Christmas in the US

Well, today marks Christmas in the US. It's an experience, my first christmas abroad. Egyptian christians are mostly orthodox and they celebrate Christmas on January 7th though.

It's actually quite interesting the story of how the whole thing of dec 25th vs jan 7th Christmas began. Because actually when you think about it, Christmas should have been Jan 1st, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ and the calendar widely in use today is based on the same event. So it only makes sense for Christmas to be on Jan 1st.
However, It seems that at some point in time people thought we had a slight glitch in the calendar system and that the calendar year did not accurately represent what a year should be. They then started calculating the time difference to compensate for it and "move" Christmas. Everybody agreed the error was around 7 days, weirdly enough, they could not then decide on whether to add or subtract those days. They calculated miniscule difference in the calendar year, and added them up across centuries, but they couldn't determing the "sign" of the magnitude. One would think they knew what they were doing doing all those calculations, but one would be wrong.
So some ended up adding those days and some ended up subtracting them. That's supposed to be how the whole December 25th vs Jan 7th started, and that's how they are equidistant from Jan 1st. Kinda funny.

So, back to Christmas here. It's been totally commercialized of course. It's almost all about holiday shopping and then gathering with family and friends and opening up the presents. It is still kinda nice to see the festivities everywhere. Huge Christmas trees, lights on the houses.

One thing I'd noticed is that people at stores, restaurants, etc. make sure they are politically correct. They never tell you "Merry Christmas", rather "Happy Holidays", and you make out of that what you may :)

I also got the best Christmas present. Helal, Mostafa, and Khalid got me this super nice shelf stereo unit. Plays mp3, audio cds, and FM. Helal knew I liked this unit since we saw it together at Best Buy, so I came back home last night (Christmas Eve) to find it neatly wrapped and placed right in front of the door. It was awesome, and I have no idea how they managed to keep it as a suprise since we're together 99% of the time :) Thanks guys, you made my Christmas, you're the best!

Morality And Economics

I just started a new book called freakonomics. I have no recollection of how it came to my attention but it's been sitting in my amazon shopping cart for a few weeks now and then I discovered it was available at the MS library. I have no recollection of how I discovered this either but it just happened.

So I checked out the book, and I'd just laid it down right now after reading the table of contents and introduction.

Of course, I do not mean this as a book review because obviously I hadn't read enough of it yet and secondly I will probably suck at writing a review.

There is however this phrase that really caught my attention:

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work--whereas economics represents how it actually _does_ work

Now how about that as food for thought....

The Ultimate Adrenaline Rush

So, I guess now that you know the mystery of slow updates I'm entitled to do them more often :P

So well, home improvement efforts were kinda hard the past few days. It's getting better now, I almost have a decent bedroom. That's for another post though.

Today it's gonna be about the ultimate adrenaline rush. Even though the past few days have been packed with fun (it snowed for the first time in Redmond), including 270 degree spins with my car in the snow (nothing to worry about) today I had the ultimate adrenaline rush. _THE_ ultimate.

I'm in Canada right now with the Microsoft shipping party. Having loads of fun and will post more about that later. For now I'll just leave you with a first for me and the blog.

Below you'll find a link for a video that you can stream to watch what the ultimate adrenaline rush is. I am just hoping it's not too prohibitive bandwidth wise for you guys. Tell me if it is and I'll disclose more information verbally :)

For now, enjoy the vid here :)

P.S.
Mom, I know you might freak out when you see this. It's totally OK, just remember I lived to post it ;). I'm doing great and having loads of fun.