I just came across this quote by Gandhi, which rang so very true... You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. -- Mohandas Gandhi Now, I'm not going to go on a rant on how some group of people conspired against the Arab world to get them to not read books and thereby destroy our culture; I'm not really in the conspiracy theory mood right now. But what is more important is how true the direct relation between not reading and the destruction of a culture really is; and how it...
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Many of us talk about our priorities in life, how we've given them some thought, how we've figured them all out, and how we know we should act according to those priorities. But in the end of the day, many many of us don't do anything about it, we know what our priorities should be, we know what we care about most in life, but when it comes to our everyday acts in life, they simply don't reflect those priorities at all. Sometimes it takes something very powerful, a shock, to just open our eyes, bring everything into perspective, and...
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Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. ~ Henry Ford...
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What defines a person? A person is what he thinks? Not necessarily, a lot of people think things they don't apply in real life. Plus you don't always know what they really think. A person is what he believes? Even more than the previous point, a lot of people don't really live by what they believe. A person is his religion? Nobody follows their religion with 100% accuracy, and even if they think they do, they more or less follow their own understanding of it, which makes it pretty undefinable. A person is what he says? Ever heard of lying,...
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Just came across this interesting quote by Henry Kissinger in the mid 1970's: "Control the oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control the people." ~ Henry Kissinger Rings very true, even if in a conspiracy theory kind of way, but yet if we look at the Arab world; we control most of the oil in the world, and we produce a lot of the food in the world, and have the potential to produce even more, yet there isn't an area of the world that has less control, even over its own future. What does...
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A thought that has been on my mind these past few days and that I thought I'd finally try to put down in writing, maybe in an attempt to sort out my ideas, and save them for future reference. The thing is that on most of these web services where you have to setup your profile; whether it be a social networking site, a job site, or any other kind of service; and even offline; whether it be a CV, a business card or presentation; you always end up with a one dimensional profile of yourself, just one way of...
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Don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear. For I wear a thousands masks, masks that I'm afraid to take off and none of them is me. Pretending is an art that is second nature with me, but don't be fooled. For God's sake don't be fooled. I give you the impression that I'm secure, that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my name and coolness my game; that the water's calm and I'm in command, and that I need no one. But don't believe...
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Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain. Two statements may be said concerning this individual. One is that he suffers from defects of spontaneity and individuality which may seem to be incurable. At the same time it may be said of him he does not differ...
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The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do. -- Joseph Stalin Couldn't be more true......
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What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. -- Bob Dylan, US singer & songwriter...
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Randomly, out of nowhere, there was a big fat universe sitting around... Randomly, this universe exploded and expanded into its current state... Randomly, solar systems were created in which planets rotated around central stars... Randomly, planet Earth was created with the characteristics we all know today... Randomly, a single cell living entity came into being... Randomly, this single cell evolved into many different, yet independently perfect species... Randomly, these different species kept evolving to their current states today... Randomly, one of these species became the human race... Randomly, every single little organ, with every single tiny detail and every exact...
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It's evaluation period at work, that time of year when tension gets so thick sometimes it could be cut by a knife. It's also the time when a lot of people, depending on whether or not they get a raise or promotion, how much the raise ends up to be, or what that new position is, start thinking about their jobs, and if they should maybe consider moving to some other company. Personally, I think there is a very simple equation to all this, which mainly consists of the balance between job, environment and financial satisfaction. The main questions a...
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Never continue in a job you don't enjoy. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined. -- Johnny Carson...
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A lot of people go through life like they are rowing a boat. They look at where they have been (the PAST) rather than where they are going (the FUTURE)....
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The other day at work, I don't know what re-opened the whole code generation tools discussion. Personally, I have a strong conviction that no code generator, no matter how advanced or good it is, can match the quality of code well written by a good developer, full stop. I've believed in that for years and years, and will believe in it for years to come. And I'm not talking theoretically, I've been in the field long enough to see the results of different code generation tools, varying from the disastrous to the quite good and pretty clean. But the thing...
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What is it that stands between us knowing what we're supposed to do and actually doing it? In many cases in our everyday lives, whether personal or professional, we find ourselves in a situation where we know what we're supposed to do to reach a certain goal, to become better, to move forward, but still for some unknown reason we just don't do it. We know what is needed to finish off this projet or that... to become better husbands/wives/fathers/children... to move forward in our careers... to ameliorate our incomes... to live happier... to do whatever it is we want...
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Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose--and commit myself to--what is best for me. -- Paulo Coelho, The Zahir...
