You Can't Make Mistakes.

“A series of pipes.”

My dad has been hosting his origami site at Geocities for the past several years. I spoke to him yesterday about acquiring a domain name and self hosting the site as Geocities—presently owned and operated by Yahoo—will close its electronic doors very soon. He will move from there to a self-hosted site with its own independent address, which is inherently better because of greater control over the back-end of things. He rightly said that this was a good thing anyway, because this is how we keep these things—websites, the Internet—alive. This started me thinking about the Internet and how different a place it is from when I first started using it over a decade ago.

Thinking about Geocities in particular made me a bit reminiscent about all of the one-off, special interest sites that sprang up in the late 1990s. Usenet aside, you could find almost any information—be it quality or not—in single column pages with colored text and often over a bright—sometimes obnoxious—background. In those days, the big Internet companies had sites that were complex, multi-column affairs with boxes and ads, but the real Internet was the domain of the people writing whatever they wanted in center-aligned pages.

It was a great time to be a conspiracy theorist. Or really into Wicca.

Searching the Internet in the 90s was fantastic and weird. Democracy at its finest. All things change with time, some for worse some for better. There are reasonable arguments in either direction for the changes evident in the Internet over the last decade and a half. For some applications, the Internet has made life easier, obviously. Communication is fantastic. I live in Egypt and communicate with friends readily all over the world in an inexpensive and effective way. This is due to greater ubiquity of broadband Internet coverage in Egypt and elsewhere.

Websites have also become easier to create and maintain. I use WordPress to generate this site and have been for several years. The first version of the site, however, was written in PHP by yours truly. It was an exercise in basics which has made working with and customizing WordPress much easier for me in subsequent years. That said, it is really easy now to have a site that looks more or less professional, and everyone does. The downside is that now everything on the Internet seems to be a blog and sites grow stagnant as soon as the writer gets a book deal—which seems inevitable for many upstart bloggers these days.

The information which used to be so readily available on the Internet is now relegated to the All Thing¹ of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great tool as a first-reference: it democratizes basic reference, particularly for those who already have experience with traditional encyclopedias. It also contains vastly more information on a much wider variety of topics than do traditional encyclopedias. That said, it is still only a first reference, and the “peer-review” to which the information is subjected to is conducted by experts and non-experts alike.

My brother and I grew up with a set—two actually—of encyclopedia in the house. It was a great first- or quick-reference for almost anything that we wondered about or were writing about for school. As I got older and learned more about doing research, the references and bibliography proved perfect guides to more and deeper information on a given topic. That was how it was done.

The Internet changed all that. I cannot count the times that I heard college professors tell students that they had to use books and journal articles rather than online references. I was always confused. Did college students really not know how to use a library? It turns out that, no, they did—and do—not. Library usage seems to be, more and more, a thing of the past. The library at my present University is not expanding its collection very rapidly because they are exploring electronic alternatives—none of which work very well.

We used to go to the library with my mom almost every weekend. We had library cards by the time we were six or seven years old. I was—and am still—an avid reader because of this level of access to books. I am like a ship without a rudder—or more aptly, a ship without water—when I have no access to a library. This is not to say that I do not now primarily access academic journals via the Internet while conducting research. I do. It is easier, and saves me the time of sifting through stacks of journals in the basement in order to photocopy endless pages from them. This is an improvement.

Additionally, Google Books and the Internet Archive are becoming ever more useful resources for finding out-of-print and public-domain works written before the current copyright cutoff. They do not, however, replace the public or research library. Instances of false information being reported elsewhere in the media based on a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source are a good argument for returning to more rigorous forms of research on the part of journalists and academics alike.

Also, the above-mentioned one-off specialist sites seem to be going by the wayside as the Internet evolves into an archive of photoshopped pictures of cats and funny/stupid things. It used to be the case that the top of the search engine output would be a number of websites with a vast amount of—potentially questionable—data on almost any topic.

