Business as usual

Driving up hill was definitely a daunting task, but hell, it was well worth it
The hotel is overlooking the sea as you can see, the other side of the hotel overlooks green valleys and high mountains.
Down at the beach it feels really humid, but up here, it was really nice. The hotel is a 5 star hotel, but strangely, the service was not!!!!
The real view is breath taking; this picture has got its resolution reduced to decrease its size, but still it gives the impression.

Sun Set at the beach

Vacation time

Starting tomorrow, i will be on a 5 days vacation.
Why tomorrow specifically? because i thought tomorrow is a day off due to Isra2 and Mi3raj occasion. Right? Worng!
Yes it is Isra2 occasion, but it is no longer a holiday.

Reservation was made two weeks back, and as such, Vacation goes on!

Will report back to work next monday Aug 3rd, until then, nothing related to databases, j2ee, ETL, OLAP or bits and bytes please

A Memoir of Moods and Madness

An unquiet mind, this paperback book is authored by Kay Redfield Jamison
I ordered the book and i will receive it anytime soon.

Unquiet Mind

you cannot simply snap out of it

Welcome back

The house of your dreams

On Thursday July 10th, we held school re-union for many of the pre-historic school friends. The venue was the house of my grandmother, the late Abdul Raheem Jardaneh - Jabal Amman. The house was built in 1935 at a street previously known as Mango Str, or Asfoor Str, but formally Omar Ibn Al-Khatab just 100 meter before Books@cafe. The house was renovated and decorated by my aunte Zaha Jardaneh Mango who posses a natural talent in interior design. The first invited guest walked in and then out thinking that they were entering a museum and not a house. The weather was magnificent and the setting nothing less than magical. I took a few pictures to explain why

A Warm Welcom

A little bit of History

One day back in 2003, 2004 I used this room as a study room while discussing Final projects for a group of students

a miniature dining room (this room was one an office ). Please note the floor

Same room but zooming at one of the walls where a full size painting of Jerusalem fills the entire wall

looking inside the same room from the Garden

looking outside from the main entrance

This is a picture taking at a low altitude. The ceramics are the original 1935

Beautiful formation

This is a Radio bought in 1937. This is Pre Transistor Radio, meaning that this Radio was built before the invention of the Transistor (probably using Vaccum Tube technology)

Part of the Garden

Also in the Garden

Some of the Guest: Nadia, Lara, Lama, Ghadeer, Maha and Ni3mat

There is also an old library and could not but take a few shots of some books that emanate history

look at the date on which this book was purchased (21/12/1920)

This book was published in 1895 (some 113 years ago) and is as good as new

So, you think you can read Arabic, read on, it is an Organic Chemstry book. By the way, my grandfather was a pharmacist





Read the following section as well

Congratulations

and Welcome back!

It is home coming season; People graduating from colleges, expats coming for summer vacation, however, foremost among those coming back are the Lebanese heroes who were held captive in Israeli jails. And foremost among those, is Sameer Qintar. Sameer was caught in Nahariya while executing a heroic mission way back then (1979). He was 17. Sameer was sentenced for over than 500 years. He was back to Lebanon as part of the Hizbulallah - Israel prisoners swap.

The IRONY is the following

Jordan and Egypt signed peace treaties with Israel long time ago and as we speak there are still Jordanian and Egyptian prisoners in Israeli jails. Lebanon on the other hand, did not sign and peace treaty and got its prisoners Free! Any lessons learned?

أخترت لكم

Travelling again

I am on my way to Muscat - Oman for two nights then another two nights at Manama Bahrain before i am back to Amman.
I have not been traveling lately. My last trip was a 2 day visit to Dubai on May 13th.
Business trips are no longer exciting to me at all. I try to avoid them when i can. However, they are inevitable.

what to exepct! well High temperature, high humidity, high hotel prices~

Pollution

This time i mean INFORMATION POLLUTION. I was hit by it. I can be diagnosed with new form of Illness. I am informationally polluted. OR, as some may like to call it. I am suffering from Information Overload.

When i first thought of it, it was kind of a humerous gesture on my side. But when i searched the net, i found a lot being written on this subject.

Its toll is becoming obvious on me. Even today, when i wanted to jot a few words on this blog, i had difficulty remebering how to login. Yes, i have not been in the best of my moods to write anything lately, but it has not been that long of a time to wonder how to login.

The acceleration at which information channels are filled and refilled is nothing but amazing. Needless to say, people like me, working in the field of information technology suffer the most. Without going into details, 16 years back, ORACLE corp owned around 16 products ( i could at that time list them along with their prices). One Oracle reporesentative told me last week that, as we speak, there are about 10,000 products. I do not know how true this is, but let us assume that there are about 1000. Just thinking of this immedaitely instigates a sense of loss, distraction and frustration being a person ambitious to maintain a goold level of knowledge about them. Well this is going to be a dauting and an impossible task. Trying to abandon them is just as stressful.

To get a feel that i am not kidding, this is an extract from "http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/chinneg.html" than can shed some light

"The acceleration of change is accompanied by an increase in the information needed to keep up with all these developments. This too leads to psychological, physical and social problems. A world-wide survey (Reuters, 1996) found that two thirds of managers suffer from increased tension and one third from ill-health because of information overload. The psychologist David Lewis, who analysed the findings of this survey, proposed the term "Information Fatigue Syndrome" to describe the resulting symptoms. Other effects of too much information include anxiety, poor decision-making, difficulties in memorizing and remembering, and reduced attention span (Reuters, 1996; Shenk, 1997). These effects merely add to the stress caused by the need to constantly adapt to a changing situation"

Find the Lost History

Even if you must go all the way to China, said the prophet, “Seek Knowledge”
In an era when the relationship between Islam and the West seems fraught with misunderstanding, how many of us realize that Muslim intellectual achievement was once envy of the world? In magnificent centers of learning, from Damascus to Baghdad and Cairo, mathematicians and a thousand year ago developed, algorithms, and trigonometry- the foundations upon which modern technology is build. Inventors devised the crankshaft and early versions of the torpedo and the parachute. Physicians’ techniques ranged from orthodontia to asthma care to tracheotomy. And Muslim astronomers calculated our planet’s diameter and circumference t a remarkable degree of accuracy- at a time when Europeans thought the Earth was flat

If you liked what you have just read, you shall enjoy more reading the book. It is called “Lost History, the enduring legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists.
You will find the above paragraph on the leaflet.

The book is authored by Michael Hamilton Morgan, and forwarded by His majesty Kind Abdulla second of Jordan.

My mother asked me to order it for her through Amazon, and I ordered two.
It is valuable book indeed. A must have

Ammar Sajdi