Amjad's Blog

Sudan: Day 1

2009-07-17T16:22:00.005-05:00

I just arrived in Sudan for a two weeks stay after being away from the country for more than 3 years. Of course, things have changed during these 3 years. New buildings, new roads, new restaurants, new hotels, new cars and even new people. By new people I mean my baby cousins whom were born during these 3 years. Not to mention how fast the kids grew up.

For my trip to Sudan I flew Qatar Airways and it was my first time flying Qatar Airways. Once I'm back in Oman I'll post about my experience with Qatar Airways since it was my first time flying Qatar Airways.

Anyways, things in Sudan are not too bad. I'm only staying here for 2 weeks and I only came to see my grandmothers, aunts and uncles. I've been away for too long and I need to keep in touch with my relatives. After 2 weeks I will be back in Oman and stay there for another 3 weeks until I go back to the US.

During my 2 weeks stay in Sudan I'm planning to update the blog on a daily basis, with a post briefly summarizing how my day went and also letting the readers have an idea about life in Sudan.

Today is Friday, and it's the day when families get together in one house and have breakfast or lunch together. The weekend for the public sector here is Friday & Saturday. Private sector has the option of giving one or two days off, but most private schools & universities only take Friday as their day off. So all families make sure to get together on Fridays, when everybody in the country is off.

Today I didn't do much. I just had breakfast at my grandmother's house, and then after Friday prayers I went to visit some relatives from my father's side. After that I came to my aunt's house and that's where I am now.

There are tons of new restaurants & cafes and I'm looking forward to going to a couple of them. There's no way that I will get a chance to go to all of them during 2 weeks, so I will just go to the ones my cousins recommend.

In Oman

2009-07-01T22:31:00.004-05:00

So... I've been in Oman for 3 days now but I was too lazy to update my blog, not to mention that I was suffering (and still suffering) from jet lag and stuff like that.

The heat in Oman is not too bad... but I think it's a little bit worse than last year. All is good though, as long as I'm home between my family :) ..

I'm really hoping to revive this blog at least during my stay here in Oman and make it as active as possible. We will see how things go...

Review: Zazzle.com

2009-06-26T18:24:00.005-05:00

For a long time now I wanted to get one of those t-shirts that said "Drill Baby Drill" or "Drill Here Now" and stuff like that. The Society of Petroleum Engineers chapter in my university had a couple of these t-shirts, but whenever I went to get one I didn't find my size. So last week it occurred to me to customize my own "Drill Baby Drill" t-shirt!

I searched on the web for similar t-shirts and said maybe I will find them online. Google landed me on Zazzle.com which I never heard of before. I then got to know that Zazzle.com is a website where you can customize t-shirts, mugs, posters, and many other things. They already had customized t-shirts saying "Drill Baby Drill" on the front as you see above, but then I decided to modify the t-shirt and put a picture of an oil field on the back of the t-shirt. I provided them with a large resolution picture of the infamous Lost Hills Oil Field in California as you see below, and also I decided to review my whole experience with Zazzle.com.

At first I was hesitant to order the t-shirt because I thought I didn't have enough time to receive it. I ordered the t-shirt last weekend and on the day I ordered it, I had exactly one week until I leave the country for my summer vacation, so I was a bit worried that I wouldn't receive it before I leave, or else it would just get lost in the mail and I would never get it. The website said that it takes only 24 hours to manufacture the product. And usually it takes 2 - 3 days maximum for me to receive stuff when I order them online, so I decided to take the risk and order the t-shirt even though I had only 5 business days in total. I ordered the t-shirt on Saturday night, and I thought they wouldn't process it until Monday since I ordered it in the weekend, but to my surprise, as soon as I placed my order, it was processed and sent to production. I could track the whole thing through their website, which was really cool, and then when they shipped it, they gave me the tracking number for the shipment to track it with UPS.

It didn't take exactly 24 hours for them to manufacture the product. Well, if we don't count Saturday & Sunday, it did indeed take 24 hours, or maybe less. So I was quite satisfied with how fast they processes my order, and then the time it took to get delivered to my door is out of their hand anyways.