Now, on the other hand, Wikipedia is at the top of the list for almost anything that you can search for. That is unless you are accustomed to advance searching and particularly adept at using keywords. Most of the students who I help at the reference desk are not. They typically begin their research by going to Google and typing their topic or a full sentence (e.g. – “Mongolia” or “why is there domestic violence in the middle east?.” These are two recent examples of searches which students were having trouble with). To get to much of the real information that is available on the Internet these days you have to sift through hundreds of entries in blogs or advertisements. Monetizing the Internet proves to be primarily a tool for obfuscating it rather than improving user-as-content-generator experience.

This is one of the primary reasons that I am an advocate of net-neutrality and online rights—including, but not limited to, file-sharing, digitized books, and un-filtered/un-traffic-shaped Internet service, not to mention open-source/open-licensing. The Internet has the potential to be a tool for posterity, and indeed it is already serving us in this manner to some degree. It has the potential to be so much more. The moment that corporate interests became more important than the needs of Internet users, the system broke. It will limp though, but it will not recover fully and become the repository of information that it should be until corporate money-making interests are set aside.

This will not happen anytime soon, and indeed, Yahoo’s decision to discontinue Geocities in order to promote their new web-hosting platform—which is pay to play—is a step in the wrong direction. The Internet is not about closing things down in order that they might not be in conflict with business interests: it is about information being freely and readily available the world over and even beyond. This used to be a purpose of libraries as well.

It seems, however, that we have lost sight of this, lulled into contented complacence by cute pictures of talking cats and repositories of awkward family photos. This does not bode well at all. It will eventually change, though. Economies and finance online are not, and never have been stable. The one thing that is stable at this stage is the ability of one computer to connect to another. As long as we have that, when the corporate hegemony Internet collapses, we will simply start over, one node at a time.

Until then, if anyone needs me I’ll be reading online comics and looking at pictures of sandwiches.

———
¹ A reference to the progeny of the blogosphere presented in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Endymion.

n. – the opposite of innovation.

Yah, I made up a word: sue me. Actually, don’t sue me. I can’t afford that right now. Between preparing to move out of the country and writing chapter 4 of my thesis—a job I do for very little pay—I’m not in any position for an out-of-court settlement.

More to the point though. I caught the following quote this morning, and this was the word that came into my brain.

It’s not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it. -Robert Musil, novelist (1880-1942)

It is absolutely true, by the way and it reminded me of a discussion that I had with my dad after my last post regarding the state of innovation in our current economic and social climate.

What we decided was that the best thing for a struggling economy/company/city is to let it fail, unless it is willing to change.

Case in point: General Motors. Old, good company. Makes cars. Could be substituted with any of the other major American automotive companies. They haven’t really committed any serious innovation in the past century. Cars are, with many bells and whistles aside, primarily the same as they were 100 years ago. They still operate under the same principles, for the most part, and the end result is the same. If you disagree with this, then you haven’t looked under the hood of any car. I would suggest then that you find a Model-A and dismantle it. Then, find a late model Mustang and dismantle it. Put both of the back together. You’ll see what I am talking about.

Now, there are some companies which have committed innovation. Any company that is putting a solar panel on the top of a car to give extra power for the air-con—Toyota—is innovative in this climate. Running cars on hydrogen fuel cells, hybrids, electrics, and plug-in models are all innovative.

General Motors—our present case-study—has done none of these things. And I don’t want to hear that GM has the Volt, an electric concept car. It is too late for concept cars. Please move to the back of the line.

Back to the crux of this line of argumentation: GM has made no major innovations of late, possibly ever, and yet they and their investors are worried and scrambling to figure out/fix their current financial problem. However, nothing they do will make any difference.

They already have the only solution to their problems, but it is just a concept car. They could save the company and generate a huge amount of business if they were just to release that car, and all problems along with it. It wouldn’t be for everyone, of course. At first it would only be for the brave who don’t mind being late because their battery died or something. It would be for those who are willing to test and try and see how it works. The deal that would have to come along with it, of course, is that the dealers would have to service anything that went wrong with the car free-of-charge and immediately. Throw in 24-hour tow-from-anywhere-and-take-you-home service: brilliant.1 They would change everything.

