Adventures of Mr.Behi

When a Geek Plans a Trip

Mr. Geek is planning a trip overseas. Look what he has done and see how geek you are compared to him. Parts of his planning work is considered to many people so regular like booking the car or hotel online but check the rest:

Mr.Geek and his wife are planning a 10 day trip overseas so Mr. Geek has been on his laptop for a long time booking stuff. But before anything, he has made a mindmap of the trip. He talked to his boss who went to the same place and created a word document with his advise in the map.

He searched tons of websites and browsed GoogleEarth for hours to locate the hotels to ensure they were cheap enough, had good reviews, close to metro stations, etc. He found the routes from city to city and dinning places in between and calculated how long it would take considering the time for pictures and threshold for flat tires and loosing way (and the possible increase in the rotation speed of the Earth:) He made himself sweat with his laptop on his laps searching for a program on the internet to transform google map routes into the GPX files so that his GPS receiver could read them. He also searched for walking tour podcasts for the places to go and have compiled already a couple of books in PDF about things to do and where to go.

All the links, bookmarks, booking conformations, maps etc are linked to the mindmap according to the time table. One of his desired hotels that was located just by the metro station was fully booked so he had to book another one, he now knows that from the hotel he booked, there will be 706 meters to walk to the metro station and now he needs to get the information if the city of destination is safe for walking when they get back to the hotel at night from the metro station. And can a geek forget computer shopping? Nooo so he has the location of the Mac store (the one and only in the country) to go to before coming back.

All this to ensure that the trip itself could be spent just for seeing things not to do last minute planing and I bet something will remain to the last minute...The question is: Why am I writing this 00:45 in the morning. I just need to finish my apple juice and head for the bedroom. Mrs.Behi is here singning with a YouTube video she has just found after watching the movie and another weekend finishes this way...

Go Gadget

I am getting better with my personal organization and could already manage to finish some overdue tasks and projects. Thanks to extensive usage of Microsoft outlook, I can survive without forgetting things. Each day, I receive requests via e-mail and through personal talk. In the company we have this funny term as "passing the monkey to someone else" when you want to assign something or politely put something on someone else. Although e-mail is the standard way of communication in our company, there are many colleagues here in Libya who do not like responding to e-mails so you have to go to their desk and followup. Normally when I receive requests by e-mail, it is easy to create an outlook task but here it is easy to forget things with people asking you stuff in the coffee room or in the hallway. That is why I have this pocket PC to sync with my outlook. Yes, too many USB devices I carry with me everyday. My bag looks like a big suitcase...a big Dell M90 laptop with its heavy adapter, two external hard disks, USB hub and adapter, wires for the pocket PC, GPS, hard disks, two USB memories, software hardware keys, ipod and all the accessories, let alone those days that I take my personal Mac to work. When I go to my clients to present, I add to this a desk projector to show things. Each time that I spend minutes packing from office to home and reverse, I think to myself that the next breakthrough shall be removal of all these wires from accessories. I am now planning to upgrade my ipod and purchase a 1 Terabyte disk. I also need to buy an airport extreme base station and connect the disk to be able to  do data transfer wireless. Last week we saw a herman/Kardon ipod car charger and FM transmitter with a full feature monitor and a music changer stick but I gave up in the last minute. I should quit this sickness of getting excited by computer accessories. oh...I am also getting into audio books..audible.com is a good place to find and buy. I am getting into books by Hemingway. Already listened to "the old man and the sea" and now have a new one in the ipod.   

Let me share with you this fantastic piece of software that I use: Mindjet Mind Manager is a package that I can not live without. I make maps of every thing...things to do, important things, week in a glance, customer breakdown, project  milestones,  marketing brainstorming, etc. It is known that our brains saves and restores data in a tree format in a sort of relational tree while we tend to put data in our publications in linear format. This is not an add by the way and I do not have any affiliation with these guys but this is a real piece of art that really saves time. I have started a map for all the links and comment that I receive in the blog and I should find time and complete it.

