Weekends

I really get to feel the weekends here. For some reason hardly anybody does anything recreational around here mid-week, most people save that for the weekend. This, of course, stands in stark contrast to Cairo where a weekend night is really no different than any other night. Every night is a weekend in Cairo! Just cruise the streets of Heliopolis, Nasr City, or Mohandessein on a Wednesday night to see what I mean.

So anyway, this is more about recreation than weekends. What I've been doing for fun more or less.

The Drive:

We have a quite a few email groups here at MS. One is called Microsoft drivers and the rest are usually for specific car brand owners, like BMW Performance groups, Merc Owner groups, stuff like that. Luckily every now and then someone posts a nice route for a drive for the rest to enjoy. Having had a few sunny days a couple weeks ago I decided to go for one. So I got off work at around 3pm, printed the map and instructions, took my roof down, and started the 1.5 hour drive.

It was simply amazing. The route was out of this world, I never even imagined there are such scenic twisty roads around here. The roads were mostly bi-directional two lane roads (one lane for each direction) and they had all types of corner and elevation variations. It was thrilling to say the least.

Of course I was hooked, so I started campaigning for a group drive on the MS email groups. And it worked! So tomorrow (Saturday), around 2 dozen people who are passionate about driving here at Microsoft are gonna go together for a longer drive on similarily scenic and twisty roads. We're planning on going early in the morning to evade traffic as much as possible. The cars that are coming? Thought you'd never ask. Here's a few of the cars that I know should be there:
Honda S2000, Porsche 911 Carrera4S, A3 3.2 quattro, Porsche Boxster, Mini Cooper, Lotus Elise, Unconfirmed Dodge Viper, Unconfirmed Corvette, Impreza STi, BMW 540, BMW 325, Unconfirmed NSX, RX-7, BMW Z3, and last but definitely not least 2 BMW Z4s.

Needless to say I'm really looking forward to it. I'll make sure we make a few stops to take group photos of the cars. Will definitely post when I'm back from that one.

The Concert

A few weeks ago I heard of a Nawal El Zoghby concert happening in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. Seeing that it's around 120 miles away from here we decided to go for it. The concert turned out to be kinda different than what I had in mind. It was a moderate size restraurant where people were seated at tables, more like a hotel ballroom type of concert than a stadium/beach type. Accordingly the average age of attendants was significantly higher than my own. It was still enjoyable, you don't get the "arabic" atmoshphere in a lot of places around here and it was sure fun to be around people singing and dancing to arabic tunes.
A pleasant surprise was that she sounded exactly like you hear the songs on the CD, which is unfortunately not the case for most singers out there these days. I sure respect singers/bands that are not "sound engineering based".
I could also walk away with a few nice photos of Nawal El Zoghby and being so close to the action sure helped. So here goes a couple for your viewing pleasure, click on any photo in the post for a larger version.









That's about it for today. A bien tot.

Selling your info to the devil

Surfing the web I decided to click an ad to see what it's about.
The ad promised free stuff of course but the proposition was a bit different than what I'm used to. You get money to spend on shopping at a retail store of your choice and then provide feedback about the store. And you keep what you shopped for. When I went to the page I found they were offering a 1000 dollars for you to shop when you sign up. As if that was not extravagant enough, they are carrying a special offer that gives you a Sony Vaio laptop too. So around $2000 worth of stuff all in all.

Of course nothing really is for free, except parental love maybe. I decided to read the license agreement (the long text in the too-tiny-scroll-your-a$$-ad-infinitum) box at the bottom. I knew they had to be getting something in return. I'm "adapting" the important parts here.


We store and use the information you give us in accordance with the terms of this Policy.
Fair enough.

Our registration form requests that you provide certain contact and profile information (like your name, e-mail address, postal address, and phone number)
That's the definition of your information, you'll see how this info is treated now.

We use all of this information in the following ways:
to provide you with personalized marketing information via electronic delivery and/or direct mail
to send you targeted advertising via electronic delivery and/or direct mail;
So they will market stuff to you..

to contact you for feedback and surveys via electronic delivery and/or direct mail;
Market research too..

to provide your contact information to CRC marketing partners to allow them to send you special offers via electronic delivery and direct mail.
And then they'll sell your information to "partners" who will basically do the same.

to deliver products to you for the purpose of review and testing
I'm just praying these are not "beta" medical products.

Those are basically the snippets that I found to explain how the thing works. I now have 2 questions:
1. How come a person's information is worth all that much from the firm's point of view? $2000 to be exact...
2. How many people think they would go for something like this? Do you think your information and convenience is worth $2000? More? Less? It's said that everything has a price, can you put one on your info?

The Ticket

Well, it's been quite a while. I've been super busy with work, trying to absorb all what I need to and get some stuff done while at it. It's getting better on that front, but this is not about work.

In order to catch up with some of the things that have been happening I decided to post my first multi-pointed post. The post about everything and nothing :)

So bad news first, I got my first speeding ticket here. It might not come as a suprise to those who know me. The cost might be though. The fine policeman who stopped me said I was going at 85mph (on a 60mph highway). He was particularily upset about the fact that I was "switching lanes passing other cars in the rain" (read: ghoraz in Arabic) so well, the ticket was for a whopping $183. I didn't pay that though.
I paid $250.
The thing is, speeding tickets stay on your record here. Insurance companies check your record and adjust premiums accordingly every 6 months. Get an 85mph speeding ticket and watch your insurance premium skyrocket in front of your eyes. So it is usually in your best interest to keep a clean record.
There are 2 known ways to do just that. Never speed, always be extra careful and keep your fingers crossed, *or* get an attorney to contest your tickets. I chose the second path. Granted, it's much more costly that way but what else can I do.
And in case you think speed limits save lives, I beg to differ. Studies of the data coming from Montana and the auto-bahn begs to differ.

Montana is an interesting state, they had no speed limits. The law just instructed drivers to be "reasonable and prudent" and to travel at speeds that are appropriate according to the road and conditions. A federal law and other incidents caused Montana to revert to having speed limits, when statistics of fatalities on the roads were compared under the two contrasting legislation schemes the data proved a very nice surprise. Fatalities *doubled* after the introduction of the carved-in-stone numerical speed limits.
Need more examples? The autobahn (a no speed limit highway in Germany, the most famous in the world) boasts lower fatalities than American highways till today. And I'm not making this up, there is hard data that supports this. if you're still interested, you might want to check out a few of these:
Fatalities reach an all time low in Montana despite an increase of 12% in traffic volume during the no speed limit period.

Fatalities double in Montana after enforcing highway and interstate speed limits.

Why the autobahn is safer than most american highways at speeds twice the national speed limit.


Well, I am definitely not saying you should go flat out in your Fiat 500 and waive the no-speed-limit flag. However, most people do not walk around with death wishes. Give him a speed limit of 60 when he -and his car- can clearly go at 90 and he'll most probably sleep at the wheel. Empower the driver to judge the speed he and his car are comfortable going at and more often than not, he will do surprisingly well.
Egypt could be an exception :P

Anyway, this has gone for too long and I can't possibly add more stuff to this one, so wish me luck contesting the ticket, and take good care. I'll be posting again in no time. I promise more exciting stuff and maybe even photos ;)

Ciao

General Wonderings

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.

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:

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

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!