Ebn Bessah and me

Tonight, after the closing hours of Starbucks, I found myself studying on the street lights outside the Cafe, so I remembered Ebn Bessah.....
Who is he? All i know about him is the following:
My mother used to tell me about him, she never met the guy either, but her father told her about him. He was the son of Bessah, a woman who used to work as an assistant in my great grandfather's farm in Menyat Saedan, Mansourah.
Ebn Bessah, being a poor kid, but loved to study, used to study on the oven in winter nights and also in hot summer nights, and when he joined the Universtiy in Cairo, as he was such a brilliant guy, he studied on the street lights because he had to save money or actually he had none to spare.

I wonder what was his name and where did he end up?

The Sound of Silence

Paul Simon 1964

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'Neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare
Disturb the sound of silence.

"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls."
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence.

- Paul Simon -
"Wednesday Morning 3A.M.", 1964
To listen to the song: The Sound of Silence (best opened with Winamp)

Viewers discretion is advised!

Did you ever get that weird feeling of you're going to be up all night and lose your mind by the morning, as you know you have along day ahead of you, and you'll not get enough sleep as you have to wake up early and study,then go to work? I had too much coffee today, I guess i shouldn't have had that third cup of coffee, and the fourth cup of tea, especially if it's a starbucks' coffee, and tea!
Now i can't sleep, neither can i study anymore, can't do anything, listening to Bahaa Sultan songs and Samira Saed, just it's very fast, matching the hyper state i am in from coffee.
To make it worse, none of my friends is online, so I am writing!

Why am i writing this?
Honestly, I don't know, may be just killing time until I fall asleep.

But wait, this raises a number of questions,
1- This might sound a little crazy, but what is a blog? what is the meaning ie aim of blogging?

a.Is it a diary?

b.Is it an open forum for opinions?

c.Is it a place to kill time?

d.Is it public-journal/forum on the internet?

2- Should it be organized or spontanouse thoughts?

3- What is the etiquette of weblogging? if there is any?

4- Is the use of foul words eg in Ebles and others inappriopriate?

5- But What and who determines what is appriopriate and what is not?

6- Would it be rated "R" for strong language, with children and sensitive viewers discretion advised?



Oops, did you get disappionted that the title was so attractive but the post had no foul words!
Hard luck! تتعوض

How Powerful is eBlogger?

How can you measure how powerful or let's say influencing a site is? This occurred to me this morning while I was waiting for Wikipedia's page to return after being down, the site gave me a choice of redirecting me to another page "to spend the time" till the page comes back. The page was for traffic ranking and it compared wikipedia.com to slashdot.com, showing how wikipedia was way more used (visited) than slashdot.com.

Wikipepedia is always in Blue and the site to be compared with is in red, if image too smal, click for a larger view.

Wikipedia vs Slahdot


I wanted to try to see Wikipedia versus Google, Oops, Google surely won,



then I tried against Yahoo, still yahoo won,


then I tried against Merriam-Webster Online dictionary, Ahha, Wikipedia won.


Then it occured to me, what about eBlogger, whom do you think won this time?
here is the result:

Wikipedia vs eBlogger




So, how can one have an approximate measure of the site being infleuntial, and read this funny article i also found and sorry for the language!