Back to Sports, Ballin’ again!

Finally got myself geared up ready to shoot some hoops!

I kind of gave up on Basketball in the last 5 years of my life, I can’t believe I have. Basketball was the game I used to live all day long in my teens. Man, when I remember how long I could keep on playing and how much I used to wait to watch NBA games. Not forgetting streeballs and the tornouments. 2 months ago, around November 2005, I got to find my old shorts and jursies well, not that I found them but accidently I found myself getting them all out of an old bag.

It felt as if I was getting in touch with an ol’ friend. It really felt that way. Man I feel I’m really getting so grumpy and old, I hate this feeling okay, 19 days from now I’ll be 25 am I that old yet?

If you ever loved a sport, get it back

I really didn’t know that ballin’ again would get me fresher. It got me some colors back into my vision. I suddenly feel a little lighter and feel kindda’ go go.

Okay, my first day at basketball didn’t go well since I couldn’t get my shots right and let’s not talk about my stamina. The feel of being at a court in itself is a type of change in scenes we see. What do we see in morning life? Offices, chairs, cold people, and some more chairs, ah and a whole lot of computer screens.

The fact that Basketball is a team-game and you have to be fit to play is kind of challenging but, after a month I started getting some brain cells functioning the way they used to. Team work is cool. The diversity of ages and nationalities that play with you is cool too.

I don’t know why I’m writing this entry. Why am I? I guess I just love this game and I gotta’ get back to it.

Word to you, never stop a sport even if your time-slots are all busy.

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My Nano is so confused!

I got myself an iPod Nano after a very depressing day as a self treat trying to chear myself up. It really is something I imagined it to be the slimness and the slickness, the touch and the whole feel of rolling the controller (am I talkin’ about a girl? Man!). It worked like a charm with my iMac, but then when I connected it to my Windows laptop iTunes didn’t recognise it and in a very weired way Windows said I have to format the iPod.

Windows is not blamed this time!

I started thinking why would the same software that works on Mac couldn’t perform as well on Windows. Is it the Windows thingy again? I guess not. Apple please! iTunes made my PC crash 3 times while downloading music to iPod. It aint’ no Windows issue, I’m sure of that at least.

One more weired thing is the fact that iTunes on Mac works really hand-in-hand with iPod and it actualy worked without me having to install any iPod software, not even the CD that came with it whilst on Windows I have to install an iPod software that integrates with iTunes. Weired combo, I can’t reason this whole thing.

Gotta get the groove on anyways

Well, as an end-user I’m gonna’ stop right where it is and try to listen to my tunes instead of trying to confuse myself the way my iPod is. So I’m listening to Alicia Keys’s latest Unpluged . Take a chance, take a break, have that album loaded and listen to it loud and high, I love it.

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Managing knowledge

It’s feeling right. At Login we’re going a little bit out of the stealth mode and very soon we will be publicly available and doing effective marketing. As much as it is exciting it causes me sleepless nights scared and backing up myself and the team against any failure we, as a team could face. That’s only the dark side of it!

On the bright side, as everything calms down again after a long timely preperations and resolving conflicts here and there, Login is to be public. Resources are to increase, well the work load is already crazy. So this gets me to this point which I keep biting my nails and thinking, alright, how are we going to effectively manage the knowledge?

Since we used to work from different places in the past we started all our conversations on the phone and then moved it to e-mails for keeping records. Back then we didnt really have the need for a Project managment software but gave it a shot. We used dotProject to sync the knowledge and centeralize the tasksheets and timings. But again it was more than what we needed then.

InfoPath to rescue

Well, after I got me a little nice IBM T23 laptop I installed Microsoft Office 2003 and guess what? It comes with InfoPath. It’s kind of a Form designer but with unlimited extensibility. Incredibly easy to use and useful! Apart from all the neat and useful templates that come with it it actualy gives you the ability to easily create any kind of Form that you need, wether you need to print the Form after filling it or e-mail it or even post it to web-service of your choice. It just works! At least for now that I’m excited about it. I’ll start doing some more work on it and will see if it is the right one. It exports data to Excel too!

So, this could make it easy to manage it all on paper as described and experienced by Blue Flavor .

What’s happening? Are we going back to paper again?

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A fresh-punch called WWW.COM!

Last night, well 6 hours ago me and a freind passed by a little joint to get something to freshen up. We stopped by and got the menu, and I’m shockingly loughing loud at a punch called WWW.COM. I just couldn’t hold myself and ordered it rightaway. You just gotta try it out! That’s all I’m gonna say.

