Some drivers in front of me decide to change lane suddenly without signalling. Some others arrive at an intersection with a highly classified intention to which way they are going, but hey, some of them do signal just after they start turning left or right, and the most shocking ones are those who cut me off entering my lane and again without signalling.

Worth than all, several years back, a driver in front on the street in the picture below, signaled right and actually turned right and exited to the right lane.

However, most of the sudden, he changed his mind and quickly turned left trying to do a full U turn before reaching the middle road separator. The action happened so quick that my breaks were not enough to stop my heavy car and I hit him badly. I was close, if you think about it, but that was because he already completely left my lane, he had a small car that actually fit the small right lane.

I mention this accident today as an example of miscommunication, someone who signal right and turn left, although one may argue this was not the main cause of the accident.

I have a habit of signalling even if I don’t see cars behind me, and by the way I always check my mirrors. When driving downtown, I signal my intention to turn on the next intersection as soon as I cross the previous one. I signal to change lane even if the lane I’m changing to is just starting (as in exit lanes).

So it is a matter of communicating your intentions to everyone around you in order to let them prepare themselves. Some of them will slow down and let you do it safely, but some others will speed up closing the chance on you, and here is were your courtesy shouldn’t be lost but should even turn into nobility; I’m not kidding this has a great effect on other drivers, let him go, slow down, then do your change lane, most probably you will arrive both at the next traffic lights stopping side by side.

Fouad Jennawi

I think the courtesy rule that applies here is “Share The Road”. My best example about sharing the road is sharing a cake, think about it, if you are the first to cut your piece, sharing means you think about and measure what is left of the cake more than measuring the piece you are cutting for yourself.

That is the exact situation at this intersection; the road of the two lanes is for you and anyone else that’s allowed at that moment to enter it with you, and those are cars merging from the top right corner of the photo. Since they have only one option which is the right lane then the piece of cake you should be picking “with courtesy” is the left lane.

Posted from my mobile

• What do I mean by courtesy driving?
• And why do we need another site giving tips to drivers aside from the traffic rules and acts?

While the traffic laws and the commonly available driving tips focus on distinguishing who was right from who was wrong following a collision between two vehicles, articles in this category will aim at lowering your chances of getting involved in a car crash and subsequently lowering your chances of getting injured.

Some of what will be published here might be controversial, and some might make you puzzled, this is, in my opinion due to the fact that most of us a preoccupied with different views about this subject. I think the important thing is that this category will make you think and may get you to change some of your habits in a way that is not breaking the law but will make more sense than what we have been hearing for long time.

And on top of all, these tips are easy and harmless to try them yourself, both mentally and practically.

BTW: I personally like the mental exercises, since they are inexpensive and could be done even if you haven’t got your driver’s license yet.

Little you can find when installing the beta version of “The Chrome”, as I expect it to be called in the high tech community, but the new browser from Google promise to be the ultimate browser that any multi-tasked internet surfer would like to have as explained in the Google Comic Book about their design goals.

The comic explains a rather obvious design to most developers but the main interesting point is that Google is going to use the power it has to fine tune the new browser for maximum performance on the most visited sites. And I’m sure soon after, there will be recommendations or best practices for building web-sites that are Google Chrome compliant for best performance.

Way to go!

The movie story reminds me of my 20 years of office CUBation and makes me pay some attention to my other sides in life; beside programming I always liked painting and playing music the least to mention.

However, as my situation is different from Waters in the movie since I love and enjoy my job, I may share with her and many others the hostility towards the walls of something called “cubicle” — for those who enjoy sun and fresh air in their day jobs, “cubicle” is a small compartment used as a workplace for people who use their fingers and, sometimes, their minds in their jobs. Of course I’m kidding with this last one. But to give you a better idea the plural cubicles is only similar a honeybee hive.

I made a little search about the cubicle and found lots of complains and only few fans. The only two advantages of this system might be flexibility and cost. I also found the inventor, according to resources, of this system; his name is Bob Propst and he came up with this idea in 1964 to replace the open system that was common at the time, an interesting article about this story could be found here.

Here are a couple of shots from the short film “CUBEd”:

There is definitely some sort of happiness by volunteering I know it a bit from myself and I know it more through my brothers Fadi and Chadi who give their time for The Faith and Light organization in Syria which takes on itself the responsibility of caring for the mentally unfortunate children and also from my other brother Somar who joined with friends built a social community for the Kirellos church in Kassaa – Damascus, a community that won him a devoted wife. That happiness of doing something and see the results right away in an atmosphere that is much different from the corporates’, an atmosphere where competition was replaced by cooperation, pyramidal hierarchy was replaced with all-for-one-and-one-for-all spirit and where the goal is the person not the dollar.
Way to go Elias, you made me proud.

