Sunday, April 30, 2006

1%

When the UAE gives only 1% of it's money to education, it's no wonder that public universities and colleges highly emphasize on English language development skills. Men and women alike are wasting precious years of their lives, all in order to be able to utter one comprehendable sentence in English, while they should be spending them studying in order to go out and work sooner. Because our public schools are not performing to international standards, children are not being prepared for higher education. About a third of the budget used for spending on higher education is being used on teaching students the skills that they should've already learnt at school.

I'd say that out of the one percent that the UAE is spending on education, three quarters of that one percent, or 0.75%, is being spent on higher education, while the smart thing to do would be to spend more money on schools rather than higher education. The UAE has many high school dropouts.

Is one percent really enough? Countries like Brazil and Pakistan spend around 3% on education. I think that the Ministry of Education should get more than a measly one percent (even if it did mean more than 5 billion dirhams in 2003)



p.s
I realize that this post has almost no sources to back up the claims, and I hate posting something without proof to back it up, but I think it's safe to say that I'm pretty sure of my claims...

Friday, April 28, 2006

Fall Off

I have a demented sense of humor, I enjoy laughing at the expense of someone else's humiliation, but you do too. If you want to challenge me:

Watch this movie


p.s
I know I haven't been posting much, I've had quite of a rollercoaster ride lately. You'll - inshAllah - be seeing more of me

Monday, April 17, 2006

Warchalking

Free and open Wi-Fi networks are out there. The art is in finding them, then chalking a mark on a street.

It's pretty common to find unsecure wireless networks if you're living in an apartment, thanks to the generous neighbors who haven't locked their wireless networks or made them secure. Anyone who's lucky enough to find them gets a piece of chalk and then marks sidewalks, walls or poles with symbols based on an old sign language. Anyone who understands these symbols then knows that there's an unsecure wireless network that can be used around that area. Laptops and notebooks are charged, then brought to that area for free internet access.

The history of Warchalking goes as follows:

In 2002, London-based IT consultant Matt "Blackbelt" Jones came up with an idea for Wi-Fi users to help each other get online. Jones proposed marking sidewalks, walls, or telephone poles where networks could be found with a set of chalk-mark symbols based on the old sign language that hobos used to alert one another to food, shelter, or potential trouble during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Jones dubbed this practice "warchalking," a pun on "wardialing," introduced in the 1983 movie Wargames, in which a young hacker has his computer automatically dial all the phone numbers in the area looking for other computers. Geeks termed the practice "wardialing." Add that familiar erasable writing technology and you wind up with "warchalking." Here are the universally accepted trio of symbols for warchalking:


Apparently, the most common used symbol is the one to the left. It reminds me of the Chanel logo with the opposing brackets. The ones to the right mean or symbolize closed networks. That means that they're closed access and no one knows how to access them. The one with the W in the middle means that you need a WEP or WPA key.

You'll find a few marks here and there in the big cosmopolitan cities such as London or New York, but most of them were made by the business owners themselves in order to attract passers-by by offering free internet access.

It's funny how some people would go to extreme extents for the sake of free internet access. A friend of mine told me that her driver would drive to Beach Center where there's an internet place for kids, which has a lot of games in there. The place is filled with 10-year-olds who would get bored after using the computer for 10 minutes that they'd just leave it. He'd go there and wait for a kid to get bored so that he could sit after the kid who left the computer and use the internet for free for almost an hour.
That's smart, funny too.

I wonder what sort of new trend will come along after the wireless craze fades out.

For more information on chalking visit this link. Read the story that BBC did on warchalking here.

Breaking the Chains:

"The days of the digital watch are numbered."
Tom Stoppard

Thursday, April 13, 2006

ماشي الحال

ماشي الحال غصب عني بعد يمشي
ضيقة بال وأشيل الهم على رمشي
* * *
حقيقة صعبة أحوالي ولا لي بهالزمن غالي
انا تعبان من نفسي واللي حولي ما يبالي
* * *
مابه خط للرجعة تعبت وفاضت الدمعة
ألا يا من يشيل الهم ويترك للهنى ربعه

I need the person I miss.
I need to leave the place that I'm in, go somewhere else.
I need to finish up.
I need to move on.
I need to stop feeling the way that I'm feeling right now.
Most importantly, I need to know how to get everything that I need.

I need many things... But who's to say that I'll ever get them?

In the end, one thing makes me go on... Particularly this sentence that's been ringing in my ears the past few days, maybe because I felt that it spoke to me, "After every storm, there comes a rainbow."


Breaking the Chains:

"Happiness is a state of mind."
Seraph

"Take my advice, it's not like I ever use it!"
Seraph