For the first time I just listened to a blog post, a podcast, narrated by a dear friend. A warm voice, emotional music, giving me so much nostalgia about so many chances I missed, skills I could have developed, people I could have made friends, places I wanted to be attached to. How I thought of many things so lightly and how I realize now how important they really are.

I'm been a big fan of Youtube autoshare option for a long time now, it saves me all the fuss of sharing Youtube videos to my networks (Mainly Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter). Recently YouTube-Twitter auth just suddently stopped working. I keep re-entering the password and it just returns a 500 error with a warning message: "It appears twitter is not accepting requests". Then I found this: http://bit.ly/eW7dYB Why Google doesn't respond to issues like this? This is NOT the first time Google leaves clients (who do not pay for their services, coughJAIKUcough). Does anyone has a solution for that?

    Wael Ghonim, a fine young Egyptian, who works as a Google executive went missing on January 27, then he was freed yesterday. Here were his first words when he reached home. Afterwards, he appeared on the Egyptian TV channel, DreamTV for a long interview about what happened to him: Part I:   Mona ElShazly: Greetings. I will tell you a short story about what happened Thursday, 27 January, before the bloody Friday 28th. Let me begin with Wednesday. In that Wednesday, we thought that episode to be the last one, for some conditions which some viewers know, or don't know. We were talking about what was happening in…

Firstly, I'd like to give me condolences to the families of the Egyptians who died, I can't say that I apologize because no protester broke anything, all protests were peaceful and out slogan was Peaceful Demonstrations. I want to say please don't make a hero out of me, I'm a person who was sleeping for 12 days. The real heros are those people on the ground, please direct the camera and give the attention to those people. And God willing we will change this country. All the bad (dirty) things in this country should be fixed, and we will fix it. *applause*

Annotated by Max Forte on Diigo, I'm just adjusting it. So when TE Data both filters and rate limits, we have an artificially slow and essentially broken network that discourages use #egypt 9 minutes agoioerror    What is clear is that in practice there is a behavioral impact – connections may fail, users are discouraged, they may be unprotected #egypt 12 minutes ago Is rate limiting an entire connection censorship? I think this is less clear because in theory *the data will eventually* arrive #egypt 11 minutes ago  Is filtering censorship? I think this is unquestionably and obviously true. #egypt 12 minutes ago@eclip5e I refused to answer their questions. about…

Diaspora should be more organized, and the developers should test it from a user point of view. The aspect concept is awesome but I'm really having a hard time adding people. If you are there you can add me here

I wonder why do I waste so many chances on people I used to care for, realizing that I need the courage to have enough force to cut it off and move on. I have to keep reminding myself that those you are care for must also care for you, it is a give and take, you can't be such a fool to give for always (a friend is never a mother), and of course, a selfish person who always take, is never worth it. This should be obvious, but it is amazing how a human being is so blind even with the most powerful eye, even with the best…

Couples are young so they screw up a lot, their families are too old so they try to make their youngster do what they didn't succeed in in their youth.   Sometimes you are so alone, so you go to a big tea party to be more lonely, so you try to get out to get back to yourself. It is like you are the box itself, you can't go in, you can't think out of it. You are stuck. The only solution is to burst yourself to survive.   Sometimes you try to mingle with the right people in the wrong time, sometimes with the wrong people in the…

As a part of Rasha's Good Old Blogging Days, I just miss those days, where the blogs were your own kingdom, before Social Networks came to steal this genuine spirit. People shared their very fine personal details to people they don't even know. Online people knew each other for long, just for the heck of friendship. Looking for truth and warmth they didn't find in the real world. Expressing their views to people who are like-minded, or who are open-minded, or both. Blogging was a place of acceptance, a place they can be free and wild, were they can virtually dance with the whole world watching, a place where all…

So, it has been a while since I joined Global Voices, first as a translator, then author, then Editor for the Arabic Lingua project. I always found the time I spent contributing to Global Voices rewarding, in every way possible. It has been almost 2 years since I was first introduced by Eman AbdelRahman who joined the community previously. She told me about it several times but back then I was satisfied by being only a reader. It was until I found a post of mine referred to by Amira Al Hussaini in one of her updates, I can’t deny I was impressed by being noticed at that time, never…

So today I was denied entry visa to go to Spain. I got a scholarship to attend the Mozilla drumbeat festival 3 weeks ago, taking place in Barcelona, Spain. The festival is taking place from 3 to 5 November. After preparing all the documents according to the consulate website, went to the Spanish consulate in Alexandria after a call for booking an appointment, was kept there for 3 hours waiting for handling the visa application and the papers to the Spanish Consul. Then I called them today to be informed that the visa application is cancelled. Why? The personnel who replied said that he is not authorized to state the…

So, last month I got the Kindle, the second generation one. I’ve been thinking of writing this post since sometime now, but was just too buried in researching about the Kindle and, of course, reading by it. It is an outstanding experience, reading with no painful LCD screens, screens which do not go blind in bright light. You have to turn on the light to read, unlike most (if not all) the rest of standalone readers (oh please don’t mention the iPad, will say why at the end of the post). I was shocked at first that Amazon didn’t ship the Kindle directly to the Middle East, so I got…