After knowing about Zazzle.com, there were two things I wanted to know about them that I couldn't find in the reviews I read about them online. So, I want to cover these two things here in my review. The first thing is the time it takes to manufacture the product, which I already talked about above and I'm quite satisfied with. The second thing is the quality of the product, which I'm going to cover below.

To my surprise, the quality of the t-shirt is beyond my expectation. I thought the t-shirt would be one of those cheap crappy t-shirts you get from companies and businesses as commercials, but I was wrong. The t-shirt alone cost me about $18.00, and I had to add $3.00 over that for the picture I wanted to be on the back of the t-shirt. So I was thinking this t-shirt better be of good quality and worth the $18.00. It is indeed worth the $18.00. Also, some of you might think why didn't I just take a picture to the nearest photo shop and let them print it on a white t-shirt. The answer to that is that these people do it differently. If I had a local photo shop do this thing for me, the picture would have worn out the very first time I wash & iron the t-shirt. But with the way Zazzle.com did this, I can wash and iron the t-shirt normally and nothing would happen to the quality of the picture.

Anyways, I feel that this post is getting too long so I need to stop here. In general, I just want to say that I was very satisfied with my experience with Zazzle.com. When I come back from my vacation, I might order some other cool stuff from them.

P.S.: Too bad the t-shirt cannot be worn from both sides, hehe...

Egypt vs. USA ad

2009-06-21T17:34:00.001-05:00

You know you're an Engineer when...

2009-06-21T12:26:00.005-05:00

1. You have no life and can prove it mathematically.

2. You can remember 7 passwords, but not your anniversary.

3. To you "couples" and "moments" have nothing to do with love.

4. You use Greek letters just as often as English.

5. You spend Friday nights doing homework.

6. You know vector calculus but you can't remember how to do long division.

7. The further you advance into engineering, the low-er your spel...ling abil(e?)lty gets.

8. You assume that a "horse" is a "sphere" in order to make the math easier.

9. Your professor asks you where your homework is, you claim to have accidentally determined its momentum so precisely, that according to Heisenberg it could be anywhere in the universe.

10. You understand at least five of these indicators.

What a beautiful day...

2009-06-19T15:57:00.001-05:00

The weather is so nice today!

Sent from my iPhone

Swine Flu Dilemma

2009-06-17T09:52:00.003-05:00

It looks like lots of countries in the Middle East like Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar AND Oman have got their first confirmed cases of swine flu, and it also looks that these cases were of young students who recently came back from the US and different countries with many swine flu cases.

I've just heard that Oman got the first 3 confirmed cases of returning students from the US. Bahrain also 3 cases of returning students from the US, as well as Qatar, Jordan and Yemen. Sweet. I'm not worried one bit about catching the swine flu in my city here in the US. Up until now, there are only 4 confirmed cases in my city, which is not too bad for a city with a population of 250,000. I'm only worried about catching this thing in the airport or my flight back home. I will be traveling through Houston, one of the largest hubs in the country and also one of the top cities in the US with the most swine flu (H1N1 or whatever) confirmed cases. Travelers will be in Houston from all over the country, and they will be traveling to different places. And the bad thing is that I will have a 6-hrs transit in Houston + the 15 hrs flight to Dubai, so I need to be extra cautious when I travel next week.

Oil Production Has Peaked

2009-06-11T11:21:00.010-05:00

Well, the title of this post is probably no surprise to you. What you're going to see in the video probably is also not a surprise to you, but I thought of sharing it because this is part of a DVD that I found very interesting.

This DVD was played to us in our freshman year when we took Introduction to Petroleum Engineering. It was kind of scary to some students as they thought that this video was telling them that they were not on the right track, but other students thought otherwise. Interestingly enough, different people have various opinions and theories about the issue of peaking out. You can see by yourself that the professionals interviewed in this video have different opinions about the issue. Also, different people in the industry that I talked to have various opinions about this which is very interesting...

