Well a few of these just hit me today in the shower. I've always found the shower to be an inspirational place, no idea why, but many of my great ideas are brewed in the shower. Well alright there aren't that many great ideas of mine, that was a bit of a stretch.
It maybe worth mentioning that these are again a pastime. Maybe I'll include the disclaimer somewhere on the blog's homepage once and for all :).
Here they go:
1. Why does the word "yesterday" have day in it while "tomorrow" doesn't. Both are days.
2. Why do we have a word for that period of the day that is only 1 second long (if your watch's resolution is seconds) or 1 minute long (if you're using the clock in your mobile). The period in question is noon.
The only use we get out of the "noon" word is the "afternoon" which is the part of the day between noon and sunset. If I were making the language I would have ditched "noon" altogether and assign the name to the "afternoon" period instead. It seems it's the part we care about anyway.
3. In a very similar vein to an old wondering brought up by Kareem Mostafa I believe about why Donald Duck throws a towel around his waist when coming out of the shower while he actually never wears any pants/shorts. This was brought up while discussing the above mentioned touchy subject with Helal. He referred to the fact that Mickey mouse actually does wear "lower body" wear. So how come? Does this mean Mickey mouse had stuff to hide while Donald duck didn't? :)
4. In Arabic how do you differentiate between snow and ice? I don't know of two different words for those things.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Monday, January 16, 2006
Home Improvement
So last weekend Helal and I decide to invest a full day in home improvement efforts. We really did need it. The living room was a mess and we'd gotten lots of furniture only to leave it unassembled. The major motivation though was the arrival of the kick-ass home theater system whose powers had yet to be unleashed.
We spent the day hammering and screwing our way through seemingly endless pieces of IKEA furniture, and then later scanning through a pile of cartons, paper and plastic bags that contained stuff we'd packed during our move from temp housing. Stuff that we'd forgotten even existed in the first place. But the results have been really worth the effort.
A few days earlier we'd gotten professional help for wall mounting the plasma TV.
Wall mounting stuff turned out to be quite a tricky job around here mainly because walls are not made of brick and concrete, but rather something called sheet rock, a white-powderish thing.
I found out the hard way when I tried to bolt on a few book shelves in my bedroom. I fixed the shelves using a few screws and then with a proud move patted the shelves saying "Now I got shelves for my books", only for the shelves to fall off the wall as if they were fixed by scotch tape.
Of course after that incident I decided I am not willing to take my chances with mounting the plasma TV.
I will spare you the technicalities of how to mount a TV on such a wall, maybe for a later post. For now I'd rather present you with a few photos of how the results now look like. The living room is still missing more than a few things, but the shots will be focused mainly on the complete part. Here goes:
We spent the day hammering and screwing our way through seemingly endless pieces of IKEA furniture, and then later scanning through a pile of cartons, paper and plastic bags that contained stuff we'd packed during our move from temp housing. Stuff that we'd forgotten even existed in the first place. But the results have been really worth the effort.
A few days earlier we'd gotten professional help for wall mounting the plasma TV.
Wall mounting stuff turned out to be quite a tricky job around here mainly because walls are not made of brick and concrete, but rather something called sheet rock, a white-powderish thing.
I found out the hard way when I tried to bolt on a few book shelves in my bedroom. I fixed the shelves using a few screws and then with a proud move patted the shelves saying "Now I got shelves for my books", only for the shelves to fall off the wall as if they were fixed by scotch tape.
Of course after that incident I decided I am not willing to take my chances with mounting the plasma TV.
I will spare you the technicalities of how to mount a TV on such a wall, maybe for a later post. For now I'd rather present you with a few photos of how the results now look like. The living room is still missing more than a few things, but the shots will be focused mainly on the complete part. Here goes:
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Random
Oh well, nothing very important. It's just that I don't really have the time or the mindset to post a very serious hmmmm oh well, post.
So here goes, a few random observations that I took notice of during the past couple months. Most if not all of them is about MS or the US. Some might find them amusing, some will find them boring, and in any case if you have something more important to do then go do it. This is just a pastime for a few minutes :).