The only other thing to do now is to simply let it die, which is more likely. Maybe the market fallout from that will take the other big two with it. We can only hope.

I know, I’m a horrible bastard for wishing such fates on American companies. “Do [I] know what effect that would have on so many Americans’ lives?” Yes, I do. But, do you know what else would happen? Some genius young engineer, right in line with his time, will be able to step up and do something brilliant. This time, though, he won’t have the added innovative hurdle of having to either out-shout the “Big Three” or be subsumed into them and destroyed by their contrary interests. Jobs and economic development to follow.

We haven’t seen a Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Washington Carver, or any of their ilk in such a long time that we wouldn’t know an innovator if they punched us in the face. Maybe it is time for some knock-outs, but they won’t come until the big, stupid brutes die off to make way for the skinny, malnourished geniuses.

———

1 This idea was lifted directly from a phone conversation with my dad yesterday. Dad: it’s a great idea.

that I am turning into my father

Not that it is a bad thing. Quite the opposite, in fact. However, my dad seems to have this weird set of things that happen to him. For a long time, I admit, I thought that it was because he is just particular or fussy in certain, strange ways. For instance, he used to tell us that he believed that he had a sign on the top of his car that was invisible to him—but visible to assholes—which indicated that people should drive like assholes when they are around his car.

The scary thing is that it does sometimes seem that way.

Another seemingly odd thing is that my dad will only wear Jack Purcell sneakers. Now, this wouldn’t be odd, except that the late, great Hunter S. Thompson also only wore Jack Purcell sneakers, and that they have become increasingly hard to find. My mother, bless her, goes to relatively extreme lengths to procure said sneakers for my dad. Or at least she did until the advent of really good internet commerce. Now I think that she buys them online.

This is not the only thing that my dad has trouble finding though. It seems that almost everything that he likes simply goes out of business, becomes unsupported, or disappears completely. Other things, like hand-held computers—which I argue have just evolved in ways that have made them unrecognizable, though Dad has compelling arguments as to why this is not the case—have gone out of vogue to the point of non-existence. Certain very good spam removal software, cordless 18v power tools, computer peripherals, et al have simply ceased to exist once my dad has taken a liking to them.

Now, this has happened to me to some degree in the past. Something that I buy once, and then like, seems to not be available when I go back to get more. It has usually been something that I could take or leave: nothing too important.

Until today.

This morning I went to buy deodorant. I have a brand and type that I particularly like because it has no aluminum in it and yet it still acts as a deodorant. It is Adidas brand Cotton Tech antiperspirant produced by COTY. When I left for Egypt last fall I took 8 sticks of it with me because I like it so much.

Now, it isn’t that this is just a brand or a type that I particularly like, but it is the ONLY antiperspirant on the market that doesn’t use aluminum. It uses some other stuff, like powdered cotton, and it is the best deodorant I have ever used, and the only one that has ever really worked.

The ONLY ONE on the market, keep in mind.

So, I go to the store today to get that and a few other things. I don’t see it. Finally, I spot the Adidas brand deodorants. I look at the labels. Those labeled “deodorant” have no powdered cotton stuff in them. Those labeled “antiperspirant” ALL have aluminum in them. Then I spot one that boasts about cotton something. I pick it up, thrilled—though the packaging is very different than what I am used to—and swiftly realize that it is not what I am looking for.

This antiperspirant has the same cotton stuff that my old one did AND is has aluminum zinconium—or some equally heinous-sounding shit—in it.

Damn, I thought, and decided that I would just check at a different store. I did, and they didn’t have what I was looking for either. They had the women’s variety, though.

So I figured that I would just come home and look online and then buy it on the internet.

Oh no. No, no, no.

I looked EVERYWHERE for this stuff. I even copied the information off the label of the last stick that I have. Nothing. NOTHING.

It is not jsut as though this stuff doesn’t exist, it is as though it has never existed. There is no evidence of it ever having been sold anywhere.

Fickle internet.