Problem is, I didn’t find no tags in it

It was kind of a Faloode fibers in the bottom covered by a Vanilla cone and pieces of fresh Pinapple, Mango, and Apple and covered by Mango juice.

If you’re in Dubai or passing by, just head on to Abu-Hail area and find Al-Mubasher cafeteria. They’ve got it. The funny part is they even had a mix called Internet.

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Open journalism and casual reality flow

We all are witnessing how blogs and open spaces are evolving from text to audio and even video. Some countries block sites and blogs and control the content received/read by the public.

A decade ago when WWW was released and the public put their hands on it and started embracing it, no one had such a vision that the web weaved today. Forgetting all the new terminologies and the buzzwords associated with the new born technologies and the new ways of exchanging data/information and most importantly Content Syndication and castings; where are we heading?

Web-based and electronic journalism

Is it journalism? Let’s call it information sharing. Blogs were the start some 5 years ago. People started sharing ideas, experiences and actualy formed a place to freestyle on demand. Okay that was all personal.

Blogs grouping and collective open journalism

Now this is journalism. Journalism where sources are blogs and journalists are actualy the blogers. Some blogers take their space as a place to write and put some of what’s on their chest on some web-form and press post. Many smart people turned it all to business and some really handfull guys made it to the fame.

So what’s really going on?

I read in many places that someday Newspapers and around-the-hour news programs will stop at TV stations. How relevant is that to say? I guess I fear that day. I’ll fear it when some software giant like Microsoft or Google or even Yahoo! take control of information-flow and the information super high way.

So everyone’s a journalist and everyone is saying his say, how much of pollution are we going to handle on the blogosphore?

Before writing this post I had this list of questions:
* What happens when advertisers inject their ads in our RSS subscriptions?
* RSS spaming? how much of spam and hijacking is possible since it is a new form of informaiton exchange?
* Agregators, are they going to use all the data they gather for Marketing Engineering and bahvioral Advertising? What’s going to happen now that everything is gon on WWW?
* Should I go on with the Arabic RSS agregator or just drop it off because some people did make it before? is it late yet?
* How long is going to get the list of the subscriptions that we have? Taging is okay, searching is neat, but then again archiving even our RSS listings? or Bloglines is just doing the right thing?
* Who to read and who not to, since it is really so many good blogs our there to watch?

You think services such as Newvine or Blog networks such as 9Rules and Itoot are the next free CNN or BBC? or are they just there for casual and entertaining and reading pleasure? These are my concern right now and can’t make out where is this whole thing leading to. Is it leading to direct and people-based journalism or is it just another layer in the whole information flow medium?

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To Web2.0 or not to Web2.0

You’re talented, surrounded by technologists and designers. All are forward thinkers and aware of the Web2.0 hype and it’s services. So should you just start a Web2.0 company and hope you’ll get the big bite? Well, it’s different in our world in this region (Middle East) but do able!

The story starts like this. AJaX is banging, new technologies and techniques have arrived to the market. The tradition of having everything on the web is at its best and running fast. Web based office applications and software are rising. But hey, did you hear some people saying Web2.0 is dead? Well, in all the cases a shiny logo, and a vector based website with big fonts and big form input-textfields wont get you there would it?

Are you going to make a service that makes someone life’s easier? Or are you going to make some web-app to say hey, we made it too and pollute the web and the blogosphore?

The rule of thumb: Never make a “yet another something”

• What are you adding to the list of the apps available?
• Who is going to benefit from it?
• The bottom line, is it rewarding at least for the hours of work?

These and more would be questions I’d ask myself if I ever wanted to start a service with colleages.

How much can we afford?

The biggest problem with starting a Web2.0 service in this region would be the internet connections and the ISP. Specially for hosting.

Suppose your application makes it and you get it to your users, who’ll pay the expenses of your lease lines and static IPs? In case you needed a mirror or a web-chain or load-balancing how are you going to acheive it with your managed hosting? Since it is really expensive. And I mean it! It’s expensive!

When I think about it it just makes me sick imagining the load-balanced server farm and database slaving and the whole session sharing and a whole bunch of big issues with high load applications. It just fries my mind when I go into it’s details. Many times me and my colleage Mohd Jassim discussed ideas and new services that would be practical and innovative, but then again ending the happy story with the limitations of our internet facilities. Dynamic IPs and expensive bandwidth for business use.

Well, to conclude I want to add that Web2.0 apps are no more Web2.0 apps. They’re solutions that are no more named/tagged under Web2.0, not exactly put like that

So to Web2.0 or not to Web2.0 in Emirates?

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