Month: August 2007

Categories
Lebanon Politics World

The Sawfar Bridge

Sawfar Bridge Destroyed

The Sawfar bridge on the road leading to the Bekaa valley was the Highest bridge in the Middle East, that was until Israel bombed it during last year’s war, the bridge was bombed twice, the first strike only made wholes in the bridge making it unusable for cars, but that wasn’t enough for Israel, unlike they said they did not to only want to cut the communication routes of Hezbollah, they wanted to destroy Lebanon, so they made a second hit which practically destroyed the whole bridge foundation and made it fall.

Sawfar Bridge Destroyed

After the war was over the USA promised to rebuild the bridge, but as you can see in these pictures they did not even start yet, so where is all the help the USA promissed us? When every country announced what they were going to rebuild, the media pointed that the USA chose to build the most expensive bridge and Iran took care of the small inexpensive ones, now every day we see on the News a bridge re-build by Iran being opened to the Public, but the construction on the bridge the USA promissed to rebuild did not even start yet! So is Iran better than the USA? The USA needs to fix its Public Relations in the Middle East if they really want to stop the extension of Iran!!

Categories
Technology

The CD turns 25!

CDThe CD is now 25 years old!! Yep on the 17 August in 1982 the first discs were pressed in the Phillips factory in Germany, back then it was a technological miracle, they were now able to store high quality music on discs, 25 years latter the CDs are now starting to be forgotten, most of our music is downloaded from the Internet and most of the games and softwares we buy are too big to fit on CDs so they come on DVDs instead, so how longer do you think the CD is going to last?? I guess in 10 years the CD will be totally forgotten.

Categories
Lebanon

Zahle Statue

 

Zahle Statue

Two days ago I went with my family to Zahle and on the entrance of Zahle I saw a statue of a women, I took a photo of the statue searched for what it symbolizes, I found a site about Zahle with these info:

Wine And Arak

Zahle’s association with the grape is pervasive, for it lies at the heart of an area that has been making wine since early antiquity. At the city’s southern entrance the statue of a graceful female personifies wine and poetry, but you don’t have to look far to see evidence of the real thing. The hills north of town with names like Wadi Hadi, Harqat, Bir Ghazour and Tell Zeina are covered with the neat rows of vineyards that supply Zahle’s wine and arak industries.
Many of the wines have been formally recognized abroad for their fine quality – equal to some of the best in Europe.

A tour of Zahle’s Ksara winery is a good way to see how wine and arak are made. Of special interest here are the extensive underground caves built around a natural grotto known and enlarged by the Romans.

Zahle is a great city, I invite you to visit someday, it has everything in it, a river with restaurants around it so you can enjoy the view while dining and a lot of known shops so you can shop in its streets.

Categories
Lebanon Politics

Lebanese Air Force Bombing Terrorists

Wednesday Annahar newspaper showed a picture of an LAF helicopter bombing Fath L Islam positions in Nahr L Bared Palestinians refugee terrorists camp, sadly I heard that the bombs the LAF is using are launched from Lebanese made launchers because the countries that “are helping us” fight terrorism help us in a really weird special way, apparently to fight terrorism you need helicopters without missile launchers (UAE removed the launchers before sending the Helicopters) and if things get complicated we get some ammunition, new equipment and heavy arms are something we don’t need to fight terrorism apparently.

The US only makes promises and rarely delivers, it’s still better then other countries who never deliver, but I guess it’s not entirely there fault, let’s face it we will never get decent equipement just from help, we need to buy new stuff from any country that is ready to sell us and it’s the government’s job to find those countries and buy ammunitions.

Anyways in spite of all this the army is fighting and exterminating those terrorists and here’s the picture from Annahar newspaper taken by Michel 7allak.

Lebanese Air Force

Categories
People World

Photos from Miss Teen USA 2007

A couple of pictures from Miss Tenn USA 2007 from la Republica website.

