My brother went to an event on EARTH DAY in the American University of Dubai, and they had a well known Palestinian folk singer, he is nicknamed as”Abu Arab”. I had the video for a while, its just a part of the concert, I wish I had the full thing. He does have a website, not sure if it is official or not but it has some songs to download, its called Ya Bladi.
Today the 15th of May is the Nakba day, today is the 60th year of the Nakba, for those who do not know Nakba means “The Catastrophe”. On the 15th of May 1948, 60 years ago, Israel which was a newly created state committed ethnic cleansing in Palestine, destroyed hundreds of villages and exiled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Now those refugees are in millions and Israel still deny them their right of return. They are the oldest and largest refugee population who are still waiting a resolution.
I didn’t live it, my father did not live it, we both heard of it, we both listened to thousands of stories, and saw many many documentaries but we could not describe how it was or what it felt like. Actually my father experienced another big event in Palestine, it happened in 1967 and it is called Al-Naksa which means “The Setback”, its the six days war, its when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
Now, I am 32 years old and lived in Dubai all my life, but since I was young and still until today my father keeps reminding us of Palestine, keeps telling me how people used to be, how neighbors used to act, and how that everybody always found happiness in the middle of darkness, pain and suffering. How people helped each other and how people generally used to be nice and kind, he didn’t say that there were no bad people, we are still on earth but he always said that majority of people used to be nicer more caring and more respectful than now, people back then understood the real meaning of things, they understood the real meaning of friendships the real meaning of family, people will always help each other always.
He always tells me how things were simpler back then, how people’s needs were so basic, but he also tells me how his father used to work so hard, how all men had to work hard to bring food on the table, but the story that I guess is imprinted in his mind and he will never ever forget is his story on how when he was 16 years old he woke up on the summer of 1967 finding himself in a ghost neighborhood, all his neighbors are not in their homes, empty homes, empty village.
His father was on a business trip and was not in the house, so he took his six years old little brother and ran to find others running too, it was quickly understood what was happening, he kept running until he reached a farms area and there the Israeli planes started bombing, so he started seeing dead bodies on the way and people dying in front of his and his little brother’s eyes, he keeps telling me how lucky they were that they were between hits, while they were running the Israeli aircrafts would fly low and hit and fly up again and so on all the way until they reached a high fence, he quickly threw his brother, yes he physically threw him to the other side and then he climbed and went to the other side himself. Still they had to keep walking, not only them but a huge number of people they walked and walked seeing people crying, shouting, injured, and dead. He saw a father with his kids crying over the body of the mother, he heard people crying asking for help, he saw women mourning their husbands, sons, and daughters.
His little brother is tired, he carried him, and kept walking, carefully moving, until after hours they reached the Jordanian borders and after passing the border and on his way to Amman he suddenly saw his uncle driving a truck, so he drove them to Amman to meet with his father later that day.
I always have asked him to write his experience, he keeps telling me “There are no words to describe it, as much as you try, there are simply no words”.
So in the end I would like to say one thing more, Israel thinks that we will forget, that time will make us believe the lie that is Israel. We all say no, we will never forget, and those are not just words, those are facts, we never forgot, and we will never forget, Israel might fool mislead misinformed Americans and Europeans, but not us. We have the history, generation after generation we will talk and we will tell, our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, WE WILL TELL.
Palestine I never saw you, but my heart beats for you, you are the reason, you are the dream, and I will see you, this darkness will go and this sadness I feel will leave and I will see you LIBERATED soon.
Just around a month after releasing Firefox 3 Beta 1, here comes Beta 2. Just like the first time, this is just beta, so only use if you don’t mind unstable browser and incompatible extensions.
One major improvement every Firefox user was looking for in this release is a solution for memory leaks and the huge memory footprint, and guess what, at last more than 300 memory leaks has been fixed, 11 improvements of the memory footprint and a new XPCOM cycle collector which should eliminate many more memory leaks.
Other new features include new download manager which allows you to easily locate the downloaded file and display where the file came from. A new autocomplete function in the location bar allows you to just type part of the title or tag or the address of a page to see matches from your history or your bookmarks. A new Smart Bookmarks folder allows you to have a look at the most pages you visited or the latest bookmarked pages or latest tagged.
In general Firefox 3 is just looking better and better with every beta release, to have a look on all the latest changes in Beta 2, you can read the Release Notes.
