archives to the relevant threads are here. While this is something specific to post-confernece commentary and discussions, I decided to also post it here since it pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

I finally got around to installing Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) on the X61T, something I’ve been intending to do since Fiesty Faun was released, but – like many other things – got shelved away to the back on my mind, largely because I wasn’t ready to migrate a complete tablet-based workflow to a system in which tablet functionality is still considered rudimentary. I still think that development efforts related to tablet computing apps in the Limux realm are still relatively basic and fragmented. The X61 comes preinstalled with Vista, which I hate for various reasons that would best be outlined in another post. However, my need for a tablet-based workflow for note-taking, annotation and research overrode my dislike for Vista, and since last fall I have developed a system for note taking, archival and annotation that I was adequately comfortable with and inclined not to change until better options were available. A few things came about that presented a potentially better alternaive:

• Xorg  support for pen input


• Good Linux apps for handwriting recognition and pen-based note-taking.


• Realizing  that the only reason I was using Vista was my need for tablet functionality, coupled with my growing dislike for Vista.

So a couple days ago I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on the X61T (in a dual boot configuration with Vista, just in case). I knew I was in for some (or a lot of) tweaking and minor hackery to get everything tablet-related to function properly, and I wasn’t expecting much variety in terms of tablet-specific apps as is the case in the Windows world, but who needs variety when you’ve already got what works, right? So here is what did work for me:

1- Setting up pen input was a matter of adding a few lines to xorg.conf. Multitouch is not supported yet, but that’s not really a deal killer for me.

2- Fingerprint authentication was set up using the ThinkFinger package (there is also fprint, which comes handy if your laptop is not a Lenovo and has a non-tech user-friendly GUI)

3-Tablet-specific apps:

• Handwriting recognition: CellWriter works great. It could be improved by adding a few usability enhancers, such as auto-detect of text input fields.


• Note-taking: Xournal (I did like OneNote, but Xournal is very good and does the job. It also has PDF annotation functionality, which is very important for me)


• Drawing/Vector graphics: Inkscape

...and here is what does not work (yet).

• Screen rotation: It is supposed to work and there are a few good guides for this but for some reason I could not get it working. Couldn’t be bothered to fiddle with it for too long right now since I prefer working in landscape mode most of the time anyway.


• Multitouch: Not supported yet, but for me it is in the “nice-to-have-but-not-required” category.


• Tablet button mapping: The directional buttons and escape button work, but the the screen rotation and the one next to it (which called up the Lenovo tools menu in Windows) don’t (at least not by default). Oh, and that blue ThinkVantage button is useless now.

Overall, I love Ubuntu on the X61. I have the functionality in need in a fully open source environment that worked mostly out of the box. I need to iron out a few things and it should be near perfect and ready for my “travel season”. I could only expect that the better is yet to come with respect to tablet pc support in future releases of Ubuntu.

After exactly 25 hours and 14 minutes of travel (of which about 16 hours were in flight), I collapsed on my hotel bed in Anaheim, California. In the US of A for the first time. I am on a 10-day trip: 5 days in Anaheim, CA to attend a higher education conference, and the rest in NY for some other work and a little play.

The conference in Anaheim was huge in terms of the number of participants (a little over 8,000) but was organized without a hitch. It is an annual event organized by a large higher education administration software provider. There was a gazillion daily sessions and classes to attend, and you eventually get flummoxed by the information overload, running from one session to the next. A combination of the busy conference schedule, jet lag and just plain laziness led to me not seeing much of Anaheim. In fact, I was staying across the road from Disneyland and didn’t even bother to go check it out.

On my last evening in Anaheim, I called up a friend who lives in Los Angeles, who was cool enough to drive down and pick me up to show me a bit of L.A. We drove through downtown L.A. for a while (lots of homeless people), and ended up queuing in a 40-minute line to get a hot dog at Pink’s. Apparently, a chilli dog from Pink’s is sort of a big deal in L.A. It was pretty good, but I wouldn’t queue for 40 minutes again for another one.