My two cents:

Peaking out doesn't necessarily mean that we are running out of oil. Different peaks can take place at different periods of time. While I don't believe that we are actually running out of oil, I do definitely acknowledge that we are running out of the "easy stuff" that flows out to the surface by itself once the well is drilled. These days oil companies put a lot of money on producing heavy oil and deep deep deep oil wells, which means that we are running out of the easy stuff.

Various prices of gasoline

2009-05-20T01:02:00.011-05:00

In Oman I'm used to the fact that all gas stations have a fixed price for gas per liter. Whether crude oil is at $150 a barrel or $20 a barrel, the price of gasoline is fixed and it's applied to all the different gas stations in the country. So, when I came here to the US I had to adjust to the fact that gasoline prices here are not fixed like Oman, and different stations charge different rates. By different stations I thought it was just different companies, like Chevron, Fina, Shell, etc... but I didn't know that the price of gas from the SAME company can also vary from location to location.

I just got back from the movies, and on my way home, I passed by four different Fina gas stations. To my surprise, none of them had the same price of gas. The very first one was priced at $2.16 a gallon, the second one $2.28 if I'm not mistaken, the third one about $2.17 and the last one, which is right next to my place, at $2.25.

That was a bit surprising to me, because I always thought that gas prices can vary from company to company, but not from location to location by the very same company! Little did I know...

[Photo Courtesy of Indahnesia.com]

Meaningless?

2009-05-14T15:45:00.010-05:00

I remember in Physics we were taught that numbers without units are meaningless. I also remember that I always had a couple of marks deducted whenever my numbers did not have units next to them because they were meaningless without the units. So, the sign above is absolutely meaningless, according to the principles of Physics.

I don't know about other cities, but I noticed that in my city, all speed limit signs have numbers without units. It's true that the US still works with the old British system of units, meaning that speed is measured by miles per hour (mph) and almost everyone knows that. All cars in the US are designed to be on mph, but what if I had an imported car and it was on km/h (kilometers per hour) and not mph? Or I was new to the city and I didn't know that the US is still using the British system of units? Assuming that everyone knows that speed is measured by mph is technically wrong. After all, you know what do you make of u & me when you "assume" things ;)

So, does the sign above mean that the speed limit is 20 mph, 20 km/h, 20 cm/h, 20 m/s or what exactly? :)

Recession + low oil prices = price increase?

2009-05-02T09:37:00.003-05:00

I just noticed that a 590 mL bottle of coke now costs $1.40 (after sales tax) instead of $1.35. Very minimal difference, but the thought that such an increase in times of recession + low oil prices doesn't make sense to me.

Something funny

2009-05-01T01:53:00.010-05:00

The so-called Swine Flu that's going around these days has reminded me of a funny thing that I would like to share with you guys. I rarely recall my funniest/happiest/saddest moments in life, so it would be nice to document them on the blog whenever I recall them.

Back when I was a kid, when I was 6-7 years old maybe, there was the mad-cow disease going around. At the time the mad-cow disease was around, I always refused to eat anything from McDonald's. Every weekend when we went out, my siblings and parents would eat from McDonald's CCC (in Oman), and I would let my father go get me a small super supreme pizza from Pizza Hut in CCC, as if the super supreme pizza didn't have beef and that beef wouldn't have been brought from an affected cow just like the burgers :) ... Everyone in the family used to make fun of me, but every single time they went to McDonald's, I insisted that I get a pizza because I didn't want to eat the burgers of an affected cow, lol.

I just recalled this and I'm laughing so hard at how silly I was. My mother always told me that the pizza also had beef, but I still insisted that it was fine to eat pizza, lol.

I want cowboy boots!

2009-04-25T01:44:00.005-05:00

Everyone here comes to class wearing cowboy boots and sometimes cowboy hats as well. I'm feeling left out!

I think I will get myself a pair of cowboy boots sooner or later. How can I tell my kids that I studied in Texas without having a pair of cowboy boots and hats?

Hummus at walmart?

