featuring technology tips and music recommendations with a personal touch

God bless Web 2.0 for giving us the technology to share our passion easily with the rest of the world.

Some of you, even my friends, don’t know that I am passionate about photography ever since high school. At that time, I won the photography class award for creating a portrait photo composition of my brother, using a darkroom technique of combining two negatives to create transparency effect in the composite photo (anybody know what that technique is called?). The winning photo was also featured as a Photo of the Day on PhotoPoint.com in October 6 2001. However, I lost that precious photo when that site went out of business on December 2001. I still hope of finding that photo stashed somewhere, someday.

Anyways, fast forward to 2007, my interest in photography is still on and that’s why I hang out at Flickr almost daily. I don’t take photos anymore, but I enjoy browsing interesting photos. Coincidently, “interestingness” is the exact term Flickr uses to describe a regularly updated patch of the most “beautiful, amazing, moving and striking” new photos on Flickr.

Here is where Web 2.0 comes into play:

I needed a way to get those photos delivered to me as soon as there is a new patch. Naturally, I was looking for an RSS feed for only the interesting photos on Flickr. While that wasn’t available on Flickr website, a simple search in Google returned a result of some guy who posted this very exact RSS feed. Here is the address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/InterestingFlickr

So I subscribed to this feed and I usually receive 100+ new photos a day in my Google Reader. Granted, not all of them are interesting to me. However, there are usually 5-10 photos a day that simply stand out as plain gorgeous and amazing. I usually add those ones to my Flickr favorites collection, and I’ve been doing that for the past couple of months.

Now here is the punch line: if you like what you see, then you can too subscribe to my favorite photos stream using this RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AlaeddinFavPhotos

Think of this collection as the combined goodness of Flickr’s finest photos, excluding the almost-pornographical ones that might get you fired at work. I promise to keep this stream of photos consistently fresh and interesting.
How to get your own favorite photos feed:

1. Get Firefox browser.
2. Install Greasemonkey extension.
3. Install Flickr user favorites feed script.
4. Find and share your favorites RSS feed link in your Flickr favorites page.

I’m back from India!

I’ve been on a 2-week trip to India attending a 10-day course series offered by the renowned usability consulting firm called Human Factors International (HFI) (read more in my original post).

So I’m now in Dubai airport with 8 hours of waiting time till my connecting flight back home. That’s plenty of time to reflect on the whole trip and that’s what I’m going to try and do here.

Overall, I’m really glad to say that objective of the trip was achieved in excess of what I’ve expected. I got out of the courses with such solid foundation of the material that it feels like money well spent. But what’s more important is that it reaffirmed my passion for this field since it was my first official exposure to the principles and methodologies followed in the world of usability and human-computer interaction design. I can safely say now that I’ve truly found my career passion!

For the rest of this post, I’m going to make a quick run through some of my observations and experiences during the trip in general. The outline will be as follows:

• Training courses
• First impressions
• Hotel
• Food
• City (Bangalore)
• People
• Funniest moments

Click here to continue reading →

Four months in the making, the curtains are finally drawn on my first ever public speech which was, by all measures, a big success!

Of course, when we’re talking success here, we’re talking relative one taking in consideration this being kind of my first public one and the fact that it’s the first time I’m presenting this widely popular phenomenon, known as Web 2.0.

That being said, the speech wasn’t without fair share of flaws. I received some valuable feedback from the audience and the organizers. However, the general feedback was that this presentation was so awesome it’s a shame many people couldn’t make it. Well my friend, that is a good enough testament, for me, for now!

Let’s take a look at the good, the bad and the ratings.

Click here to continue reading →

Well I’m back. For those who didn’t know, I’ve been on a brief business trip to Jordan, Amman from 16/11 - 19/11 2006, the objective of which is to set up my company’s development team which will take care of outsourcing our software development requirements here in Jeddah.

Overall, it was a pretty easy trip. Aside from flying out really early in the morning (thanks for the ride Basheer!) and landing really late at night (thanks for the ride taxi man), the rest of the trip went pretty smoothly and we achieved our objectives.

The major highlights of the trip include seeing my aunt family in Amman. It was really refreshing to get to see them all once again. We had so much fun. I don’t know what has changed since my last visit, but we all seemed to click and have fun and laugh ourselves out. It was really fun!

Another dear ones I got see were my best friends Reem and Yasmeen from back in university. As you could see in the photo album below, we too had some really good times. We went out first to a restaurant, UrbalGrill, which Reem claimed to serve the best hamburger in Amman, and it DID! To the point where I made special arrangements to take my aunt family on the last day again to it to try it out, and they too fell in love with it!

We were supposed to go see a movie but it was getting late so we just stopped by a crowded mall and had some dessert. It wasn’t the most pleasant setting you could find but the company of my friends were far more important. Overall, we had a really good time and a night to remember!

Jordan itself, on the other hand, was the least impressive thing in the whole trip. A LOT has not changed since my last trip and I seem to think the country is going from bad to worse in virtually every aspect. I care not to go into details with everything that’s wrong with the country, but I would say that if this place was to pick up pace with the rest of the world, it’s gonna need some serious makeover. For me, Jordan is a place I stop by to see my loved ones and then move on, nothing more, and nothing less!

Will I do it again if I had the chance to? Absolutely! Seeing everybody, well not everybody coz I sadly didn’t get the chance to see some other good friends of mine, is so much worth it. I do hope I get sent out on another trip sometime in the near future.

Jordan Trip 2006