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A show I've been enjoying a lot recently is NBC's "My Name Is Earl". It's a light comedy show that takes the main character's interesting simplistic definition of Karma: "You do good things, and good things happen to you. You do bad things, and bad things happen to you.", and makes a really cool show out of it. In order to turn his life around, Earl makes a list of all the bad things he did in his life to try and set them right in order to get on Karma's good side. A bunch of funny situations and stories...
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The simple life... "The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life." ~ Robert Louis Stevenson So many people dream of a simple life, or at least that's what they say. In fact I haven't met a person yet who doesn't seem to have this sense of nostalgia for the...
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One of the most interesting phenomena to me are those "Déjà vu" (Already Seen) experiences we go through every now and then. It's amazing how you feel so sure that you've witnessed or experienced a precise new situation previously, sometimes even sensing that everything is just as it was before and having a weird knowledge of what is going to be said or happen next (in this cases it's rather called "Déjà vécu" (already lived)). I've gotten this feeling quite a number of times throughout my life, the last time being yesterday; I was talking to some colleagues at work,...
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I was just chatting with a friend of mine on Gtalk, when they asked me to write another one of my posts that make a person think. So me being in the mood, that got me thinking, what is it that makes people think? In other words, how do you provoke thought? I mean, for me and for a lot of other people, when you write something, you post a photograph you've taken, you quote somebody, ...etc; your absolute goal is mostly to get people to think about a certain something, and maybe even eventually get to a certain destination...
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Sometime ago, I remember a friend and I were talking about the internet and television as sources of information, which one is more useful, which one gives us more knowledge and generally comparing the two mediums. At the end of the discussion we reached the conclusion that the main difference between the internet and TV is that one, the internet, is a "Pull" medium, while the other, TV, is a "Push" one. Online, you generally know what you're looking for or you have a little idea about it, so you search for it and go to places where you can...
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Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. Oscar Wilde...
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They say to me in their awakening, "You and the world you live in are but a grain of sand upon the infinite shore of an infinite sea." And in my dream I say to them, "I am the infinite sea, and all worlds are but grains of sand upon my shore." [Quote from Sand And Foam by Khalil Gibran]...
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If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years. Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)...
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British rock act Radiohead has a new album coming out soon called "In Rainbows". The album will initially only be available on their site in the form of online downloads without copy restriction software, in other words no DRM (Digital Rights Management). But even cooler than all that is that Radiohead is letting the buyers choose their own price for the online album, thereby asking fans to establish a monetary value for their music, even when widespread piracy means that it would be available free. Personally, I think this is the way it should be done, and it should be...
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Transport is so unpractical in our world nowadays. It just takes too long to get from a certain point A to another point B. I can't believe that over the years, mankind haven't been able to invent a faster method of transportation than the airplane. A dream method of transportation for me would be a teleportation device. There would be public ones, phone booth like structures that you find on every street corner, or private ones that you could buy and use from the luxury of your home. You'd walk into one of these booths, to find a little ATM...
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Mirrors are all around us, and there isn't a day that goes by without us taking a look at ourselves in at least one of them. Some people spend more time in front of the mirror than others, while some just take a quick glimpse while walking by. Most times, when you look at the mirror, you see a dumb reflection of yourself, you straighten your hair, check out your smile, sweep your tongue over your teeth in an attempt to make them even whiter or shinier, maybe wink at yourself if you're the kind that does that, and then...
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Something I've noticed many times over the years is how some people seem to slip into different personalities when they change or assume different roles in life, work or elsewhere. It's as if a dial in some imaginary control room is turned, switching the person to another completely different personality. And in most cases it doesn't feel natural at all, it's just an act the person is putting up, just because he thinks he should be acting in a certain new way, because of their new status. I've seen this in newly married friends, colleagues who got a work promotion,...
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For a couple of years now, I've been wishing I could just stop, take a break from everything and take a sabbatical year, and just do whatever I want to do in it. When you come to think of it, it's not really such a hard thing to do after all, I think that if you've got yourself financially covered for a year, meaning that you've managed to save what equals 12 of your paychecks, then you're good to go and have yourself a year off from work and the everyday responsabilities you've had for the past years. Ok, it's...
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At work, one of the things I've become known for is a saying I believe in, which is more or less translated into: "It's all in the way you say it". This holds when you're having a normal discussion with someone, passing on important information, joking with a person, telling someone about something they did wrong, asking for something, ... anything; I believe it's all in the way you say what you have to say. This is not about sugar-coating things you have to say, it's just about knowing how to say a certain thing to a certain someone at...