Google Docs, Zoho Writer and now Adobe Buzzword. Since the start of the rise of online document editors, I always asked myself, why those websites do not use flash instead of Ajax and I still don’t really get it. I always thought "FLASH" would be better and faster. I know that "Live Documents" will also use the FLASH technology.
Adobe Buzzword although came a bit late to the game, but there are couple or more things that makes it better than the others. Obviously being in FLASH is the first that comes to mind, it really makes it super fast. Buzzword is far more simpler and easy on the eye’s too. It works on any operating system, your computer just needs to have Adobe Flash installed, which is available in most computers by default anyway.
To read a full review click More…
As soon as you finish your registration you are quickly switched to the main page. In the main page you can basically either create a new document, open a saved document in Buzzword or open a document from your harddisk.
The beauty of Buzzword, being in flash, the menus are smooth and fast. And nicely organized, and on your first look you would get the wrong impression that BUZZWORD lacks features and options.
But you will be very mistaken to think so, just click on any of the icons and it will slide revealing various features. The picture below shows some of them.
We shouldn’t forget the pull down menus too, which also hold a number of different kind of options.
The "History" feature keeps track of different changes that you make on a document so you can switch between them easily.
In Buzzword you can also insert Pictures and Comments.
Document sharing, you can make a document private or share it with others in a very simple way, setting a role for the person you are sharing the document with. There are three roles. Co-Author where he can do anything with the document, Reviewer where he can read and comment on the document, and Reader where he is only allowed to read the document.
There are other great features also, such as Zooming, using a slidebar you can zoom the document in and out which automatically resize everything in it. You can also insert special characters, and Offcourse, the automatic word count is useful when you are limited to number of words.
Now that is all great stuff in BUZZWORD, but there are couple of things that I found negative in it, nothing is perfect in this world. Anyway, the first thing that bothered me is the limited number of fonts available, which are only seven fonts.
The second thing is what happens sometimes when you upload a picture, it took me three tries to upload an image, a message keeps coming up stating that "Buzzword could not contact the server to complete our action". I tried doing this using IE, Firefox, FLOCK which is Firefox anyway, and I tried it from my Toshiba G30 Notebook and My Desktop PC. Sometimes the image is uploaded from the first time, but the error window do appear quite often.
In the end I would like to say that Adobe Buzzword is a good, easy and fast Word Processor. Couple of enhancements here and there and it will defiantly become THE web REAL Word Processor.
Firefox 3 skins will fit the visual appearance of the OS its being used on, so if you are using Windows Vista it will look something like IE7. Am not sure if this visual integration is a good thing or not, I donno but i guess we just got used to how firefox looks. But I wonder how they would do this with linux, with all those flavours out there.
Of-course there is allot of new features, a new rendering engine, a new way to organize your bookmarks, different sets of icons of each OS, but what i am really looking forward is a new feature where you can navigate to a bookmark or a history item by typing part of the name or URL.
Today the 15th of May is the Nakba day, today is the 60th year of the Nakba, for those who do not know Nakba means “The Catastrophe”. On the 15th of May 1948, 60 years ago, Israel which was a newly created state committed ethnic 
cleansing in Palestine, destroyed hundreds of villages and exiled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Now those refugees are in millions and Israel still deny them their right of return. They are the oldest and largest refugee population who are still waiting a resolution. 
Now, I am 32 years old and lived in Dubai all my life, but since I was young and still until today my father keeps reminding us of Palestine, keeps telling me how people used to be, how neighbors used to act, and how that everybody always found happiness in the middle of darkness, pain and suffering. How people helped each other and how people generally used to be nice and kind, he didn’t say that there were no bad people, we are still on earth but he always said that majority of people used to be nicer more caring and more respectful than now, people back then understood the real meaning of things, they understood the real meaning of friendships the real meaning of family, people will always help each other always.
So in the end I would like to say one thing more, Israel thinks that we will forget, that time will make us believe the lie that is Israel. We all say no, we will never forget, and those are not just words, those are facts, we never forgot, and we will never forget, Israel might fool mislead misinformed Americans and Europeans, but not us. We have the history, generation after generation we will talk and we will tell, our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, WE WILL TELL.
Just around a month after releasing 
Other new features include new download manager which allows you to easily locate the downloaded file and display where the file came from. A new autocomplete function in the location bar allows you to just type part of the title or tag or the address of a page to see matches from your history or your bookmarks. A new Smart Bookmarks folder allows you to have a look at the most pages you visited or the latest bookmarked pages or latest tagged.
