Shreef in Life [ Shreef.com ]

I really miss how I used to blog here before joining the army. every vacation I come and find that allot of things changed, people got married, or traveled to another country. new technologies and buzz words appear and others disappear. this makes me feel like I'm living in a cave far away. anyway, there still just another 6 months till I finish my military service, I wish they will go fast and harmless.

the most annoying thing is the time it takes to travel from Alexandria to El-Salloum, it takes from 14 to18 hours using the military train and military buses. this is enough to make anybody hate the idea of going home that way, especially if that person is living in one of uper egypt's cities, it will take him 2 days to reach home.

Anyway, I always try to spend my vacation in useful things like reading technical blog posts, reading news and maybe attending offline technical events if possible. In a previouse vacation I was able to attend DotNetWork.org's 7th event in Cairo.

this days you will find me moving from website to another. the unclosable tabs in my browser are Gmail , Google reader and Facebook. myabe this vacation I got more interest in StackOverflow.com because of its high quality. I like how this website is self managed by its users. the idea it self is so old and there is allot of websites provide the same service, but this didn't stop the creators of the website from building the same idea again but with new features and concepts. that made this website better than the other old ones.

This made me think about focusing more on the old websites that we got used to, and find these websites weaknesses that can help in creating other better websites that serves the new needs of the users.  Innovation isn't always about building new things, it can also be about looking at the old things from another way and trying to make it better for people.

Most of the big websites now are alternatives for an old websites that provided the same service, but for some reason it lost its shine. websites like facebook , flickr and Gmail are all not new ideas, but just a cleaned and improved versions of old websites.

From my first days as a computer user, I always had the dream of building a user centric website. I wish someday -isA- I will start my own company that builds websites for the normal users. I don't have interset in the creation of business centrec software, I know how profitable it is, but this isn't the thing that I will love to spend the rest of my live time doing. maybe I did it and I will do it as an emplyee in software companies, but this will be for gaining experience and saving money for my own future projects - isA-.

check xkcd.com & geekculture.com for more.

Do you remember me?I

Actually it's not my fault. they give me short vacation for each month or more I spend in the desert. put yourself in my shoes, when you live in a far isolated place where you don't have time to watch the news or have any way to know what happens in the world, what will you be able to blog about. I have nothing to say as I know nothing.

I just wanted to say hi again and tell you that I'm still a life. It's good that facebook, twitter, Google reader help me know what happened to my friends and what's the new technologies.

~5 months left since I joined the army. what changed?? I feel somewhat more athletic and gained experience in working with a wide range of personality types .. from the smartest to the dumbest. my average number of sleeping hours is 6 to 7 hours in the normal days. it can be 4 to 5 hours only if I have to do night guarding service. I learned to do every thing by myself without help from others. the lack for tools doesn't allow us to not finish the work. living in a tough environment is very hard, but the results of this experience makes you better. I still have 15 months coming before I finish my mandatory military service and I hope that I 'll keep surviving.

On the other hand, my social life is collapsing. whenever I come for vacation, I spend that time home without going out. I don't know the news of my friends. maybe the only thing that keeps me updated about what happens in the outside world whenever I return is my RSS reader, twitter ,and FaceBook. in the army, I like the fact that I'm working on a very expensive and powerful machine, but it's not a computer. I'm worried about how low my programming experience and level 'll go down after a year from now. all what I'm able to do now is taking programming books with me and coding on papers, and this is what I was doing through the previous months.

I 'll be here till friday, then I 'll go in a 12 hours travel again to the military base. so bad that I won't be able to attend the Agile Egypt day, but I hope that my next vacation timing 'll allow me to attend EDC 2008 (Egypt Developers Conference). Mohamed Meligy said that this year it will be in mid April.

this days I feel happy as I got some good news about some friends:
the 1st is that Mohamed Hossam's marriage is today.
the 2nd is that Mohamed Hossam 'll join the work force at Microsoft, he 'll join the live.com team.
the other thing is Tarik Ibrahim's post about the waited baby :)
I wanna congratulate them and wish them luck and happiness in their lives.

I know that some friends were waiting to catch me on msn messenger for a chat, but I'm sorry as I have problem with my windows OS that needs some time to investigate it. I didn't want to lose some of my precious vacation time, so I moved to my Ubuntu OS. if you want, you can catch me on twitter or facebook only as I don't like Pidgin that much, I just us it for IRC and Japper.

I know, it's a very late post. but I didn't have chance to write it earlier because of many reasons that you won't care to know about.
now, I want to remember what I did in 2007.

- contributed to ZendFramework (my 1st open source contribution) .
- joined another company .
- wrote a post about something stupid I found in careermideast.com , but I want to thank them now as they fixed this problem.
 (ps: days ago I saw the same problem with mazika.com , I wish they can fix it too ) .
- started being an active IRC user, specially on freenode.net  #phpc .
- joined the SK DemoDay 2
- become a 20 years old guy.
- joined the Egyptian Army to start my mandatory military service.

In 2008 I wish to (isA) :
- be a better programmer.
- start my CS studies.
- get back to playing soccer.
- gain more confidence and training to give public speeches better.
- restudy Deutsch