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So many people underestimate the power and importance of a smile, that simple little facial expression characterized by an upward curving of the corners of the mouth. A smile has many meanings: pleasure, friendliness, welcome, amusement, and many more; and it is part of a universal body language that doesn't need any extra interpretation. Plus a smile, with all its simplcity and beauty, can be a very important factor in many aspects of our lives: - You fall in love with a new country you visit because its people greet you with a welcoming smile everywhere you go; other countries...
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A couple of days ago I was flipping through tv channels when I came across this show that was just beginning; the show was about biofuel, and the presenter listing the different points of the show went on about how they would talk about how cost-effective biofuel is and whether the outcome justifies the cost. This is an approach that I've been seeing in a number of places by a number of people, and I'm totally against it, because we don't really have an option anymore; this is not a business issue where you evaluate what you're going to get...
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Inspired by an off-topic question posted in one of the comments, I felt like posting what a perfect summer vacation day in Tunisia would be like for me: - Wake up whenever I feel like it - Have ftayer (pancakes) for breakfast - Hit one of the beaches in the North of Tunisia for half a day (Best Places To Swim In Tunisia) - Go back home for lunch, preferably Macaroni or Couscous - Rest, watch a movie, take a nap... - Go out for some ice cream and a walk on La Marsa's Boulevard - Have a delicious Bambaloni...
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I think one of the biggest problems of the Arab world today is the "Do whatever you want as long as I don't catch you doing it" mentality and attitude that's being applied to a wide variety of things we just don't want to handle. This problem exists at all levels of our Arab societies, and it's simply a way of avoiding to face the issues and problems that exist and taking the necessary steps to address or solve them. An example I've seen so many times at the family level: The tough father forbids his son to smoke; but...
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- I wouldn't nag and nag and then nag some more... - I wouldn't talk simply for the sake of talking... - I wouldn't spend over two hours getting ready to go out for only half an hour... - I wouldn't go into panic mode at the slightest hint of a wrinkle starting to form on my face... - I would always be on time... - I wouldn't be a bimbo... - I wouldn't be insanely addicted to shoes... - I would only go shopping when I needed to... - I wouldn't obsess on how big or small a certain...
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Why were we created? That's one big question; one that doesn't necessarily have one exact answer, but well depending on who you ask, you'll be getting a range of different answers. For example, A pious person would tell you that we were created to worship God. A scientist would tell you that we were created to discover the amazing secrets of our world. A philosopher would tell you that we were created to think. An artist would tell you that we were created to simulate the perfections and imperfections of the world through art. A philanthropist would tell you that...
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You live, you learn You love, you learn You cry, you learn You lose, you learn You bleed, you learn You scream, you learn You grieve, you learn You choke, you learn You laugh, you learn You choose, you learn You pray, you learn You ask, you learn You live, you learn These great words come from one of my favourite Alanis Morissette songs "You Learn", and the big important keyword here is "learn", because going through life without learning from our different experiences is basically nothing but a huge waste of time. Everything that happens to us happens for...
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I was just surfing around Scribd when I came across a really interesting post by Joe Mazzella, called "A Better Life". I've been thinking about the issue of happiness and what a person can do to have a better life quite often lately, and I think Joe sums it up really well and in a beautiful way. ...the only way to have a better life is to live a better life, and only way to give your children a better life is to show them how to live a better life as well. How do you live a better life?...
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... And it was at that time that I thought about Thomas Jefferson writing that Declaration of Independence. Him saying that we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I thought about how he knew to put the 'pursuit' in there, like no one can actually have happiness. We can only pursue it. -- Christopher Gardner (The Pursuit Of Happyness) Do you really think that no matter what we do, we can never really attain happiness; we can only pursue it?...
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Isn't it weird that whenever we need to talk to someone about something, we can't simply just dive into the subject and start asking whatever we have to ask or saying whatever we have to say, we always have to start off with some small talk, a set of meaningless questions and answers that are just for the sake of making a little pre-conversation. Is it because we think it's rude to just jump into a certain subject? Or is it because we want to set the mood before we launch a discussion? Or is it because we don't actually...
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It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to...
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Throughout the history of mankind, one of the main objectives of the human race, if not the core one behind every other objective, has been to attain happiness. In fact, Aristotle stated that happiness is the only thing that humans desire for its own sake. He observed that men sought riches not for the sake of being rich, but to be happy. Those who sought fame desired it not to be famous, but because they believed fame would bring them happiness. But what is happiness? The dictionary says happiness is: 1. joy, the emotion of being happy. 2. Good luck;...