2009-04-18T18:24:00.001-05:00

I really don't know how long has this Hummus been available at walmart, but just recently I got to learn from a friend that walmart actually sells ready-made Hummus. The other day we were BBQ'ing and one of my friends brought these nicely packaged Hummus and everyone was surprised because they never noticed such packaged Hummus in the Mediterranean grocery stores in town, and he said that he got them from walmart. Nobody knew that walmart had such Hummus, and if you ask me, it tasted so darn good! So, after that day I immediately went to walmart to get some of their Hummus.

I stopped shopping at walmart on a regular basis because I found better alternatives, but the small things like this that I can't find elsewhere is what takes me back to walmart every now and then. If you are interested, you can find this nicely packaged and ready-made Hummus at the deli section in walmart, next to the meats & cheeses, and actually there are different types, like the classic Hummus pictured above, and other types that contain garlic in the Hummus, pine nuts, red pepper etc... I saw at least four different types, but I preferred to take the plain classic Hummus, without anything. It's so darn good! Now I eat it all the time.

Is the Hummus really so popular in America? First the Hummus sandwich at Which Wich? restaurant, and now this ready-made Hummus at walmart!

Domino's responds

2009-04-17T19:38:00.010-05:00

First, these two nasty workers of Domino's mess around in a Domino's store and record the video above. Then, Domino's president publishes the video below on YouTube apologizing to Domino's customers and assuring them that serious actions were taken.

I am glad that Domino's responded and took serious actions, because this is extremely disgusting.

via English Sabla

Macs

2009-04-16T15:25:00.007-05:00

We have a bunch of iMacs and Mac Pros on campus, and from time to time, I try using them to get used to the Mac operating system, just in case one day I decide to get a Mac or I need to deal with one.

For some reason, using a Mac makes me feel sooooo dumb! I don't know if it's actually complicated or I'm just too used to Windows, but I think if I get a Mac and stick with it for a couple of weeks, I will get used to it anyways. For now, just now and then I would use one of the iMacs or Mac Pros available in the library, to familiarize myself with the Mac operating system.

Will I ever switch to a Mac? I don't know.... maybe. They say Windows 7 is the good stuff now. How true is that?

Domino's: You've got 30 mins

2009-04-08T10:25:00.005-05:00

I really like Domino's delivery service. They're not only fast in delivery, but efficient as well. Their deliverymen do indeed deserve good tipping.

Usually when I order pizza, I go pick it up. But the other day I wanted it to be delivered since I was too lazy to get out of my place, so I ordered the pizza online through their website. After I placed my order and got everything confirmed, this Pizza Tracker thing that you see above showed up in my screen. First I thought it was a joke, but it turned out to be real. You literally track your order from the time it is placed, the time it is prepared, the time it is baked, to the time it is ready and out for delivery. I was tracking it from the beginning, and in less than 15 minutes, the red thing reached to "box" meaning that it's ready to be out for delivery. Another 5 minutes, and I find the deliveryman knocking my door.

This is amazing delivery service. I don't know if they have the same quality service in Oman or anywhere else in the world, since I only started dealing with Domino's just when I came to the US, but I really like their service here. They are the delivery experts as they claim.

Leaving class

2009-04-05T23:18:00.011-05:00

Is it only me or is leaving the classroom in the middle of a lecture and in front of a professor really disrespectful? Not only leaving class just like that, but leaving class after signing the attendance sheet and turning in your homework!

Most of my professors, especially in small classes, have an attendance sheet that circulates around the class while he is lecturing. Some students leave class immediately after signing this attendance sheet, and of course, the professor will not know them since he doesn't know all the students in person, and they will be counted as attended even though they didn't attend the whole class, not even one-third of it. I find that absolutely disrespectful, and I can see how professors get irritated when students do it. True, some lectures just get very boring, especially when they're long and the professor is talking to himself or the board most of the time, but still, at least show some respect to the professor and stay there for the whole time! A lot of times I felt like I didn't want to be in class, but I stayed there because I find it disrespectful to leave the classroom in the middle of the lecture without an acceptable excuse.

