Monday, June 27, 2011

Top 5 things I hate about Qnet:


I actually wrote this post while listening to a Qnet presentation to one of my colleagues at work … I hope non of the Qnet people will take it personal as many of them do

1. How materialistic it transforms people . with Qnet you only care about the $$$

2. No one really cares about the products they are selling .. even the guy who was doing the presentation next to me, he didn’t really know much about the products. the guy allocated around 10% of the time talking about the products and the rest talking about gaining amazing profit from qnet with all the financial independence it provides

3. Mind trick games the IRs play during the presentations ( am doing this for you not for me , i only invite people who are willing to work not anyone ,.....)

4. After you enter Qnet .. you see everyone(Family, Friend , someone u barely know) as a potential customer or victim

5. Trying to associate Qnet to any big organization or event … before that there was Microsoft which didn’t go any further than installing their web servers then they stopped mentioning it .. today I heard the guy saying that they are the official sponsor of "Formula 1" !!! … I googled it and it turned out they are sponsors for the Virgin racing Team ... it just shows how desperately they seek some credibility

Saturday, December 11, 2010

The dog days are over.


Yesterday was my last day at school; the university life for me was different. Attending a school that is 9000 miles away from home is no ordinary. It is thrilling and sickening at the same time, as everything else in this world, it has its own perks and drawbacks.

When I was offered this opportunity to go and study abroad I was over the moon, excited, and couldn’t wait to get there. I got everything in order at home before leaving to Malaysia in which I am going to spend the next five years of my life. Happiness and excitement were all over the place for so many reasons; I m gonna be free, living on my own, traveling seeing new faces, new people, new culture at this young age.

All these excitement and happiness were turned to agitation and depression in my first day at school, I remember vividly, when I first entered my dorm room. I hv put my bags on the floor, sat on the bed, putting my hands on my head, thinking to myself what the hell have I done, have I gone out of mind, it is my first day and I already miss my family and my friends like crazy….. what time is it now…. when is the next flight to Egypt, can I catch it. If I went back will I be able to go back to the university I dropped out from. What the fuck, is this gecko?, how I m gonna call home. Is it too hot in here. Is it only me who is thinking about this or all my friends do as well, and finally and most importantly, will I be able to survive 5 years in here. All these questions were rushing to my head, it has been a rough night actually one of the worst, but I told myself everything is gonna be alright isA, and it did el hamduliah.

My university life turned out to be the best life experience I have ever had, the university life built 80 % of my character. Apart from the education you get from the lectures, I believe that life is the greatest teacher of all time, it teaches you a lot and the witty is the one how can get the most out of it. You can learn a lot living alone. I was seventeen when I first came here. I was naïve, kind of stupid, thinking I m very cool. Mostly, like all the teenagers, but my character evolved so quickly I had to transform from a boy to a man in a very short time. I had to adapt to this completely different environment.

In an earlier post I mentioned that the best thing in Malaysia is my friends, and we together made it through the first days together. Honestly speaking, I wouldn’t have made it through these 5 years without them.

It has been great living in Malaysia, great country and great people. Malaysia taught me a lot. I feel sometimes like I owe Malaysia. If you asked me, name one thing that you regret? It will be not getting to know all my classmates more than I already know them; they are great people and it had been my pleasure knowing them all. In the end it is memories that we are left with, and I really hope we only remember the good ones, coz now every one of us will go separate ways and we may or may not meet again, but this is life. Nothing stays the same, and it is time to change. So cherish the good memories and forget all hassle and tension. It is time to write a new chapter, even though the last one was exhilarating, life goes on, and I have always believed that the best is yet to come.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

u never know how it may turn out to be.

Around 8 years ago a friend of mine had his right arm broken. his name is mostafa abd el Fattah or we call him te7a. He broke it in his basketball practice or something I don’t really remember. It was kind of severe so he had to put it in cast for a little longer, and by a little longer I mean it stayed up to five or six weeks. Mohamed el Moez (Wezza) which is a mutual friend, came to me one day looking serious which is very weird of him coz he is always smiling.

Wezza: dude I want to talk to you.

Me: Sure bro, anything.

Wezza: dude this is serious, you can’t tell anyone.

Me: dude what’s up??

Wezza: It is about te7a.

Me: What about him.

Wezza: I went with him last night to the doctor to check on his arm, and the doctor told him that your arm is getting better, but there is another problem.