So here I am. Without deodorant—though I know that I left about 3 sticks of it in Egypt and am now fiending to have it when I go back in a month and a half. I have exhausted every online source for deodorant and I can’t find a single stick. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to buy enough of it to keep me in aluminum-free antiperspirant for the rest of my life, which is what I would need.

So, I am furious. The problem, again, is not that I liked the brand or that type or anything and could easily replace it with something similar. The problem is that there is ABSOLUTELY no other similar product on the market.

So, my options are as follows: 1) Find this stuff and stockpile it if it is the last thing I do. 2) Write an angry letter, receive no response. 3) Find an alternative that doesn’t even come close to doing the same thing. 4) Stop wearing deodorant altogether. 5) Learn more chemistry. Find the ingredients on the label of the one remaining stick that I have in my possession—read: cold dead hand. Create a concoction based on these ingredients and then use the ol’ trial-and-error method to sort out the proper proportions and method for making it.

I carry the curse of my father: the curse of liking brilliant things that are destined to either fail or simply disappear from the consumer market.

I suppose that I will go back to writing my thesis now, just sweaty and smelly.

Damn.

YOU want mint.

I was walking today and saw a kid standing in the street shouting and waving something in one hand. As I approached, warily, I realized that he was yelling—indeed bellowing—the words: “Who wants mint? YOU want mint! Who wants mint? You WANT mint?” I went out on a limb and assumed that he must be waving mint in that hand.

He spotted me coming down the street and ran right up to me saying “Mister! You want mint?” He was little, his head was at about the level of my elbow. I told him that I didn’t really need any mint, but he was persistent. He shook the mint and then shoved the whole bunch right up under my nose, instructing me, “Smell it. The smell is very good. You want mint.”

I couldn’t resist. I asked him how much, doubled it, and crossed the street before he could try to give me change. Little things like that make my day. It’s not everyday that you can feel that good after having succumbed to a sales pitch.

Sold.

Smalltalk backfires to my advantage.

I am really bad at smalltalk. I hate talking about things that I don’t care about or am not interested in, so I am not good at bringing them up.

Now, we all know that when you have nothing to say, you talk about the weather. Well, I was in a cab today for a rather long time on my way to Medinat Nasr, and I brought up the weather. Mostly, I brought it up because I wanted to know a few things and learn some words that I didn’t know so I asked the cabbie about the recent barrage of rain and storms in Cairo.

Apparently, I wasn’t very clear about what I was asking, or he misunderstood me—both of which are likely—because rather than telling me whether it was normal or not to receive this much rain in Cairo, he told me the average prices for a taxi from almost every point in the city and suburbs to almost any other point. It was all I could do not to get out my notebook and voice recorder. I could write a grid guide for this and make a million dollars. I might still anyway: I retained most of the information in my steel-trap brain.

Apparently, to get from Downtown to Medinat Nasr, 20 LE is normal. Back is about the same. To get from downtown to Zamalek and vice versa: 5 LE. Round trip?: 8-10 LE. Mohandessin to the airport: 40-55 LE depending on traffic. Airport to anywhere else?: 40-70 LE depending on how foreign you look. He actually said that to me, by the way.

Now, this information is particularly valuable because there are no standard prices for anything. The meters in the cabs are never turned on, though each cab has one. You can take cabs that are more like cabs in major cities in the United States, but they are more expensive, and often more comfortable. The only basis that you have for prices in cabs here is what you know and what people have told you.

I thought that maybe this guy might have been inflating the prices a bit for me, but we seemed to have pretty good rapport and his data tracked with what seemed to make everyone happy from my experience haggling over cab fair. So, I figure that he was actually being honest. At the end of the day, the prices are still ridiculously cheap when compared with prices in the United States. Many things are beginning to level out, but cab fare is still one of those things that is just cheaper here.

For instance, for a Chicago cab-ride equivalent to the one that I took today, I would have paid $70-80 US each way. Instead, I paid 50 LE, equivalent to about $9.00 US. I can’t argue with that.