So here goes:
1.Well it maybe stating the obvious, but many americans (at least in my experience) are indeed unilingual. I can't really blame them, maybe if most of the world spoke arabic as 2nd language we would've been like that. And it usually impresses to tell an American that you can speak 2 languages fluently and a 3rd fairly well so I can't complain. Some even guessed we speak English in Egypt when they find us using it comfortably.
2. This is really useless, I have no idea how it came to my mind but pocket handkerchief packs around here are usually 15 2-ply tissues, instead of the ones in Egypt with 10 3-ply tissues. Ultimately the same number of plies but I think the US version makes better use of the resources :)
3. All conference rooms and offices at Microsoft have motion sensors that would turn off the lights when no motion is detected for a few minutes to save energy. Pretty cool idea. I have yet to find out the exact timeout for those though. Someday I'm gonna perform my own experiment and find out.
4. I just noticed today what seemed to me like tiny braille writings on the restroom signs at MS that seem to identify men's/women's restrooms. Very thoughtful.
5. It does indeed rain a lot in the Seattle area. Again stating the obvious, but what most people who never lived in similar weather probably don't know is that it's always warmer when it rains. On the non rainy days we get -4 degrees celsius weather. It can never go below 6 degrees celsius when it's raining on the other hand.
6. You hardly ever need to carry cash around here if you have an ATM/credit card. You even pay tips at restaurants/cafes by writing the amount on the store's copy of the visa receipt. I find myself usually carrying zero cash, not something you can get away with in Cairo at all. Another side effect is that I have yet to get used to the banknote and coin shapes. I still have to stare and read to know a given US banknote/coin's value.
7. I'd probably wasted enough of your (and my) time by now :) So I'm wraping this up. Merry Christmas for the folks in Egypt, and Kol sana wento tayebeen for everyone celebrating 3eed El Ad7a everywhere!
See ya
So here goes, a few random observations that I took notice of during the past couple months. Most if not all of them is about MS or the US. Some might find them amusing, some will find them boring, and in any case if you have something more important to do then go do it. This is just a pastime for a few minutes :).
So here goes:
1.Well it maybe stating the obvious, but many americans (at least in my experience) are indeed unilingual. I can't really blame them, maybe if most of the world spoke arabic as 2nd language we would've been like that. And it usually impresses to tell an American that you can speak 2 languages fluently and a 3rd fairly well so I can't complain. Some even guessed we speak English in Egypt when they find us using it comfortably.
2. This is really useless, I have no idea how it came to my mind but pocket handkerchief packs around here are usually 15 2-ply tissues, instead of the ones in Egypt with 10 3-ply tissues. Ultimately the same number of plies but I think the US version makes better use of the resources :)
3. All conference rooms and offices at Microsoft have motion sensors that would turn off the lights when no motion is detected for a few minutes to save energy. Pretty cool idea. I have yet to find out the exact timeout for those though. Someday I'm gonna perform my own experiment and find out.
4. I just noticed today what seemed to me like tiny braille writings on the restroom signs at MS that seem to identify men's/women's restrooms. Very thoughtful.
5. It does indeed rain a lot in the Seattle area. Again stating the obvious, but what most people who never lived in similar weather probably don't know is that it's always warmer when it rains. On the non rainy days we get -4 degrees celsius weather. It can never go below 6 degrees celsius when it's raining on the other hand.
6. You hardly ever need to carry cash around here if you have an ATM/credit card. You even pay tips at restaurants/cafes by writing the amount on the store's copy of the visa receipt. I find myself usually carrying zero cash, not something you can get away with in Cairo at all. Another side effect is that I have yet to get used to the banknote and coin shapes. I still have to stare and read to know a given US banknote/coin's value.
7. I'd probably wasted enough of your (and my) time by now :) So I'm wraping this up. Merry Christmas for the folks in Egypt, and Kol sana wento tayebeen for everyone celebrating 3eed El Ad7a everywhere!
See ya
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