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I am a Linux fan. A quick look at my site will tell you that. So naturally I was pleased when Google announced a new Linux distro (Google’s “Chrome OS”). It is good because it will hopefully encourage more OEMs to write better drivers for their hardware.

What I hated though is how some techies and all techy-wannabes had a spontaneous collective orgasm at the first sight of the news. I mean come on! I think some of the guys at TechCrunch had to go change their pants after they read the announcement. Heck, this guy at the “IT Portal” has already written 5 Reasons To Love Google Chrome OS and the product doesn’t even have a web page yet! I like how he explained “reason #3″:

Google has a blank canvas to work with and doesn’t need to rely on code that is 15 years old, nor does it have to deal with software compatibility issue

Oh really ? Somebody should tell that guy that Linux (what Chrome really is) was first written in 1991 and is thus 18 years old!

Finally, some common sense articles are popping up. I like this one (specially how he catches TechCrunch for calling an OS like Linux a mere “bag of drivers” .. anyone who knows anything about operating systems knows that is not true). This article is also nice.

There are reasonable predictions of what we can expect from Google Chrome OS, and I’ll try to talk more about this later.

P.S: I hate over-hyping. I REALLY REALLY HATE over-hyping. That is why I dislike Apple, they overhype everything, even basic features! In all fairness, Google didn’t overhype Chrome, but many of those “techies” did.

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.

… each of us is insignificant, but we are all important.

-OR-

… we are all insignificant.

You might have the truest message and the most noble cause in the world. But if you don’t present it in an acceptable way to the rest of the world then nobody is going to accept what you are talking about. Worst still, it will most likely negatively affect the cause you are trying to help. You always have to appeal to your audience regardless of the circumstance.

I see this often in Arab-Israeli debates. There is no doubt that we Palestinians have had tremendous injustice bestowed upon us, and we’ve been constantly wronged for the past 60+ years. Yet, Israelis know how to appeal to external/western audiences. There is no magic there, no great conspiracy. Just basic carefully examined messages.

Always know your audience. People in the USA have different mentalities than those in Britain, or France, or Turkey, or Palestine, or Pakistan ..etc. So naturally, what might be a sound argument in one place could be totally useless somewhere else. In Arab-Israeli debates many people immediately jump to issues from the time of the British mandate or 1948. Why ??!! I honestly think this is a bad dialog course. There are far more contemporary immediate problems that we can talk about (and try to resolve). Shouldn’t we try to solve the immediate problems first before tackling the big grand picture problems ?

When talking to people you have to befriend them and think like they do. People are more willing to engage in the viewpoint of somebody who is similar to them rather than somebody who is very different. Never come off too strong. Never be inflexible.

I am often asked questions about the situation in Palestine by Americans. I found it best to start out by telling them the simple most basic things. That is, we don’t like violence. Like them, we too like to live peaceful lives. We like to be able to live, work, visit family, and go about doing our business without hassle. That the vast most Palestinians are not hell-bent on the destruction of Israel but rather want to live normal peaceful lives. Then I tell them how ordinary people who haven’t done anything suffer. How we have more than 500 checkpoints in the West Bank that prevent us from moving around, how Israel imposes city-wide curfews, how people can not move around freely or conduct business freely, how the mobile telephone company struggled with Israel for more than a year just to import a single retransmission tower to meet the increase in demand. I tell them my personal story. People do respond when you tell them about your personal story.

Anyway, this came to mind after seeing what happened in the recent U.N. racism conference. I do not agree with the Iranian president, but he was trying to use Palestine as an excuse for whatever he wants and he was trying to present a case in which, as always, he came off as a nut-job to the west and just managed to hurt the true message of the Palestinian struggle with his idiocy.

For a while i haven’t been having any (or any significant) dreams when i sleep. Maybe it is due to exhaustion or a temporary slump in creativity. But my night dreams are back again, and boy they are better than ever!

Honestly, my last few dreams have been amazing; the view point, the music, the dramatic climactic plot .. they are fairly complex for 2-5 second dreams, and they are a major step up from what i used to dream before. You might think i am exaggerating, but last night’s dream was most definitely a work of art . For example, the beginning of the dream was narrated and was in a yellowish color scheme. The view point was not static, it moved in complicated ways. For instance, at some point i was seeing things from an vantage point hovering in the sky then all of a sudden rushed between incoming heavy traffic (including some vehicles from Red Alert 2). I was seeing things as if i was accelerating between the vehicles going in an opposite direction of them. The only fitting music for that segment would have been Verdi’s Dies Irae Requiem.

I know what you might be thinking, and no i haven’t seen a movie since at least two or three weeks. Nothing super dramatic has been happening in my life .. just the dreams got better

Unfortunately, as all dreams, this one ended before i wanted it too. Don’t you hate it when you’re dreaming and then you get disrupted and you get into a state when you are not dreaming any more but you are not quite awake yet ? Then you try to get back into the dream but it doesn’t work ? Then you try to stimulate your mind by trying to think of a continuation for the dream and it sometimes succeeds and you’re back in and sometimes it doesn’t. Well unfortunately this was one of those times when i couldn’t get back to my dream. Ahhh .. only if there was a way to capture dreams and continue them over multiple nights