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For some reason, The School of Athens just popped into my mind and i just can not let it go. It is truly a masterpiece. It is so full of deep references. ….. you have the great Greek philosophers laying left and right, and the center point is a master piece of itself.

You have Plato on the left and, his student, Aristotle on the right. Walking side-by-side giving a complete sense of fellowship. Each of them is holding a book that he has “published”. With their right hands, one gesture is enough to sum up their personalities and beliefs. Plato is pointing up depicting his belief in high pureness, not material/physical things (a mathematician indeed !!). Aristotle, is gesturing the ground depicting his belief in empirical physical data (an engineer ).

Thank you Raphael for this true masterpiece.

P.S. I really was tempted to put the full size of at least one of those two files in this post. I stopped myself in the last minute :-). But i did have the full-sized Plato-Aristotle picture up on my homepage for a while .

Arabic rap is increasing in popularity in the region. According to this wikipedia article, either the group DAM (from the Lod اللد) or MWR (from Acre عكا) where the first in this business. Personally, i am not a big fan of Arabic hiphop yet. However i am getting to like the group Ramllah Underground. Some of their songs have some nice expressive meanings, which is good.

Anyway here is a video clip of Ramallah Underground’s “Nateejeh bala shugol” (result with no work). The video was apparently shot in Jordan (possibly Amman) because you could see the “كلنا الأردن” slogan on top of the door he exits from in the beginning.

Caution: there are a couple (not alot) of blant Arabic swears in the middle. Not a big fan of swearing myself.

I was talking about how i wish i could blog as soon as ideas or events occur to me sometimes. Well this has just occurred to me just moments after writing that post.

Still at work, i had to go use the bathroom. Now they usually don’t maintain the hand soap regularly, and today was no exception. As i was exiting the stall, i noticed a guy just finishing up and drying his hands. Turning back to the sinks, i found out that there was no soap! So, i just said “Screw it!!” and headed outside to the kitchen to get some dish-washing soap … of course the guy did not know that, and i saw him staring at me … “WTF ?! i can’t believe this guy isn’t washing his after using the bathroom!!”. He was gone by the time i brought the dishes soap from the kitchen!

Now i had to fix that, so as i was passing his office on my way back to mine i pretended to be making a phone call to my friend complaining to him that i had to use the kitchen soap yet again. Unfortunately after i finished that bit, i noticed that the guy wasn’t in his office!!! So, here i am touring the office floor searching for him and pretending to be on the phone . Finally, i found him by the copy room, and i passed infront of him doing that bit again (although that wasn’t on my way to he office).

Did he buy into it?? I really doubt that … but there isn’t anything that i can do now. Eh … screw it!

I haven’t posted for a while, although i have had many posts panning out in my mind. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a direct link from one’s brain to his/her blog? … talk about a true brain dump :-).

Anyways, the last period was nice. I got to witness the first (of hopefully many) light rain shower of the season, some really dense fog, and how everybody in Amman magically turns into a good driver on the first droplet of rain…. I was in a taxi ride on the Madeena Street, nobody was speeding or racing, cars were around 10 meters apart instead of the usual 5.2cm distance…. Everything and everybody seemed relaxed, maybe even enjoying the rain.

This last period was hectic too. At a crossroad in my life, i have to make a decision choosing between work and grad school (at least for one semester). Actually, it is a bit more complicated. I know i want to do (/will be doing?) both simultaneously. However i have to choose which gets higher priority in the next 7 months. No decision has been made yet.

On the other hand, i have been busy building a coupe of web applications for work. One of them is a truly revolutionary (web 2.0-type) idea that has quite a great potential (…unfortunately i can’t say more yet). There is also this other just-for-fun website idea that has been in mind for a while now, today i finally decided to act on it. So expect a nice new website really soon .

I guess that’s it for now. I will try to translate some of those mind blog posts into actual text now.

Many thanks to everyone who suggested a good place to buy a frisbee. I was able to find one yesterday night. I will give it a spin and see how does it match up to my beloved old one :-). Who knows, if this works out, we could organize a big game of ultimate or something. No experience necessary