Irony : it’s just how this world works !!

Not so far ago… exactly 375 days ago, I made a mocking parade on a friend of mine for wearing white and voluntarily standing in a booth.. I actually wrote a note about it : http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=52061622349

Back then, I didn’t intend to make fun of the idea of volunteering itself, I just thought it was so unlikely that it would make a good subject for ridicule, plus I wanted to mess with my friend :)

I had no idea back then that in less than a year, I would stand in three booths, two in which I wore white to, and the other one I actually wore a pink baroque and an orange pumpkin hat !! (http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4903737&l=3f947d60ee&id=728380609)

Of course the irony here doesn’t escape me, the same act that I once thought was silly, I am committing now exactly a year from then, wearing the same T-shirt that I once thought it looked like a gas station uniform (I still do by the way :), but I wear it proudly nevertheless)

So what changed during this year that made me turn form mocking an act, to actually committing it proudly? In order for you to fully understand that change, we’ll have to go back to the mocking Era.

Back then the IST entry in my dictionary was “IST (n) : just another student model”, but it was bound to change as I got to know my friends better, less than a month into the future the definition shifted, it became “just another student model whose members are really close”, I kept mocking though..

The motive then wasn’t that clear, I just kept mocking as an act of habit, another month to the future, I began to realize that there was something more to it, but should the mockery and the ridicule stop? No my dear friend, It became clear to me that I was actually envious!! Envious about the connection they had with other members, envious about the moments they shared… but it wasn’t enough to get me convinced, ergo the mockery shall continue.

And as I think about it now, the connection and the belonging they had wasn’t the reason per se, but it was a hell of big reason to screw with that dictionary of mine, few months later that page in the dictionary was whipped, and a single sentence emerged from that contradicting chaos, and declared itself as the definition that was bound to stay …

“IST : One big family”

VERY Genuine tea !!

Microsoft el-Arosa GENUINE green tea.. because if it's not Microsoft, then it's not genuine !!

Disclaimer : if the tea crashes, stops unexpectedly, lags while drinking, or even gets cold this is ONLY because the tea you are using is not Genuine.. cracked tea is bad, and we blame it for everything, because here at Microsoft if we were as good in developing as we are in blaming, there would be nothing to blame for !!

IsEnabled ?? seriously ??

I can see now how WPF can make the world a better place.. you see, the property 'Enabled' is now called 'IsEnabled', I know thats probably going to cause world peace, relief the world form poverty and hunger and also produce a bugless program, but i am still gonna sue Microsoft for the 400 mellisec it takes me to write those two extra letters !!

Not Again !! -in arabic for a change

وللمرة الثانية قابلته...  في تكرار عجيب للموقف بحذافيره ، كأن القدر يصر على آتيانى به ، لكني حاولت تجاهله هذه المرة ... تباطئت في ركيعاتي المتبقية... دعيت الله أن ينكشح.... حتى نسيت وجوده تماماً ، ومع قيامي من الصلاة و استهلالي بختمها ، اذا به جالس في آخر المسجد ناظراً إلي و مبتسماً ابتسامته الصموتة... لم ارى بداً من إلقاء السلام عليه، فذهبت مبتسماً –أو مدعي الابتسام– و مددت يدي، لاحت ابتسامة صفراء على وجهه كأنه موقن انه رأى بسمتي الأخيرة ، ورد السلام قائلاً بأداء كوهيني متميز "انت عامل ايه ؟" ، ولسان حاله يقول " دانا محضرلك حتة امتحان... هاتلبس فيه راشق... يالا ودع البسمة دى يا شاطر!!! "

my first motivational poster :)

one day.. three lessons

after a whole day of plans going wrong, plan B’s also going wrong , after dragging about 20 of my friends with me, roaming the streets for a place to eat, and messing up 3 different groups, moving three different meetings that had nothing to do with each other into the same place, i can say with my mouse full that i had nothing to do with it, yet it all falls on my shoulders..

so heres what i have learned :

1-no matter how much you plan or how much your plans are perfected, there is always a place for fate to shuffle things around