Today was definitely a lesson in “If You Don’t Know What You’re Doing, You Can’t Make Mistakes.” If I had stopped the guy and tried to turn the conversation back to the weather, I would never have learned this crucial and potentially valuable information. Instead, I benefited from the mindset of someone who is happy to let information wash over him in waves, just hoping to take in anything he can.

Try it. You might learn something by accident.

G-mail’s Security Failure affects the business of Graphic Designer

This week graphic designer David Airey’s Google E-mail account was hacked, which allowed for the hacker to hijack his primary domain name by performing an illegal transfer.

If this doesn’t mean anything to you, imagine this scenario: you go online at the computer in your home office to check your e-mail. Then you go to the store for some milk. When you return, your key doesn’t work and a real estate agent walks up your driveway offering to sell your own house back to you. You didn’t even know that you had put your house on the market. Then, when you attempt to take this real estate agent to court, you are told that it will cost you more than what they are demanding from you for your own stolen house.

What do you do?

Mr. Airey has refused to give in to the criminal who stole his domain. Thankfully he has a secondary domain, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t losing business, money, and time.

Read his article here.

I felt a particular twinge of sympathy for Mr. Airey as I am currently living in Egypt and had trouble getting internet connection for the first three months that I was here. This could have just as easily happened to me. I never go to the internet cafés here because I have had friends here who have had their e-mail passwords hacked by the kids who work in hand hang out there. They seem to think that it is fun to fiddle with spyware and keylogger software to get passwords and phone numbers from people. This is fertile ground for the type of hack with which Airey was attacked.

Though unfortunate for Mr. Airey, this should be instructive to the rest of us.

1. When you check your G-mail, check your filters for hacks
2. If you own domain names, put extra security on them
3. Do not use public computers, and if you do, make sure that you have logged out of your e-mail and other accounts, and check them for anomalies
4. Be sure to make your passwords complicated, using numbers as well as upper and lower-case letters
5. Change your passwords frequently
6. Do not open links in your e-mail if you are not sure where or who they came from
7. Do not visit shady websites

The most important thing that you can do is be vigilant and not visit shady-looking websites. However, Airey did all of these things and was still hacked and had his time and money stolen.

If anyone has any experience with this sort of thing which can help Mr. Airey, please visit his site and e-mail him with any helpful suggestions. Spread this link around to your friends and make this sort of incident more widely known. Additionally, for G-mail users, e-mail your concern about this problem to Google.

I never really understood what that meant until now.

I spent the weekend in Cairo again, this time attempting to sort out some Arabic lessons for next semester, sort out an apartment and see my friends off back to the U-S-of-A. Everything worked out, it seems.

My friends made it off alright, at least as far as I knew. I left a few hours before they were actually off to the airport because I had to catch the last train back to Alexandria. Their flights, complicated by the presence of their two enormous dogs, left at about five o’clock in the morning.

One of the myriad things that had to be accomplished before they left was to repair minor damage to a couch, perpetrated by their giant, ahem, boxer-mix Cha-Cha.

Cha-Cha is a sweetheart but is unaware of her size and power. She will readily bowl over anyone coming through the door in her efforts to greet you. It is no wonder that jumping up onto the couch meant tearing the couch to pieces with her massive feet.

So, Stacey and I set out to find what seemed like easy prey: needles and thread. This was not to be.

We first went to Carrefour, the sort of giant French WalMart, figuring that if anyplace would have a needle, it would be them. At the time this made sense: Carrefour has everything. Rows and rows and stacks and stacks of everything.

We engaged a rather lovely cabbie and set off. It was dark and driving on the Ring Road was a treat. You can see the whole city laid across the Nile at parts. It is a nice relaxing highway drive.

When we got to Carrefour, the cabbie agreed to wait for us, which was very kind of him. The cabbies that hang out around these places are vultures and will readily try to screw you out of cash, even though you know better. So, that sorted out, off we set into the gaping maw of globalization to search for a needle.

In the mean time, we had learned that the word for needle was ibra. Having never had any need for an ibra here, we wouldn’t have known that. This is learning, baby. Vocabulary acquisition in action.