Miss Teen USA

Miss Teen USA

More Pictures
From Digg

Categories
Operating System

Windows Vista

I recently bought a new Laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium pre-installed, before buying it I read a lot of reviews about Vista, its bad sides and its good sides.

Windows Vista Logo

 

A lot of people complained about Vista and hardware incompatibility, I didn’t have this problem since my Laptop is preloaded with vista so everything was compatible, another problem a lot of people complained about is vista’s memory usage, well that’s true vista uses a lot of memory so buying it with 512MB of RAM (Microsoft official minimum requirement) will certainly give you problems, I have 2GB of RAM so I have no problem in memory usage but I have a sidebar gadget that always shows me the amount of RAM used, when I power up the PC it’s usually around 32-37% (I have a lot of Toshiba stuff running in the background) I work on a lot of stuff together (Firefox, VB.NET express, Photoshop CS2 are running simultaneously many times) and I never fill the RAMs (53% now with the apps mentioned above and MS Office Word 2007) so I recommend 1,5GB of RAM and more if you want to get Vista running smoothly.

Some of the other problems with Vista are software incompatibilities, and well to be honest Microsoft can’t do anything about it, the software makers have to update the applications they make, another problem was moving files in Vista! It used to take 5 minutes to move a 5MB folder because all what windows was doing is calculating the remaining time instead of moving the file, Microsoft issued a fix for this bug a week ago and moving files is a lot easier now.

Vista User Interface

One great thing about Vista is its ease of use and nice graphical interface (Aero).
Searching in Vista is great! All the files are indexed so finding a file takes just seconds and the files start to appear as you type your search, Searching in vista is the easier way to get somewhere so you get a search box in every corner, You have aWindows Vista Search search box in every file explorer so finding a document in a folder with 1000 files takes a second, there is a search box in the start menu too, so instead of searching in the huge list of programs you just type the first characters and Vista shows you the program you are looking for. Searching is also made easier with tagging, so you can tag any file you have with many words and when you search the files those words make the document easier to find (very handy for pictures).

Windows Vista NetworkingAnother good feature in Vista is the networking, it connects and configures everything for you, that’s a very helpful feature for beginners, when I first got the laptop and connected it via LAN to the internet it detected the settings and I had internet immediately, the same connection needed configuration in XP, I bought a wireless router after that and connecting wirelessly to the router was also very easy. The only bad side about networking in Vista is advanced stuff are harder to reach. I have a shared Hard Drive on one PC and in XP all we had to do is find the computer the drive is connected to and access the drive, in Vista I had to manually type the HDD location on the network to access it.

Here’s a list of some other features worth mentioning in Vista:

  • Windows Photo Gallery, All your photos are shows and grouped in a nice easy interface you can navigate, you can also edit the pictures to fix Red Eyes and similar mistakes.

Windows Vista Speech Recognition

  • Windows Speech Recognition, similar to the one that was available in MS Office, but it now covers the whole OS, easy to use but not always accurate.
  • Windows DVD Maker, make your DVDs from windows.
  • Windows Movie Maker, an improved version similar to the previous ones
  • Windows Calendar, Organize your schedule from windows! It used to crash after the reboot when you add a new appointment, but it’s now fixed.
  • Windows Meeting Space, A new and improved Windows Net Meeting, I didn’t try it yet but they say it’s nice and easy to use.
Categories
Lebanon Politics

Orange Tayyar Land Rover

OTOToday I saw this Orange Land Rover with Tayyar signs, GMA pictures and FPM’s slogan all over it parked in Rimal Beach Resort! I know every one is free to like whoever he wants, but seriously this guy needs to find a hobby!!! I am pretty sure all he thinks about is politics!

FPM Land Rover

Tayyar Land Rover

Categories
Personal

Multitasking

As you already know, yesterday I didn’t have internet for most of the day, so I had to do all my work at night in the same time!