2-things have a way of sorting themselves out by their own

3- chaos is the color that colors an otherwise dull life, embrace it.. oh sweet chaos :)

finally i know it sound clichéd but i am going to say it anyway.. i had a really fun time during every nerve-breaking moment of that day because i know that -brace your selves- in the end only the good memories stay.. and no matter what happens, we must be glad that we shared such an experience together, and keep in mind that we will remember it and laugh years from now.. told you its clichéd :)

circle rectangle triangle features

recently our class had this project in which we must differentiate between three types of basic shapes.. which are circle, rectangle , triangle.. in order to do that we need a feature to differentiate between them, features could be anything, thats why lots of my friends went on searching over the internet for such features.. and here is where this post kicks in.

this is simply just a prank to lure them here, thinking they had found something, then knowing it was me and they were just pranked :)

in order to lure them, i need Google to list me as one of the top results for the keywords they might use, and thats why i wrote the following paragraph :) remember there is a big difference between spamming and pranking :D

TAGS : recognize features circles triangles square rectangles p^2/A area pattern recognition how to differentiate between shapes matlab c# csharp c++ circle rectangle features feature triangle inscribe code perfect circle, feature , circle features, circle and rectangle features geometry

note that the picture is meaningless, it just makes the topic as if it was really talking about something good :) features (this one is just for luck) :)

PS : if you are from my class, and you’ve read this.. please follow my blog :)

I can Explain... !!

Listen to this first : My Rap

so before anyone decides to hack my computer and overvolts it to try and make it expode in my face, here is why i made the lyrics :

there is this app on facebook called social interview, it asks people questions about their friends, and it often asks people if i can rap, and their answer is usualy yes, so to emphasize their point i had to write some rap as a comment, and to prove my creativty i had to write a diffrent piece for every person, and thats one of them after a little modification :)

about the music, and why i made it a song in the first place, it’s because of this program that Microsoft made called songsmith, and it is supposed to put music that goes with your singing, so should i just believe that it does ? no i had to try it, and thus this hideous song came to life :D

11th of November

i still dont know if you were the patriot they thought you were..

or you were just a man who was trying to get by..

but for better or for worse, we miss you up there..

at least you held your people’s unity…

in the memory of yasser 3arafat (1929-2004)

3am sa3d

3am sa3d… An everlasting symbol of our faculty, maybe more famous than the dean himself to people outside our faculty… This man has been violating copyrights since 1964

It’s inevitable that you deal with him once you were by any way associated with the faculty… Students and professors alike, his knowledge with every book ,it’s contents and it’s version which may exceed the instructors knowledge astonishes everyone, at least everyone who stops at such things in this fast non stopping faculty.

I once had a talk with this guy and to my surprise he was very friendly and open… he told me that he first came here in 64, and it was the same job as it is now, only now he has people assisting him, he said students come and go, doctors come and go, even deans come and go, but only he stayed the same, he was proud to be the only fake books provider in the faculty.

For the community this guy is a hero… as he helped many students get their hands on books that otherwise they would’ve never seen, he is like the social justice that keeps rich students from having a better advantage, of course all of that was in the pre-internet era, but still he does a great job -from the social point of view of course-.

But from the legal point of view this guy should be imprisoned for life… running a simple calculation , our faculty has 15,000 students, say only half of them buy at least 2 books a year, which means 15,000 fake books per year, that’s 15,000X 300 L.E average original book price X 45 years he have worked = 202,500,000… yeah :D you are looking at hundreds of millions of losses which are enough to hang him five times.

What remains is the ethical point of view.. is it OK to violate a copy right to keep social justice ? and is it a must that only inadequate students buy from him ? well I am not an ethics expert nor am I a social analyst, but I can tell that as long as the books prices are far from the average citizen’s reach -the average citizen income in Egypt is 80$ per month-, and as long as the publisher has another market that makes Egypt looks like a school canteen to him, it’s ok for THE STUDENT who’s incapable of buying the book to buy a fake one… which means -in my humble opinion- that these students are ok, but 3am sa3d himself is a thief -maybe a noble one- but still a thief.

I don’t care what legal maniacs say or what ethics experts recommend, because no matter how hard they try to emphasize that it’s not a gray area, I’ll always think it is, it’s not like stealing food, but it’s not like taking pictures of a statue either.