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I believe in God... I believe in science... I believe in logic... I believe in freedom... I believe in equality... I believe in peace... I believe in love... I believe in kindness... I believe in creativity... I believe in believing......
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A friend came to me the other day for some career advice regarding moving to a new job, and I found myself repeating a piece of advice I've given some other friends and colleagues before. I thought I'd share this piece of advice here, maybe it'll come in handy for someone someday. The idea is as follows, whenever you're considering moving to a new job, don't think about that next job, think about the job after it: consider what the different options you have for your next job will do to enable you to get to the job after it,...
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"Life is a risk." -- Diane von Fürstenberg At different points of our life, we often find ourselves at a stage where we have to take very important decisions, decisions that could and almost always affect the rest of our lives, and maybe even the lives of those depending on us; to add to the stress of that, every decision comes with its own set of risks, and possibilities of things going right or wrong. All that makes these stages and the decisions we have to take even harder for us. A lot of people decide to play it...
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A good friend of mine and I were chatting earlier today when the subject turned to how so many countries and people are losing their identity. This is a true problem that I've been seeing all over the world, and the main reason behind it is unfortunately Globalization. I'm no anti-globalization activist or anything, in fact, I'm totally for globalization, economically and industrially speaking, but we can't neglect the negative effects it has on culture and society. In this globalized world, cities are becoming clones of each other, and people are converging into fake stereotypes; gone are the unique cities...
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For a very long time, I hated mobile phones and didn't see much use for them, and honestly speaking, I still don't like them that much to this very day. I only got my first mobile phone after my first to-be-employer emailed me saying they were trying to call me on my home line to set up a job interview but weren't able to get a hold of me. After that, the idea of a mobile phone for me was mainly a device that I could use to contact whoever I wanted, anytime, anywhere I was, but as I'm not...
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Isn't it so amazing how everything is always urgent at work? Urgent is to the say the least, as it's always preceded and followed with a bunch of superlative adjectives. The alert levels are always up! This is extra high priority and can't wait because it's extremely urgent. That is so urgent the client is breathing down our necks, literally. The other is even more urgent the boss is bordering on a heart attack. You'd think we work in a nuclear facility that is about to melt down or that we have a really important and powerful job, but then...
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I don't believe in Astrology, not one tiny bit, I think it's total crap and nonsense, but I don't care if others around me do, and I don't give them a hard time for it. Everyone is free to believe whatever they want to believe, right? But what does piss me off is when some of the people who believe in Astrology start talking like they're so damn sure of it, analyzing and judging me, foreseeing my future, while claiming that it's a well-founded science. Well it's not! Astronomy is a science, but not Astrology; Astrology is a group of...
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Some people believe in God... You can't but respect their beliefs even if they don't coincide with yours... Some people don't believe in God... You can't but respect their right to believe what they think is fact... And then there are some people who don't want to believe in God... Meaning, they believe in God, but they don't want to... They try to convince themselves that God doesn't exist... For different reasons... Mainly not to feel guilty for whatever wrong they're doing... People like that simply can't earn your respect......
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I remember when I was a child, at that age when we start to think about the world around us and analyze the different things we're taught without any limits or taboos to restrict us; one of my thoughts was about heaven, which we learn is this perfect happy place, somewhere up in the skies, where people who do good deeds go. I thought: what if heaven isn't a place somewhere up there? What if heaven doesn't exist yet? What if heaven is what this earth will become when we all start caring and thinking about each other, trying to...
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You know what's worse than taxes? What's worse than tax is insurance. You got to have some insurance. They shouldn't even call it insurance. They just should call it ''in case shit.'' l give a company some money in case shit happens. Now, if shit don't happen, shouldn't l get my money back? -- Chris Rock - Bigger And Blacker (Full script here) I couldn't agree more... Insurance is the biggest scam ever created by man! What pisses me off even more is that somehow they've convinced everyone it's ok for them to steal our money!...
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"Trying to make everyone happy makes no one happy" I'm not sure who originally said that, but I couldn't agree with it more. If you spend your life trying to please and make everyone around you happy, you'll end up leading a miserable life, plus no one will be happy because it's impossible to make everyone happy. But why do we sometimes go down that path and attempt to make everyone around us happy? Is it fueled by insecurity, an intense spiritual passion or compassion? Is it because we believe we'll only be happy if everyone around us is? Is...