The Carrefour was rammed with people. I couldn’t tell why, exactly, but judging from the mob around the Christmas decorations—oh yes—it appeared that the Copts had come out en masse to stock up for the impending holiday. We asked the first guy looked like he worked there if he knew where we could find an ibra. He directed us to walk all the way across the store, and then ask someone there.

I made a crack to Stacey about redefining the meaning of “finding a needle in a haystack.” She grinned.

A we walked, I thought that I had remembered seeing sewing needles near the shoe-polish in the Carrefour in Alexandria. I suggested that this might be where he was sending us. They were not there, but Stace needed shoe-polish. We asked someone near our new location if she knew where we might find an ibra. She said she didn’t know, but asked three guys nearby.

One guy said that they didn’t have any ibra. “Mafeesh,” he smiled. Another said he didn’t know. The third said that if they did have them, then they would be on the other side of the store.

Right.

So, off we went again. We asked every person we saw where the ibra might be, and receiving various answers of “Mafeesh” and somewhere other than where we were—which we swiftly learned to translate as “either we don’t have what you need or I don’t know where it is, but I will tell you something that I think will make you happy so that you won’t give me that disappointed look that breaks my heart because my only desire in this world is to make a foreigner smile at this moment.” After completely exhausting all possibilities, we decided to leave and look to see if there was an upholstery shop in the mall. I had remembered seeing on in the Carrefour mall in Alex, so it was worth a shot.

As we walked, we saw a pharmacy, and I mused, longingly about how if we were in the States, that would be the place that we would find everything we needed and more. As I said this, Stacey said that she was going to give it a try, what could she lose.

She marched up and asked the clerk if he had any ibra. I was drawn to the gel insoles after having walked back and forth across Carrefour several hundred times, and missed most of the conversation. I did catch: “Blah blah blah blah mustashfa. Blah blah mustashfa blah blah.”

We walked away, and I asked Stacey why the guy was talking about a mustashfa. We needed a seamstress not a doctor. Then it dawned on me:

We had walked into a pharmacy where they sell medical supplies and asked for needles. He thought that we wanted hypodermic needles.

Sigh.

We left the Carrefour and told our Cabbie, Mustafa, about our woes. He indicated that he understood, saying that Carrefour had everything. Everything but ibra. He said that he would take us to the Omar Effendi, a store, in Mohandiseen. They would have ibra there.

On our way back to Mohandiseen, the cabbie stopped suddenly, saying that he would be right back. This was an odd move, but “maybe he had to pee,” I suggested to Stacey. “Like that guy?” she said, pointing out the window of the cab at a guy taking a leak on a wall adjacent to the street.

We shortly figured out that he had gone to find us some ibra. It seemed that he knew a place where one might procure ibra. After he had been away for what seemed like an excessive amount of time, we perhaps thought that he had gone to his mother’s house or something to nick one off her.

Stacey mused at some point that this was very sweet of him, but that if he came back with needles and no thread, she would strangle him to death. I cautioned that this was very likely, as we had only indicated a need for ibra and not thread. We didn’t know the word for thread anyway.

He came back with the needles and no thread. Bless him.

Sigh.

We got back to Mohandiseen, indicating that we still wanted to go to Omar Effendi. Mustafa didn’t seem to know where it was, so at one point we just got out. Stacey asked the first woman with children if she knew where the Omar Effendi was. She gave us directions to a different store and went on her way. We gave up for the evening and had a drink.

Sunday

It was critical that we get needles on Sunday and fix the couch. Their flight left late, late that night and this had to be done before then so that the landlord didn’t freak out. Stacey and I went out in search of needles once again.

This time, we had some information on our side. The dry-cleaning guys downstairs told us that there was a store very near that had all the things needed to sew anything. This and we still had Omar Effendi.

We decided that since no one seemed to know where the Omar Effendi was, we would just get in a cab and have him tell us by taking us there. He told us, after driving away, that Omar Effendi was closed. Permanently. We thanked him and got out, setting off to find the one last store that we had been told about.