I was working on a Big Update for Exoleb so I had more than 50 pictures to crop, resize, fix (brightness, level, contrast) and add Exoleb logo to, while doing all this I was also writing the posts and adding the photo gallery code to them, talking to a couple of people on MSN Messenger and working on a small “photo managing” application that I thought of while editing all the pictures, to make things more complicated I decided to change the way post are written in Exoleb to see people’s reaction, but writing posts this way takes a lot of times so even if people like it, I don’t think I am going to do more than 1 post like this every update.

I finished everything at 1:30 this morning and went directly to bed, I usually stay up later than this but I’d be talking to people on MSN instead of doing all this! So that’s the first time I am tired of working on a PC!

Categories
DVD TV Series

M*A*S*H

M*A*S*H Logo

M*A*S*H is a TV series from the 70s and the 80s that I used to watch on the Paramount Comedy Channel (Now ShowComedy) a couple of years ago before they stopped it, two weeks ago I saw Season 1 and 2 in the DVD renting place so I got them and watched them.

M*A*S*H is about an American Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Korean War and the way the staff is dealing with the war.
“Hawkey” Pierce, the main character is a sarcastic surgeon that hates the war, his friend “Trapper” McIntyre is basically a slight variation of his character that’s just a little calmer, together they “ruin the war” for Major Frank Burns, a cheap person that’s also a bad surgeon and Margaret “Hotlips” Houlihan the head nurse, they do all this while showing us the ugliness of war for everyone participating in it in a funny unique way.

M*A*S*H Cast

 

Other characters are:

  • Colonel Henry Blake: He is the one in command (well sort of), he also hates the war and everything in it, Hawkey and Trapper always manage to manipulate him to get what they want.
  • Radar O’Reilly: The company Clerk, he is the colonel’s assistant but sometimes he seems to be the one in Charge, he is called Radar because he has the ability to know stuff before they happen.
  • Maxwell Klinger: A Libano-American who’s only goal is to leave the army, to achieve this he dresses like a girl hopping he gets discharged for being crazy!

(Some of the characters do not participate in all the other seasons)

You should really watch the show it is entertaining and funny and it keeps getting better as the episodes pass (season 2 is better than season 1 in my opinion) All the seasons have been released to DVD so I hope the DVD store gets them soon!

Categories
Lebanon Politics

2006 Summer War

Last summer was supposed to be one of Lebanon’s greatest summers, tourists where everywhere and the economy was recovering from the shock it received after the murder of Rafic Hariri the previous year. That was until the 12 of July, on this “Holy day”, Hezbollah decided to kidnap a couple of Israeli soldiers to exchange them with Samir L Kuntar who’s basically a guy who entered Palestine with a Palestinian organization to Liberate Palestine but who is still considered Lebanese by Hezbollah for some reason, That’s not all the Government members (Hezbollah was part of this government) had also agreed that Hezbollah can attack the Chebaa farms to free them but that the government was supposed to take care of the prisoners issue through “diplomatic channels”.

Anyways Hezbollah attacked and Israel “replied in a proper way” (for Israel that means destroying Lebanon), so for 34 days Israel bombed the bridges, factories (Important military ones, ex: Milk Factories, pre-fabricated houses Factories…), Cellular towers, TV Antennas and every village in south Lebanon killing more than 1200 civilian, Hezbollah replied by launching rockets at Israel some of them destroyed a couple of buildings but most of them did nothing.
Israel also tried to enter Lebanon but Hezbollah succeeded in inflicting heavy damages to the Israeli troops so during the 34 days they were never able to control a village!

After 34 days, on the 14 of August 2006, UN resolution 1701 was voted and the war ended, Hezbollah declared victory over Israel (A Divine Victory to be precise) and that was it, you cannot question Hezbollah’s decision to launch the war and you cannot say we didn’t win -not that I don’t like winning, but 1500 martyrs (civilians + Lebanese Army + Hezbollah fighters), a destroyed economy and no goals achieved aren’t really my idea of winning and that doesn’t mean we lost by the way- so let’s just hope a new divine war is not declared anytime soon because we are seriously tired of holy battles!