Now, lets put leaving class in the middle of a lecture aside. What's up with students showing up to classes just to turn in their homework and then leave immediately? Professors usually collect homework in the beginning of class, and they don't accept any homework 5 minutes after the beginning of class. Some students come in the beginning of class, turn in their homework, and just leave. I also find that very disrespectful. But then again, it might only be me who finds it disrespectful, since I see the majority of students doing it.

And then of course, there is the one who doesn't show up to classes at all, and only shows up when there is a test. Sometimes I see some classmates only when we have tests, even though attendance is taken every single class and weighs heavily toward the final grade. Though, I find not showing up to class at all a lot better than coming just to sign the attendance sheet and leave before the end of the lecture.

My drill bit shaped mug

2009-04-04T21:02:00.001-05:00

My drill bit shaped mug
Originally uploaded by amjad248

Only a hardcore drilling engineer would be having his hot drinks with a drill bit shaped mug...

I first saw this mug with my drilling instructor. Thought that it's really cool and then I bought one myself and now it's been my primary mug! And yeah, I'm drinking some delicious hot chocolate with it now!

I want an aquarium!

2009-04-03T19:08:00.001-05:00

I want an aquarium!
Originally uploaded by amjad248

Found this cool aquarium at my friend's apartment. It looks so beautiful and now I really want a similar one in my apartment! Only problem is that I don't have time to take care of the fish, so probably they'll just die if I get an aquarium at my place.

Flickr

2009-04-03T19:06:00.001-05:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Say HELLO to my new TV!

2009-03-30T17:34:00.008-05:00

A pretty 32" TOSHIBA LCD HDTV. Only downside is that it's a 720p and not 1080i. But oh well, I didn't see why I should invest the money on a 1080i if I'm not going to use the TV for gaming anyways...

Scorpion Belt Buckle

2009-03-28T17:45:00.006-05:00

A year and a half ago when I left Oman for my higher education, my father gifted me this belt that has a scorpion in its buckle. He owned this belt since back in the 70s, but I only got to see it when he gifted it to me before leaving Oman. The scorpion you see in the buckle is real, but preserved, of course, and that's what makes the belt cool and unique.

Although I had this belt with me for a year and a half now, for some reason I have only wore it very few times. Lately though I started wearing it more often, and people are telling me that it's such a cool belt. It's a unique belt and the reason I tend to wear it only occasionally is that I don't want to abuse it by using it frequently. I think that's why I never saw my father wearing it even though he owned it for a very very long time.

Snow in March????

2009-03-27T11:09:00.005-05:00

This is unbelievable. It's been really warm for the past whole month, and all of a sudden, I wake up this morning to find out that it's snowing outside! The temperature is -4C right now, and for the past whole month it's never gone below zero, and was usually in the 20s if not 30s!

The snow season in this city is November - January. It's known that if it doesn't snow in January, then it's not going to snow throughout the rest of the winter. Winter is officially over since last week, and since February we've been getting a beautiful spring'ish weather, but now all of a sudden it's extremely cold and snowing!

Welcome to Texas, where everything is not only bigger, but possible. Next time I wouldn't be surprised if it snows in summer.

First Arab to Sail Non-stop Around the World

2009-03-26T00:22:00.009-05:00

As part of a wider project to help reignite Oman's maritime heritage and inspire youngsters to take up sailing, Mohsin Al Busaidi left Muscat, Oman on an attempt to sail non-stop around the world on January 8 2009. 76 days later, the Sultanate of Oman has welcomed him home as a hero.
Sail-world.com

At 15:43:12 local time (11:43:12 GMT) Musandam crossed the finish line in Muscat to finish her round the world record attempt in under 80 days. The elapsed time is 76 days, 1 hour, 12 minutes and 42 seconds.
OmanSail.com

Congratulations to Mohsin Al Busaidi on this great achievement! Congratulations to Oman Sail team, and most importantly, congratulations to Oman on reigniting your maritime heritage! Congratulations congratulations congratulations.

You can learn more about this from OmanSail.com. You can even find highlights and updates by the team throughout the trip, and videos as well.

Musandam Round the World Attempt - Week 1 [YouTube]:

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