za3tar

I am almost halfway through my summer internship in this new town. One thing that I am glad about is that there is an Arabic/Middle-Eastern street in town with a bunch of Arabic shops, turkish restaurants, and some coffee-shops, something I deeply miss in my collegetown.

I’ve been diligent to eat my fair share (and a bit more) of falafel, shawirma, kifta, and your other normal Arabic restaurant food. Perhaps I am preparing for the upcoming drought I’ll experience when the internship ends and I’m back at my small isolated campus.

Today after going to the gym (yes I am surprised too) I went for my daily dose of falafel at a nice Turkish restaurant. On my way back I noticed a cafe called “rotana” with the smell of m3assel spilling out of the door seams. I immediately thought “trix & tarneeb”, something I haven’t had properly for almost two years now.

I walked inside and the owner recognized I was new. He insisted to treat me to a cup of tea even though it was late and mentioned I had to leave. Typical Arab :-). We were 3 Arab men; sitting in an Arabic coffee-shop with argeeleh, tea, cocktails, and cards served, a tv stood in the corner and nobody was lokng at it. The talk undoubtedly turned into politics even though we just met. Ahh how I missed hanging out with the guys in the 2ahawee. I haven’t had the chance to play tarneeb yet, there was no fourth! But I am happy, maybe because it reminds me of back home.

For a while now, Google Maps has been displaying the names of towns and cities in the countries’ local languages when you pan over them. So for example, when you go over Japan, you’ll see the name of towns in Japanese with English subtext. This is similar for European and Arabian countries.

Interestingly enough however, Israel-Palestine has been mostly blank with only English written there. That made me curious because Google, like many other tech companies, tries to remain neutral when it comes to international political issues, and i wanted to see how they handle this one. So i kept on checking back often.

Today I noticed that they started to display Hebrew names in pre-1967 areas (which is politically safe). Interestingly however, the Hebrew words only appear when you are not zoomed in to see the individual city names.

Anyway, what is really funny is that they have hugely misspelled the Arabic name of Madaba. Here is a screenshot below:

Btw, I couldn’t find a link to report this mistranslation, otherwise i would have reported it.

… this will really brighten your day (at least it did for me).

The video picture quality is not good, but that is not important.

Figaro … Figaro … Figaro …

This is indeed rediculous. Not only that, but i also hate it when services require you to sign up with a username & password even if you just want to try that service for a brief time. Too many user accounts online, ultimately you run out of memorizable unique passwords, and sharing passwords or using a service-dependent naming scheme is not wise. Check out this website for a neat tool btw.

In these days (and specially if the whole “cloud-as-a-service” model is to become successful, oh and it will) we should have a concept of a single global account, or a managable federation of accounts that form a global account, that would allow people to “turn on” services on the web to try them out (or use them), and then “turn them off”.

I know about openID, but having a single account (be it from Google or Microsoft or Yahoo) to log in to many places is too “big-brothery” for my taste. Plus, not all online services allow users to use openID, even though they really should.

It is bollocks! Bollocks I tells ya! *shaking his fist*

At first she was cute and fun to hang around with. Then as i got to know her i realized that woman had only two modes: off and crazy. The latter was more prominent than the former. I have had enough. My problem is that i can’t just switch off, i tend to overthink it. I hate to impose, so i keep my thoughts to myself, and just try to understand why would a person behave in her way.

But now i’ve decided. Enough is enough. I must disengage. Let the demons clear out of my head. Let me sleep the night again.