The deal was like that, the old CRT is now looking blur so we’ll replace with an LCD. But I had many benefits of my CRT setup that I couldn’t give up:

• The view width: I was using two CRTs which is very useful, you know, reading long line log files, showing two text files for comparison side by side, and not to mention software with side panels and tools in particular Visual Studio. A replacement of both is out of question.
• The view height: I used to push my CRT to its limits especially on the vertical sync, this allowed me more lines. I became used to showing multiple lines in the task bar, this gives me direct access to more quick launch links, shows me more of the active tasks without shrinking the title to a sometimes useless icon, shows more of the resident processes icons; I don’t like the auto hide of inactive function, and simply showing the clock on multiple lines is cool. Also I like to see more lines when reviewing a couple of years old code. Anyway, having an LCD with 1280 pixels vertically was also out of question.

So the trade-off was clear, the closest equivalence of a 2 CRTs 19″ each is a single 24″ wide LCD which achieve the same vertical centimeters and a fairly close width. Too much for a Christmas gift. So I got a 22″; Acer 2216w with some extra letters not important for a CRT veteran.

New things I learned from my new LCD are staggering; they make higher DPI now so looking for the same vertical centimeters doesn’t make sense anymore, go by pixels. The space you gain on your desktop is really important. And my eyes now for sure need a checkup.

However, Dell did and now it seems the company is Switching back to Windows XP. Never in any previous version of Windows I remember this lack of enthusiasm about a new release and resistance to upgrade.

Is it Linux may be?… Many are saying that Vista’s older brother, Windows XP, is its main competitor and I think this is right because of many reasons…There are certain number of things that we want the operating system to do for us and they are offered with Windows XP, actually most of them where there since Windows 95 which, at the time, people said about it “This is how Windows should have been in the first place”. Windows XP also fixed security weaknesses and stability issues of 95, the same thing was done even in Windows 2000.

So features, stability and reliability are all there in XP but being cool, modern and more fashionable doesn’t win you popularity in the world of production. I am one of many people who “made switching to classical windows theme” the last step of any new installation of Windows XP and the reason is standardization; it doesn’t really matter if doing certain job on a PC is less ergonomic in one way or another, what matters is whether I know how to do it and practiced it for a long or is it new and need me to figure it out.

It is not practical to attend a driving course every time you buy a new vehicle. But Microsoft kept fooling us every new version of Windows with moving icons around; e.g. between control panel and the administrative tools, or by changing files names or directory structure like the “document and settings” versus the old “user profile”, not to mention the cosmetic fashion when one day it imposes the 3D buttons and the next day buttons go flat, to round or not to round a rectangle’s corners, and even using transparent and irregular shaped windows or use just simple opaque rectangle.

The matter of the fact is that standardization is the most important issue in an operating system after reaching maturity.

It is not a new idea, I should say, you all have seen online websites building tools for so long, even photo editing and enhancing tools found on online printing shops…etc. but the question is why Microsoft didn’t do that when it was able to do it?

In an article nearly six months ago I read that 90% of Microsoft profit comes only from Windows and Office business. This probably explains how crucial to the company any change to their sales strategy in those two fields. We saw SQL Server given for free after the end of its bloody war with Oracle; which could be the result of the open source database server like MySQL nevertheless I don’t like to pay for database server which I see a mature piece of software 15 years ago.

So still the question isn’t whether Microsoft is dead or not, the question is why it is not adored by people of the industry. I think the answer is because Microsoft wants a share in every PC-related business even if it doesn’t have the experience in that field, and money does not buy her the experience only time does, and this is why we see the company changing a lot in between version 1.0 and 2.0 in each new business they do, we saw that clearly in between MSS 2004 which now became deployed and in use with no future and MSS 2007 yet to come; a fully dramatic change that left Microsoft friendly developers unhappy wasting their time while Microsoft is learning telephony and meanwhile also learning how to screw up telephony business. I’m saying that because we might see eventually a Microsoft Speech SDK Express (as in SQL Server) given for free when the company discover that the 90 percent in Windows and Office business ratio simply did not change.

The only chance that push Microsoft to play fair in the industry is for that ratio to decline, and while no one wants the operating system to be nothing but standard like Windows, the only place left is Office and Google has just started an interesting run.

I said good bye to her,

a beautiful 18 years old Silver leather interior Cadillac that marched with me for almost a decade.

I grew up in a country where people live and die with their cars and so it took me a long time to give up her ride, and it even took me longer to convince myself that my drive way is too narrow if she stays in it.

… but anyway, I will always remember those days when she took me with my friend Majed all the way from Ottawa to the Atlantic ocean; a trip that totaled 5000Km, with just a little pain to be honest. I will remember the rides that really resembled riding a fleet of wood…

A great goodbye, or I should say, see you later.