Shref in Life

~5 months left since I joined the army. what changed?? I feel somewhat more athletic and gained experience in working with a wide range of personality types .. from the smartest to the dumbest. my average number of sleeping hours is 6 to 7 hours in the normal days. it can be 4 to 5 hours only if I have to do night guarding service. I learned to do every thing by myself without help from others. the lack for tools doesn't allow us to not finish the work. living in a tough environment is very hard, but the results of this experience makes you better. I still have 15 months coming before I finish my mandatory military service and I hope that I 'll keep surviving.

On the other hand, my social life is collapsing. whenever I come for vacation, I spend that time home without going out. I don't know the news of my friends. maybe the only thing that keeps me updated about what happens in the outside world whenever I return is my RSS reader, twitter ,and FaceBook. in the army, I like the fact that I'm working on a very expensive and powerful machine, but it's not a computer. I'm worried about how low my programming experience and level 'll go down after a year from now. all what I'm able to do now is taking programming books with me and coding on papers, and this is what I was doing through the previous months.

I 'll be here till friday, then I 'll go in a 12 hours travel again to the military base. so bad that I won't be able to attend the Agile Egypt day, but I hope that my next vacation timing 'll allow me to attend EDC 2008 (Egypt Developers Conference). Mohamed Meligy said that this year it will be in mid April.

this days I feel happy as I got some good news about some friends:
the 1st is that Mohamed Hossam's marriage is today.
the 2nd is that Mohamed Hossam 'll join the work force at Microsoft, he 'll join the live.com team.
the other thing is Tarik Ibrahim's post about the waited baby :)
I wanna congratulate them and wish them luck and happiness in their lives.

I know that some friends were waiting to catch me on msn messenger for a chat, but I'm sorry as I have problem with my windows OS that needs some time to investigate it. I didn't want to lose some of my precious vacation time, so I moved to my Ubuntu OS. if you want, you can catch me on twitter or facebook only as I don't like Pidgin that much, I just us it for IRC and Japper.

I know, it's a very late post. but I didn't have chance to write it earlier because of many reasons that you won't care to know about.
now, I want to remember what I did in 2007.

- contributed to ZendFramework (my 1st open source contribution) .
- joined another company .
- wrote a post about something stupid I found in careermideast.com , but I want to thank them now as they fixed this problem.
 (ps: days ago I saw the same problem with mazika.com , I wish they can fix it too ) .
- started being an active IRC user, specially on freenode.net  #phpc .
- joined the SK DemoDay 2
- become a 20 years old guy.
- joined the Egyptian Army to start my mandatory military service.

In 2008 I wish to (isA) :
- be a better programmer.
- start my CS studies.
- get back to playing soccer.
- gain more confidence and training to give public speeches better.
- restudy Deutsch

I'm online again. after spending 30 days in the army, I can see how I wasn't caring enough about time and how luxurious my life was. my family isn't that rich, but the fact that you can set on a chair and eat what you want whenever you want is a luxury by it self.

if I compare what I imagined about the life in the army and what I saw in these 30 days, I will say that the army isn't that frightening. its just a well organized place where every thing you do, have to be done perfectly and in time. you will life with your comrades 24/7, so you will know each other well. it's a good environment to find good friends.

I remember that I was planning to write about this experience, but they warned us allot about talking about the daily routine or whatever happens in the army. "what happens in the army, stays in the army". I didn't finish my 45 days yet. I still have another 2 to 3 weeks to spend in the training center. I came home 2 days ago and I will leave tomorrow -isA-.

it looks like many things happened on the internet in the last month. my mail box and feed reader are full of new items.

1. Flock - a new browser
I read about it on my twitter page. it looks like @ramsey , @CalEvans ,and many others left Firefox and moved to this new browser. I will quote Ben Ramsey here :

ramsey Flock left open all night with all my extensions enabled. No memory leaks or slow load times. Pages still load fast! Woo-hoo!

2. the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5
my knowledge about .Net will start going down so fast starting from this moment. maybe I will be back to .Net when they release v5.0 .

3.  iPod touch.
I 'll love to buy an iPod touch instead of an iPhone, but I will wait till steve jobs increases the storage or lowers the price.

4. Kindle - Amazon's e-book reader
I need to read more about this thing. till now I don't know if I will be able to read my old PDF books on it or not ?? another thing, the price is high.



what else happened in the last 30 days ?! if you know something else, just tell me please.

After 1 hour (at 1:00 am), I will be heading to the training center in Cairo. they call it the "HiKeyStep". this morning, they told me that I will be serving in the "Leadership organs - اجهزة القيادة". I don't know what I will be doing there, but I like the name ... yeah, "Leadership" .. sounds cool.

I have to be in the training center at 7:00 am. I'm getting my bag ready for the travel,  they told us not to get any foods or mobiles.

so, I will see you all after 45 days -en sha2 Allah- .

bye

It's long time since my last post here. I don't know the reason, but maybe it's because I was tired, depressed or had nothing to say. many things happened in the last 6 weeks that kept me overwhelmed.

The biggest thing was my struggle to finish my military service papers. I'm now considered to be a soldier in the army starting from 23-10-2007. it will start with living for 45 days in the Army's training center. there is where they change us from normal citizens to army soldiers. every one I met that been in the army before said that these 45 days are the worst days for every soldier. it's not about the heavy training, but it's about the brainwashing.

Anyway, I'm trying to keep my self thinking about how interesting is learning new things and living in a tough environment. ok, it's not that interesting, but I will keep pretending that its the coolest thing ever since the 4-wheel bike.

Other thing, I now own the domain shreef.com . I will keep it forwarding to here till I get some time to work on the new website. this will depend on how the things will go in the army -isA-. I don't know where I will be serving yet.

I'm not available on any IM service now. I just keep updating my twitter and facebook . I was thinking about blogging my experience after coming back from the 45 training days in the army, but Korayem remembered me about the fact that at this time, I mostly won't be able to remember what blogging is. :) lol