Deep breath.

We followed the directions perfectly, but there was no store. We walked up and down the street asking people where we would find an ibra. One man told us two places, both of which turned out, inexplicably, to be lingerie shops. Finally we started hearing the name of a store, Nimroosi. We asked everyone where Nimroosi was and they pointed in various directions.

We went into one shop that had stationary, pens and art supplies just to see if they had ibra. The man at the door pointed us to a counter in the back. We rejoiced until we got to the counter. The girl sitting there begrudgingly looked up from her text-message and asked us what we wanted. We, wild-eyed and gesticulating, explained that we needed ibra. “No,” she said, shaking her finger and clucking her teeth.

Deep breath. Deep breath.

She lead us to the door and pointed at a location down the street and said, “Nimroosi.” We squinted off into the distance and then looked at her. “Nimroosi,” she nodded, smiling.

We had narrowed it down. We had bounced back and forth down the street like errant ping-pong balls. The reward for our perseverance had now come. We walked back the way we had come from and saw nothing. Upon asking someone standing on the street, we were directed across a side street.

I looked and noticed a shop that was closed because there were workers re-tiling the entrance. I paused, looking up. “Nimroosi,” the sign beamed down at me.

The store was closed.

I thought that I was going to have a heart-attack. I thought Stacey was going to lift off. She gently explained to a gaggle of workers that she absolutely had to have a needle and thread. They said it was not possible. I walked away toward the glass and looked in desperately at the stacks of needles and spools of thread lining the display cases.

A fat-cat, gangster looking dude took pity on Stacey and shouted something down the hallway and a bunch of needles were brought out. Frigging hallelujah. I suggested thread colors.

We handed him ten ginay and were on our way. I relished in the opportunity to stitch up the seams of a sofa like I never though I could. It was sheers bliss.

That dread that I feel about flying to the Middle East has nothing to do with fear of flying

Well, I have two weeks until take-off. On my birthday I will experience the joy of flying and sitting in airports for 20 hours. I complain now, but I am very excited about the trip. What I am not excited about is that the airlines that I am flying keep changing details. I have had one leg of my departure flight changed twice and two legs of my planned return flight changed. Originially, I was to leave at 8:00pm, now I leave at 7:10. Originally I was supposed to depart from Alexandria on the return next spring, now I depart from Cairo—which complicates things greatly, I’ll explain later.

What I can’t figure out is why there haven’t been revolts on planes and in airports based on poor service and bad scheduling. I know that airfare hasn’t really increased over the past 20 years, but that doesn’t mean that the service associated with flying should be totally left by the wayside. I am not talking about in-flight cocktails or pillows or that stuff—though, wouldn’t it be nice to have an included-in-the-price bourbon on an overseas, overnight flight that you just shelled out $1500 for? No. I am talking about keeping the scheduled departure rather than changing it twelve times between booking and take-off or completely canceling the flight entirely.

Part of me believes that this is another example of the cellular phone’s destructive power. The cell phone destroyed the plan. Do you remember when we used to make plans, say “Let’s meet Friday night at 8:30 at the corner bar,” and then actually meet at the agreed time and place? I do. We don’t do that anymore, though. Now we will say, “Hey do you want to get together on Friday night?” and you will hear in response, “Sure, I will call you.” This is really a kind way of saying, “I will hang out with you, if I don’t have anything better to do.”

Airlines are now doing the same thing to us. We are saying, “Hey, I want to fly to Paris on Thursday,” and the major American carriers are saying, “We will take your money for that, and perhaps we will leave at the specified time, but maybe not. Oh yeah, also, you might not have a flight because we may have sold your seat to someone who paid five times as much for it. We’ll call you.” Some people believe that the little phone messages reminding us of our flight times, terminals, and departure gates, delays, changes, and cancellations are a valiant effort on the part of airlines to help us to deal with the harrowing experience of traveling. I say that they are a non-solution, a band-aid that falls off in the pool, or bullshit. If airlines really want to win their customers back, I suggest opening a bottle and proposing a toast to free drinks in the air. At least that way we might not remember why we were so frustrated before we finally got on the plane.