Me: ….

Wezza: you know his arm has been in cast for almost 6 weeks now, and when he did it the doctor advised him not to put his broken arm anywhere near water, so he listened to him and he did exactly what the doctor asked him to do. So he had never cleaned his hands for six weeks, and it even went worth, since he doesn’t clean his hands. It developed some kind of fungus and a skin disease and it is infectious. So you better not touch his right hand.

Me: shit maaan.. r u shitting me ..

Wezza: I swear man.

I tried to avoid te7a the whole day, but he will come to me and extend his hands to shake mine, but I would defy it, I would hug him or do anything but avoid contact with his hands, I felt terrible for two things, first is because he is my friend, second I felt bad for not telling all my other friends about it, but there was nothing I can do. On that day te7a was becoming extra friendly, he came to me every now and then extending his hands waiting for mine to meet half way, I tried avoiding him for hours, hoping that the day would pass and then I will figure out something to do for later, until te7a and wezza came and told me it is April’s fool you idiot.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

El Taraweh Prayers

In Ramadan the one before the last one, I went to pray “el tarahweh”, we only pray taraweh during the holy month of Ramadan, it is a considerably long prayer where you have to stand still for a long time listening to the Imam reciting Qur’an, it’s a very good thing listening and thinking about the words of god in the Holy Qur’an, but like all Muslims or better say all people our minds drift away, no matter how hard we try to resist it, so in that beautiful prayer, my mind drifted away, I tried to concentrate on the words of god, it was very interesting being able to understand it, feel it and learn from the stories in it, I felt great happiness, felt as if my soul is being nourished, I felt the greatness of god in such simple words that have very profound meanings, only then that I realized that the one standing on my left hand side is south African and the one standing on my right one is Turkmen, which made me feel sympathy for them they don’t understand anything .. literally anything because the Qur’an is recited in Arabic..yet, they still come to the prayers and do what they have been asked to do, so I started speculating.. they might be feeling the meaning of these words in their souls or I don’t know but there must be something great happening here or else they wouldn’t be doing this, or maybe they are just doing it coz that is the orders of god and they have to obey it to be part of the great ideology in which they believe in.

But either way, this is the true meaning of Islam which is submission to god .., they did what they were asked to do coz they really do believe in it, and I shouldn’t feel sympathy to them anymore coz in fact they might have a better understanding of the religion than I do.

Ziad El Adawy

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

learning Vs Education ... ?!?!?!?!


U know when u are in a lecture that is so boring that u start thinking of all the irrelevant stuff in the world, I presume that u all know of it, it happens to me all the time except this lecture on Monday of last week, I went to the lecture 3 minutes late which is the usual, Walked through the door heading to my destination, focusing on my seat in the last row in the classroom, sat down, implied the impression that I really care of what is the lecturer saying .. while in my head ..it’s noisy, filled with ideas … memories .. a lot of more interesting stuff or at least to me than what she/he is really saying.

It came to my head that in less than 3 months I will complete my degree and be an engineer, a person who really counts in the society, thinking back through all what I have learnt in these 5 years, I discovered that academically what I have learnt is too little for that long period of time, and not just that, what bugged me more is that I learnt most of these stuff/subjects all by my own through reading, or doing projects.

So technically I could have got this degree without signing in for a university, I could have got the books and read them and I would have been just as good as now or even better. Or maybe I can get Medicine books and study them and be as good as a Med graduate except that he will get a job coz he has a piece of paper written on it that the person holds a degree in .. whatever, which is the case for Med students or any other student in any major, they just memorize the books, the better you memorize them the higher the marks you get, the better job you get, the quicker you get married, the better you raise your children, thinking that this will make you live a happier life, which is nt necessarily true

It became embedded in us that the more you study the happier ur life will be, I don’t really know who started it coz it is embedded by the media and the society inside everyone of us, so u will find some parents giving their kids hard time for screwing up a quiz in the spring semester of their 5th grad, so it became a well known fact to him that if he didn’t do good at school he won’t be happy, and that lead to studying subjects that u can’t bear, cheating in exams deceiving himself b4 their parents, convinced that he did his part just alright.

This can be reflected In our own society now, you will c a lot of ppl almost everyone these days holds a degree, but he has no signs of education at all, education was formed in the first place to help human beings living a better life, a more civilized life, but if u took a glimpse of what is going on in the world you will find that we are just as barbarous as the cave man, we fight over anything, we have become tribes again.

