Things have changed
Writing from my office, obsessively listening to a Bob Dylan song.
A worried man with a worried mind
No one in front of me and nothing behind
There’s a woman on my lap and she’s drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes
I’m looking up into the sapphire tinted skies
I’m well dressed, waiting on the last train
Open Letter to President Mohamed Morsi from Maryam Al-Khawaja
Johannesburg, August 27, 2012
I write you in my capacity of The Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) Acting President, to express my deep disappointment and to protest the unlawful and hostile treatment I was subjected to at Cairo’s International Airport on Sunday, August 16, 2012 by the Egyptian security forces.
I had a 7-hour layover in Cairo and was going to enter the country to see Egyptian friends before boarding my connecting flight to South Africa scheduled on the same day. I was granted an entry approval at the airport. Shortly thereafter, I was called back and asked to wait. Then, my passport and travel documents were taken by the police. I was informed afterwards that I will not be allowed into the country due to “top secret reasons.”
A man of words and not of deeds
A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds
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And when I try to get through, on the telephone to you, there’ll be nobody home.
Friends tell me why don’t I blog that much, specially when they listen to some of my stories or things I might call adventures. I don’t really know why, sometimes I feel like I’m just a bubble. A bubble with a very long life time, waiting for some random moment to burst to get out all the memories, to talk. That near-bursting moment comes a lot, but, veeery veeery rarely that it bursts. When it does, either I’m with the wrong person or with just no person at all.
I’m going to the streets in the Jan25
Book review: The Promised Land by Grace Ogot
The Promised Land by Grace Ogot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My Global Voices friend, Laila, who lives in Kenya, gave me this book during her visit to Egypt. It hit me deeply how can Kenya and Egypt be so similar regarding family ties and traditions, and how local traditions are sometimes considered part of religion, sometimes even overwhelming it. Whenever you read the first chapter you won’t leave it till the end.
I give this book 5/5, I really enjoyed it, and it gave me an idea why Egypt should be explicitly back to her African roots.
Reflections on technology
I just finished watching a Lebanese-Swedish movie, Zozo. It is about a Lebanese boy, with the name Zozo, during the civil war, who gets separated from his family and ends up in Sweden. In the beginning there is this scene where the father is mad at his son for trying to get his mother’s attention while they were following the news about the war on TV, while the boy had just finished crafting a piece of wood and wanted to show it to his mother.
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Twitter translations priorities
With all due respect to western European languages, why do twitter ignore a language like Arabic with hundreds of millions of speakers and begin with less-popular western European languages? I applied to be a volunteer translator for Twitter in 2009 and no one answered which is something weird considering Twitter’s efforts to switch to Web interfaces vs API by acquiring the most used twitter clients on all platforms.
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Yahoo Groups violations?
Last week I was added to a Yahoo group on my Gmail, that seemed of a spammy nature, not to mention the action itself is considered spam. I reported the group to Yahoo and this is what I got in reponse:
We appreciate your report of this incident in Yahoo! Groups. We will
investigate your report and take appropriate action as per our Terms of
Service (TOS). For further details about the Yahoo! TOS, you can visit:
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