A Delay and So Long (ADSL)

After so many weeks of waiting, our ADSL connection is up and running now and we can start blogging again. We have been very busy since last post...almost not felt how those days passed..no chance to blog during office hours and we were without connection at home.I still could not configure the wireless ADSL modem so Mrs.Behi is connected to the LAN port of the normal modem and is sharing her connection through her wireless port so I can get online...viva DSL...and we are in love with our Mac laptops...I also got a new Garmin GPSMAP with all the car accessories and am navigating and mapping tripoli with it on GoogleEarth...this is so cool...will write about it soon

Free but slow internet

I am still using the very slow satellite connection for Internet and considering the amount of business/personal activities that I have on-line, it is very miserable. The only good thing about not using the Iranian network of fiber optics for a while is that there is no filtering machine :-) so you can surf the web without being stopped by the "Access denied" warnings. There is indeed a positive side i any misery, the point is finding it soon enough.

Internet outage (but happy new year)

The fiber optic connection that Iran is using is having a problem so all the Internet connections and outside phone calls are affected. I am using an alternative satellite connection (Thanks to the company :-) Now it is officially 2006 by the way, happy new year. This is going to be a hell of a year with so many adventures, You bet! Tomorrow we are going to have a very important meeting in the company for the objectives of 2006 and for me, this is a new beginning...so many challenges ahead...cheers for a good year :-)

Blogrolling filtered!

Iranian Telecom is famous for the filters it imposes over websites/weblogs that are containing what the government considers as "against morals of the society" or "against national security". This costly activity has already cost Iranian government many million dollars to become reality and there is a little care about the legitimacy of the reasoning that should be there behind the filtering of each URL that is swept away from the sight of Iranian web surfers.

Meanwhile, there are many social/political pages that are filtered just because they have something to say that brings bend in the eyebrow of the headmasters! yet sometimes when I hear news about recent filtered websites in the Persian blog-sphere, I can not create any logical link between my humble Gray cells and the minds of those who commit the filtering!

One of my such odd surprises came after I gathered that blogrolling.com is filtered in Iran after some days of fluctuation between availability and unavailability. So many bloggers are now complaining that why a tool such blogrolling should be unavailable? perhaps because it would make you aware that something is posted questioning the new president! Some bloggers now fear for Blogger to get filtered and with the popularity this free blogging service has among Iranians, that would be due to the huge decrease for the skyrocketing number of Persian blogs. I guess the idea of media censorship can only come from the culture that says: "If I am right and indeed I am, one that talks against me is wrong and should not be there to talk". Sweeping the URLs with political content and closing newspapers containing debates is like what kids do by hiding the broken glass in the closet pretending everything is safe an sound while everyone knows it is not and more than others, the kid himself!

A low bandwidth Candidate and his way of banding together!

Dr. Mostafa Moein is known as one of the pioneering reformists in the cabinet of President Mohamad Khatami. When he relinquished his position of minister of Science, Research and Technology as a result of pressure from the conservatives, the hope for success of the reformists to truly confront the conservatives was already being perished.

Apparently, he is the first presidential candidate who created a website (weblog?) for himslef which is damn good. Since I became aware of this, I have been checking on him hundred times per day but his blog is experiencing bandwidth exceeding which is strange. It has been at least days since the problem is seen and yet still, they have not done anything. How many visitors he was expecting to have when he was purchasing the service? He cannot make his weblog up and running, what an impression! It is like painting your living room using expired paint. More on Monday, March 28: The blog is now up and running

It is not clear to me why he is running for presidency anyway as his team have already demolished the hope for effectiveness of the reforms and it is clear that they are handicapped by the rest of the "selected" wings of the government. I would only miss the reformists for (almost) open-minded decisions they made for letting some freedom in expression and social activities to flow (Conservatives did their best to click on ”Undo” and they were smarter than normal, they sometimes even undone further back from the original state).

Hey Buddy! You may have a PC of your own Genes!

Link: Researchers use enzyme to clip DNA wires for computer parts | Science Blog.

Nice news about advancements in computer research. The report says that people are testing DNA chips for electrical properties so they can make future computer parts. It is not revealed that what will be other advantages but there should be more to come. Imagine going to the PCWorld to see computers aided with genes and see prices according to IQ of the gene owner J