I saw once in a lecture given by matthew taylor that “it has been a cliché that education is the most valuable resource in the global knowledge economy , it is just as important as fostering empathic capacity to achieving a world of citizens at peace with each other”.

The human brain is the most complicated thing on earth, it has endless powers, god gave it to us to utilize it and to think about everything not to just fill it with information, it is ok filling it with some information, but you have to use it as well, the scientists from b4 they didn’t go to school or anything, they reached the basis of all the sciences we have, just by utilizing their minds, who knows there might be a new science or a new philosophy, that you can discover and put the basis for it.

I read once but I can’t remember where, that there was a student that was just as me and you, he was sleeping in the physics lecture, and he woke up by the end of the lecture, he found that there is an unsolved equation written on the board as an assignment, he copied it down, went to the library to solve it but he couldn’t but he was so persistent and devoted that he will solve it, he kept researching for 2 weeks in all the resources available, until he managed to solve it, he went to his lecturer to tell him that even though this assignment was tough, he was able to solve it, It was a shock to both the lecturer and the student, coz the lecturer told him that these equations weren’t assignment or anything, they were Einstein’s equation that no one was able to prove them in history and he was just sharing them with the class, and that student, he won a noble prize for solving these equations, so if he was awake in the lecture and he knew that this equations were unsolvable he wouldn’t have tried and he wouldn’t have solved it.

Who knows how the world nw would have been like if Socrates was forced to join an engineering school, we would have lost a great philosopher, and what if Averroes (Ibn roshd) was forced to study economics we would have lost a great contributions in a very wide range of sciences and disciplines, I m not saying that we should study all this things, just pick the ones you like, even if it is silly or won’t make a living after.

For example I always made fun of those who studied fashion design, I thought that it is the least important thing in life, but I read a book there was this story of a king in the Arab world who was very wise, long story short, he paid millions of dollars to help a native who wanted to study fashion designing, that king helped him in achieving his dream and paid whatever, so when the king was asked u paid all this money for study of fashion designing you could have invested in the education of engineering or medicine or anything else, he replied that these other branches of sciences are very important but fashion designing is important as well, because you are wat u dress, no matter wat ppl say, investing millions to build the bridges between us and the western world is worth every penny, if you introduced the way u dress to the western culture it will be easier for them to perceive you and accept you, coz u will look to them familiar or one step closer at least.

It turned out that there is no such thing called least important discipline, if you looked at the developed countries you will find that they are offering all kinds of disciplines and they are funding them well enough, is that just a coincidence?.

I was actually about to post this article yesterday but I dunno why I delayed it, however today by coincidence I read an article by Richard Branson it was about Education as well, we all know that Richard Branson didn’t complete his studies but no one dares to call him uneducated or anything, coz that guy is a genius, anyways .. he was mentioning that education can be from different resources, u meet ppl u learn from them, u read u learn, u think u learn… but at the same time he said that studying at a university is important … but it is nt enough and I may quote from him” A diploma can be very useful, since it shows that you have gained the skills and other building blocks required to start your career. But obtaining a diploma is only a first step

So All in all get a degree in whatever u like, and even if u don’t like it nw go with it .. but always educate ur self in the other disciplines u like u don’t have to hold a degree u can be just knowledgeable, a more interesting person .. and sure thing that whatever u learn will help u.

Sorry for taking so looonnngg .., I actually wanted to write more .. but I think this is enough. :D

And these are merely my thoughts .. I just got my brains in gear, u don’t have to agree with them.

Cheers

Ziad.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Goodbyes



Well as a remarkable day was 2day .. i thought of writing this post before i go on the queue to board on my flight back to Egypt .. this time is different because this time i'm going back for good ...
looking back at those past 5 years am really grateful for this experience ..they say one of the hardest thing in life is to find a true friend , i guess i was lucky enough to find many of them here
leaving 2day was certainly one of my most remarkable and emotional moments of my short life .. there was a flash back of memories when i was saying bye to every single person... after the 4th person i was starting crying which was really weird for me something i didnt expect but i couldnt help at the same time
anyway i want to thank all of u guys for all of this great time.. am sure this is the best memory i will ever have and u will always be the closest ppl to my heart . we have grown up together from kids to men sharing all of those great memories.... love u all