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The other day someone I don't know added me on MSN, after finding my msn email on the blog. After a small introduction and all, this person asked me to tell them about myself. Being pretty sure the little profile I had on my blog's "About" page was enough, I sent them its link. The person told me they had already read it, but what they wanted to know is "Who is Marwen?" Me being at work at the time, and that being an opener for a very long chat, I apologized that I wouldn't be able to chat much...
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Life is full of difficult decisions for us to make, and no matter how simple we try to make our lives, how many self help books or articles we read, how much we try to learn from other people's experience, ...etc; we always end up confronted with a hard decision to take. There simply is no escaping it. Taking decisions is a complicated process, and so many things come into play. We first have this gut feeling generated by our adaptive unconscious, some of us follow it, and some of us hesitate and need to think more, sort things out...
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People living in the city want to move to the country side, and people living in the country side want to move to the city... People in their home countries want to emigrate, and people abroad want to come back. Young people want to grow up, and old people want to be young again. Working people want to retire, and retired people want to go back to work again. And the list goes on... It seems like unsatisfaction rests at the core of every human being's existence. We're almost never happy with what we have or where we are in...
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A couple of days ago, I was watching "A History of Violence" featuring Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris and Maria Bello, and it got me thinking about crime and redemption, which actually also reminds me of the movie "Redemption" featuring Jamie Foxx, which is based on the true story of Stan "Tookie" Williams. I'm actually a bit torn between my thoughts on this, and haven't reached a satisfactory conclusion. I mean, if a person commits a crime or even leads a life full of it, but then realizes how wrong he was and tries to move on and build a new...
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People have different ways of dealing with the stress in their lives: - Some suck it all in and let it eat away at them from the inside. - Some bang on tables or whatever surfaces they find near to them. - Some break things they find lying around them, glass objects are a favourite. - Some shout their lungs out, obscenities galore. - Some bang their heads on a wall. - Some start a fight with the first person that crosses their path. - Some rush for the fridge and have all they can eat. - Some unleash it...
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I've written a bit about homosexuality here and there in the past, mainly commenting on a piece of related news or something, but I never got around to writing a post just about homosexuality in the Arab world. This is my attempt at writing that post. First of all, let's start with the general fact: Homosexuality exists. It has existed for ages and ages, and will continue to exist for ages to come. The Arab and Muslim world is no exception. Homosexuality exists in our societies and is a lot more widespread than we think it is. We and our...
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It's weird how as our life goes by we keep hanging on to all this stuff from the past, these bits and pieces that belong to different eras of our life. Most of the time, it's a bunch of useless crap that we no longer have any use for whatsoever, but still, for some reason, it's crap that is very dear to us. The other day I had one of those moments when something dawns upon you, and you suddenly understand a certain thing about your nature, and about human nature in general. I think that in our present, we...
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One of the songs that really touched me when I first heard it some years ago was "If Tomorrow Never Comes" by Garth Brooks, covered by a number of others too. It's a love song in which the singer asks "If tomorrow never comes will she know how much I loved her?" But the song didn't make me think of that only, I mean of course it got me thinking about whether I showed my feelings enough for the one I love, but it also got me thinking about a bunch of other things. It got me asking myself the...
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Ok, this might be one of those posts that leave you thinking "Why the hell am I even wasting my time reading this?!", but well you're here and you might as well read it anyway. Well, the whole thing is that I think Asterix & Obelix cartoons are very unfair. I've felt this way ever since I was a child, and everytime I read one of the new books, I get pissed off again. I was introduced to Asterix & Obelix by my very cool uncle, who is a big fan and used to collect all their comic books. They...
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As a cinema lover, it's really about time I wrote about this. It's an issue that's been eating away at me for ages. When the hell are Cinemas in Tunisia going to get their act together?! Ever since I was a child, the state of cinemas in Tunisia has only been getting worse and worse. Not one new cinema has opened, yet a number of old ones have closed. The only somewhat happy event was the re-opening of a cinema in La Marsa, Al Hambra, in the Zephyr shopping center. The Habib Bourguiba road in downtown Tunis is lined with...
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One of the things I love the most about blogs is how you get to meet so many interesting people both online and offline. Over the past 3 years that I've been blogging, I've met so many people online through them commenting on my blog or sending me an email asking me for certain information, telling me about an interesting bit of news, informing me about an exciting new project, or just expressing their appreciation for my blog or even disappreciation; yeah I actually got one hate email from this sick racist maniac Tunisian woman in the US who is...
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You're walking down a street in your favour
