Screwdrivers and Israel

Egypt is not Europe. I knew it before I came here. But I had no idea how frustrating it can be to leave the Old Continent. 

My hard drive "died" last week. Surprising, cause I put it in only 10 months ago when I installed Leopard, back in November. The reason is probably burned electronics on the drive - something that might have been cause by the damn electric sockets which are not grounded! That would be nice to have here since they turn the electricity on and off all the time (I literally mean like 10 times a day!). Furthermore, I guess that the current isn't really stable and I can see the sudden peaks and falls of the voltage just by having the lights on in the evening. Anyway, my disk died and I needed a new one.

Before I could change the drive however, I needed screw drivers. More specifically a Philips #00 and Torx T8 which are necessary for changing the hard drive in MacBooks. My first guess after speaking with some natives was that I won't get it in Sharm. So I took a trip to Israel. Thought that would be nice. They are civilized, after all..right? 

Maybe they are. Maybe not. I don't know. But I had no luck with finding the screwdrivers in neither Jerusalem or Bethlehem. Probably I just don't know how to look. All the time I ended up in the Arabic parts of the cities by the way... Where are the Jews?!

So no luck here. But the visit in Israel gave me at least some nice photos...

On the Mt. of Olives a mix of tourists and Israeli land forces. Fully equipped... Shit. 

Oh it was soooo bright!

These children reminded me that the summer's over and it's time for school for some! Too bad...

Meat. Lots of meat. Old City in Jerusalem. Wonder if it's kosher?

Something similar in the background.. you see? Must be dangerous to live so close to lots of gold...
Old City in Jerusalem

I found some Jews in the Old City after all. Turned out the city is divided in four quarters: Muslim, Christian, Armenian and Jewish. At least that's the traditional division.  
No in Bethlehem. Looking for screw drivers. 
Bethlehem is a part of the Palestinian Autonomy. No Jews on the streets here. No screw drivers either..unfortunately.

A view from somewhere in Bethlehem.
And the panorama over Old City in Jerusalem from the Mt. of Olives. 

So that's it. Got back to Sharm. Found the screw drivers (at Radio Shack...). Bought an exactly identical hard drive in a computer shop. I got it for 80 euro last year in Sweden. Now I payed 100 euro... Today the same costs about 55 euro in Europe (checked it on the Net). But hell.. what was I supposed to do?

Now thanks to Time Machine (love you!) I'm back and running just where I was! Egypt and technology are however still two very different and incompatible concepts. No Internet at home, cause somebody somehow messed up the telephone cables for the DSL line. And it's Ramadan, so they can't promise it will be fixed anytime soon. 

But still it's 35 degrees and sunshine... At least the life is wonderful! 

Egypt blocking Facebook?

Here's the first of hopefully no more posts about why Egypt actually is a third world country (unfortunately after the recent day's events, I have some more themes for blog posts about why sucks in Egypt).

I hope I'm wrong now, but it seems like the Egyptian government is blocking Facebook. Not a big deal, huh? Maybe not, but it's still narrowing an individuals options for communicating with the surrounding world. Seriously, it is a bigger issue, considering why the persumed block is taking place. According to LA Times:

The reason: In April, one group of young citizens mobilized 80,000 supporters to protest rising food prices. Facebook networking played a crucial role in broadening support and turnout for an April 6 textile workers' strike and protest.

OK, now it seems like an issue. Considering that I have found a few more evidences. All from the end of the summer of 2008, where people presumed it would happen. Now it seems like it has. For political reasons. Great... Hard to believe it but it seems like I'm living in a country where basic human rights are not respected. 

Right now I have been accessing the social network site via different proxy servers available, but it looks like the scripts essential for Facebook get blocked, so I can not even send any messages to people. 

Stay tuned for more reports on human rights in Egypt. Hell yeah... bye!

Update: Btw, I've been off for another reason - my hard drive suddenly decided to end our yearlong collaboration and leave my with a 5 days old Time Machine backup (thanks God for Time Machine!). But it took my a couple of days to find anything that I could replace my dead drive with in this part of world. More on this later! 

Bad bad bad bad bad bad news

This won't be a happy post. It won't be long neither. All I will say is that today I was working on a PR thing for the company when my Mac suddenly froze so I had to kill it by shutting it off. Now I see how some of you laugh: "haha there you go, even your fantastic Apple computer died!". Yeah, maybe it did, cause when I reboot all I see is a pretty neat icon with a blinking question mark, which represents "I can't find any disk to boot from". And that's true, my hard drive appears to be dead. Damn..great timing. Just for your information, the hard drive isn't original Apple, it's a 250Gb Toshiba drive I put in two years ago, and I knew it would die some day. Luckily I have Time Machine backup, which means it will be easy to get up and running again. Badly though, the last backup is 5 days old...

So tonight I'm going to Jerusalem to look for a) a new hard drive and b) some screw drivers cause I left my set back home in Sweden. Great. Sweet. Fantastic. I love this. Pray for me.

And I will pray. I'm a bit confused to whom I should pray though, considering I'm European, currently stay in Egypt and hope to find everything I need to fix this in Israel...

Hello, again!

It's been over a year since the last post (which by the way happen to cover the original iPhone launch) and a lot has changed since - although I still don't own an iPhone, when it seems like the whole world does. For example, my friend Viktor - who btw makes living by being an excellent Microsoft .NET coder and isn't really known for being an Apple fanboy - recently picked up his second one (3G this time) of those all-in-one devices. Beside this I've seen people everywhere - from Palestine to Poland and from Sweden to Sharm el Sheikh - using these phones and I was just about to get one this fall, when something changed.

I was looking for interesting opportunities for job, as well as for collecting some data for my upcoming master thesis, when I got stuck in Egypt where I found both - and even more. One funny thing I can say about this guys is: read The Secret. 

When the summer of 2008 came to a rainy end (at least in the northern parts of Europe) I returned to Sweden to move out of my apartment and say a "see-you-soon" to my friends (I don't believe in good-byes for some reason). I got out of the flat two days ago, spend a night at bullshit-Mackan's house and finally got picked up by my family and went to visit them. So this weekend I'm gonna be in the charming city of Göteborg (or, technically, just outside) visiting my family. I'm also planing on using this new DSLR of mine and shoot some pictures while I'm here. Talking about pictures, don't forget to check out my Flickr account, where you can see some of the better shots from around here. I'm also working on adding some photos from Egypt, and these will come continuously, as I shoot new when I get back there soon!

So what can you expect from this blog from now on? Well... more frequent updates - that's for sure (shouldn't be too hard to achieve since the last update was something like 400 days ago). Besides, I will of course talk something about the life in Sharm el Sheikh - what, where, when and how - and illustrate everything with knife-sharp photographs. Furthermore, you can expect the usual crap about tech, geeky stuff (such as the world politics, travels and weather) and of course, music. 

That's it for tonight! Thanks for reading and stay tuned (preferably by adding this blog to your RSS reader of choice - I recommend Google's web-based solution). Ciao!