Last summer I sold my beloved 1992 black Audi 80. It was slow as a turtle (a rather hefty car with a measly 1.6 liter engine doesn’t exactly make for a sprinter) but had technology that surpassed its contemporaries, superb build quality and a very nice interior. The only thing that ever seriously went wrong with it was a failed fuel pump. I always said that if I’d sell my Audi if I was going to buy another Audi. Easier said than done of course. The problem is, parts and maintainance costs for Audis in Egypt are extremely high, which limits the appeal of an otherwise great car.

Being car-less in Cairo is both a blessing and a curse. With a car, there is the daily battle with the heinous traffic and the rudest, I-am-the-only-one-on-the-road drivers you will encounter anywhere. Without a car, you have to deal with congested and unreliable public transportation and haggling with taxi drivers. In both cases, you’re getting high blood pressure and bouts of uncontrollable anger. Given the choice of the aforementioned two evils, I prefer to have bouts of uncontrollable anger inside my own car so that I can bang my head repeatedly on the dash and use the steering wheel as a bite plate.

So the search for a new car commenced last September. Since then, I’ve seen just about every new model within my budget range. The problem is, I couldn’t find the exact hue I wanted in the color choice catalog at the Porsche dealership, and Ferrari Enzos were all sold out!

Ok seriously now, the problem was that within my defined budget ceiling I can’t even afford eying a new German Car from a safe distance. And by new German car, I mean a proper car, not a VW Polo (no offense to any VW Polo drivers reading this). After over three and a half months of deliberation and so many dealerships visited that I think they blacklisted me, I had an epiphany. A moment of clarity, if you will. If I can’t buy a new German car, why not buy a used German car?!

Truth be told, this option has been always at the back of my mind while I was scoffing at Korean-built POS’s, pitying families placing down payments on rebadged Chinese Franken-cars, cussing at teenagers in suped-up Japanese moronwagons (aka ricers) and envying lucky bastards in Bavarian sport sedans. Given the amount of money I had (or rather, didn’t have) and my beggars-can-also-be-choosers attitude towards automobile purchase decision-making, the light at the end of a very dark and long tunnel was to find a used, early model BMW. Here is why:

• A BMW is a BMW, even if used and (slightly) banged up.


• Holds value very well in the Egyptian market (and all other markets, I imagine). To quote Jeremy Clarkson “You can stick the BMW badge on a dead cat, and people will still buy it”


• Relatively ubiquitous in the Egyptian market, which makes for a good ecosystem of parts sellers and competent independent mechanics. A strong dealership network too.


• Did I say that a BMW is a BMW.

That said, (and even for a 10-15 year old car) the woes of expensive parts and labor still exist. This is still a luxury brand, and a such anyone involved in anything remotely related to the car has the right to charge you an arm and a leg and probably one of your kidneys too. Caveat emptor.

During the period between mid September to late November, I saw no less than 15 used BMWs and came very close to buying two. I finally laid eyes on this sterling silver 1993 BMW E36 318 IS.

And yes, this is a picture of my car jacked up at the mechanic’s, where it spent a the first two weekends after purchase for the following “minor” repairs:

• New motor mounts


• New clutch master


• New ABS pump


• Fixed front electric window keys


• New front left grille


• A small unnoticeable dent in the front fascia, between the twin grilles.


• Fixed side mirror electric motors, wind shield wiper sprayers, fog light bulbs, and a whole bunch of other electrical stuff

The car kinda looks cool from that angle, trunk and hood agape and all, don’t you think?

Don’t let that picture fool you, though. The car is very good for its age and the previous owner properly serviced it. It has a sunroof and electric everything, sports suspension (which is somewhat a problem becuase the car sits too low for Cairo’s speed bump-ridden roads) and clear-lens corner lights. The engine is high-revving and has done 110,000 kms, which is considered rather young for German engines.

At this point, a little disambiguation – which I am sure you do not even have the remotest interest in- is due on the”IS” model designation:

In the United States, the IS suffix denotes the coupe body type in the 1992-1997 E36 model range (thus the difference between the 318I, which is a sedan and the 318IS, a coupe). In Europe (and I assume pretty much everywhere outside the US), however, “IS” denotes a sedan or coupe E36 318 with the M42, 140 BHP engine rather than the M40, 115 engine in the 318i.

Confused? I know, me too. At least now you are a little less ignorant about something.

Now if I could just find the schedule for those road rage and anger management sessions.