See you next time. I’ll call you.

Again, for those of you who actually read this, of which there are five, I apologize for my recent month-long hiatus. I have been a bit busy, though not gainfully, necessarily.

Recently my dear friend, John Tobey, and I decided to start a design firm. We will be conducting business primarily on the internet as we will be in wildly disparate locations very soon. Tobey does graphic design and sound engineering and is a prodigy when it comes to both of them. His work is superb. I do graphic design and web design, though I will make no claims as to my own proficiency specifically, I think that I do a decent job of them. You can find our online faces at johnmedia.net. I think that we will at least have a very good time working for ourselves, and possibly even make some money at it.

———-

My laptop ate itself—mostly my doing—a few weeks ago. I had attempted to do a clean install of the OS and my optical drive failed in the process, successfully murdering my laptop, leaving it with an unformatted disk and only a BIOS. I managed to get a Linux kernel and a bootloader on with a network boot and had little success after that. Then my dad found a new optical drive for me and I was able to reload the Windows install that was on it. After that I partitioned up the disk and placed an Ubuntu Linux install on a second partition, which I am actually using right now.

It is brilliant. It runs better than the windows—it is less resource intensive—and it has effectively allowed me to use Ubuntu—which I have grown to really enjoy using on my desktop—anywhere I want. It is like turning my five-years-old Sony notebook into a totally different machine. I suggest trying it, but it is not without obstacles an pitfalls. Installing Linux—especially in a dual-boot environment—is not the easiest thing in the world. However, after a little reading, I think that anyone would be able to do it.

If you are interested in learning about Ubuntu, I would suggest visiting their website: www.ubuntu.com. There was a recent article about Ubuntu in The Economist Magazine which is worth reading. This article is what got me interested in Ubuntu in the first place. I had been playing around with Fedora Core, but didn’t really like it.

Ubuntu ended up being immensely more usable and intuitive, though not without a need for little tricks and tweaks to get everything up and running. Specifically, Ubuntu still has an issue with wireless networking. I tried several cards with different chipsets before settling on a Linksys 802.11g card with a Broadcom chipset. With the bcm43xx-fwcutter package, it is pretty easy to install Broadcom-based wireless cards by extracting the firmware from freely-available drivers.

If you are interested in having an Ubuntu laptop, I would suggest trying it first from the live CD, and then if you like it, have someone help you install it so that you don’t accidentally delete the Windows install from your notebook. I haven used my Windows since I have had Ubuntu, but it is nice, when in transition, to have the option.

Perhaps John Media will also perform Linux installs on people’s computers for them. I could do that. Though, not from September until next April, as I will be in Egypt. I imagine that having someone ship their laptop to Egypt to install a different OS would be more of a pain-in-the-ass than it is worth.

———-

That brings me to my next trick. I am getting ready to move to Egypt for nine months. This should be interesting. I will be studying Arabic at Alexandria University while writing my master’s thesis. I will also be doing a bit of design work via the internet. Thankfully, they have fast internet in Egypt, otherwise I would be SOL. Much of my research data is housed online, and, though I have it backed up and will be taking it with me, it is nice to know that I will be able to get the data again if I need it.

I will also still maintain this site while away. I will use it as a way to communicate en masse with friends and family. I figure that it will be easier than sending mass-mails and that kind of thing. It would also be entirely impossible for me to e-mail and write and call everyone I know. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a jerk, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. This site is pretty neat. You can e-mail me from it. You can sign up for e-mail subscriptions to the blog, if you would rather have the posts e-mailed to you. You will be able to view my CV and portfolio, and, when I have to time to start working on this, you will be able to read sections of my thesis and other papers that I have written. Not to mention, I am attempting to place pictures on the site right now. That will be neat.

It is like a portal to… me. I feel like it will make it easier for me to deal with sending applications and papers and whatever else if my CV and information is all available at a central location. We’ll see how it works.