A Story by Khalil Gubran

I was strolling in the gardens of an insane asylum when I met a young man who was reading a philosophy book. His behavior and his evident good health made him stand out from the other inmates. I sat down beside him and asked:
"What are you doing here?"

He looked at me surprised. But seeing that I was not one of the doctors, he replied:
"It's very simple. My father, a brilliant lawyer, wanted me to be like him. My uncle who owns a large emporium, hoped I would follow his example. My mother wanted me to be the image of her beloved father. My sister always set her husband before me as an example of the successful man. My brother tried to train me to be a fine athlete like himself.
And the same thing happened at school, with the piano teacher and the English teacher - they were all convinced and determined that they were the best example to follow. None of them looked at me as one should look at a man, but as if they were looking in a mirror.
So I decided to enter this Asylum. At least here I can be myself"

In The Perception Of The Poor...

Hello Everyone...
This series of posts will be a bit different, I don't know if any of you will be interested to read it but I am mainly writing it for the sake of "saving" it for a future use.
I've been collecting some short-stories for children that have some kind of a moral to learn from them...And since we have to put bases for concepts like: love, happiness, trust, honesty..etc from a child's early stage (I believe until he/she reaches the age of 6), the narration of such stories can help raise smart children in the future...So, the first story will be: "In the perception of the poor"...

One day a father and his rich family took his young son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of showing him how poor people can be. They spent a day and a night in the farm of a very poor family. When they got back from their trip, the father asked his son: "How was the trip?"
"Very good, Dad" his son said.
"Did you see how poor people can be?" the father asked.
"Yeah!" said the son.
"And what did you learn?" The father asked.
The son answered: "I saw that we have a dog at home, and they have four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of the garden, they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lamps in the garden, they have the stars. Our patio reaches the front yard, they have a whole horizon"
When the little boy was finishing, his father was speechless!
His son added: "Thanks dad for showing me how poor we are!"

Isn't it true that it all depends on the way you look at things? If you have love, friends, family, health, good humor and a positive attitude towards life, you've got everything!

You can buy any of those things. You can have all the material possessions you can imagine, provisions for the future..etc but if you are poor of spirit...You have nothing!

As Opposed To Microsoft!!

Hello Everyone...
As opposed to Meshref's post of his great experience in Microsoft, I thought I might
share with you my summer-internship experience in "Promoters" which I think it also
has something to do with the fact that Microsoft is great (if you know what I mean :))



Last year, the university offered limited summer-internship offers for students in some companies. And since the offers were limited, the university itself had to do an interview for interested students to pick and choose who fits best (apparently, they didn't think of who fits "where" as well)...

Anyways, I got accepted and the university sent me as well as 2 of my collegues to "Promoters"...I didn't know anything about the company at first but I knew I had to sit for another interview conducted by the company itself...so, I searched a lot on the internet to find out about the company, its site and all.

I got to know from their site that Promoters is supposedly one of the top marketing firms in Egypt whose deals with big companies and institutions in Egypt like: AUC, Timberland, Adidas, Bahgat Group, Orascom, IBM, Henkel, Pepsi, McDonald's, C&Co., The Island (Sharm El Sheikh) and more...

I got excited at first and I thought it's an excellent company and all...So, I went for an interview, the interviewer was very friendly and nice and as soon as she finished her questions and I finished mine, she asked me to come the following monday at 9 a.m...

So I was there 8:50 a.m (I always like to be there 10 mins early in case of anything), I stayed at the reception till it was 9:15 and then I told the receptionist that I am supposed to meet Ms.Dina (my interviewer and supervisor) at 9, where is she?...she told me that she hasn't come yet!
I thought she might have issues so I waited a little longer...a lot longer...until it was 10:30 and I rose off to leave when I saw Ms.Dina comming.
She was like: "Where are you going?"...I said "I am here from 8:50 and you did not show up so I thought you are not comming!!!"...She said no and she asked me to have a seat until she comes back to me...

She went there for like 45 minutes...I thought she might be taking a shower or something..she seemed to stay quite long!!!
Anyways...after all this time, she came back with the biggest smile on her face to tell me: "I'm sorry, we can not begin today...unfortunately, we do not have rooms or computers for you to work on!" (like they discovered that today!!..what a surprise!)
So I said ok, so I guess I'll leave...she said I'm sorry and I will contact you as soon as we fix this...maybe within one or two weeks...I said ok, no problem and I left...

As soon as I got back home, I found my cell phone ringing...I picked up...
It was Promoters' receptionist..she was phoning to tell me to come the next day for they have came up with a solution...So, I said well...okay!

I went the next day where I met a couple of my university collegues...again at 9 and she showed up at 10...anyways...the good solution they actually came up with was that they let us sit in their meeting room having a HUUUGE stack of airplanes' magazines, pens and papers and making tables of contacts of airline companies, airplanes' manufacturers, airplane accessories' manufacturers, and engines' manufacturers..etc for we were supposed to be working on a great project named "AVEX 2006"..the 2nd International Airshow in Egypt held in Sharm (supposedly running now)...it's a very important event supervised by governmental institutions and all...So we were doing excel sheets of potential exhibitors in this event "manually"...when we asked for computers to enter the data right into an excel sheet instead of this mess...she said "You are going to enter it later in an excel sheet"...
So I asked "Why not from the beginning?"...
Her answer was the following: "Because when office boys find printed papers on desks or in shelves, they usually throw it...but they never throw hand-written stuff"
I was like WOW...that's the dumbest answer I could ever expect!!! (Like they can't tell their office boys "please don't throw stuff WHATEVER it is :s)

Anyways..it was my first day...I didn't want to be complaining too much about stuff..so I just did the work I'm asked for.

They usually let us leave late and take work with us at home...it was sooo tiring and not at ally benefitial (atleast, that's how I saw it...I didn't find any experience with doing excel sheets of contacts!)...

After a week from work, they discovered that they haven't done an orientation for us!!
So they called in Amr (a project manager)...and apparently, everyone there is a project manager since they don't have a hierarchy..they work as a "team" (hehe)...whatever..
First, let me give you brief information about Amr...he's the model guy who walks in at 12 p.m checking on everyone in the company, where they've spent their night the other day...or what parties did any of them go to and what are their plans for tonight..as a start for the day!
Then, he goes to check on the girls...he sells watches and stuff...so he "promotes" those watches to his female collegues and ofcourse since Amr is the handsome guy of promoters, a girl working in promoters had to change a watch everyday!!!

So, he began introducing us to promoters, the floors they have...which floor is which branch of promoters..like there is promo-sport which is concerned with the promotion of sports-related stuff and there is promo-sign who builds and makes stuff...and he gave me this example "If Amr Diab wants to make a concert in Marina, he contacts promo-sign to tell us the lighting he wants..the stage..everything and we do it...if he wants a girl to come to his hotel room everyday and put chocolate on the bed..we must provide that"
I thought "What's your job again?!!!!"
He told us that we're not going to be working in the "entertainment" stuff...but we're more of the governmental-concerned stuff...so I was a bit relieved.

All through the month I stayed there, we've experienced a lot of "inefficiency" problems...like no one to supervise us most of the time, no available laptops or computers to work on so mostly, we had to wait for one or two of the employees to finish their msn chatting time and let us work on their computer for sometime...
we were working in the 10th floor with no air-conditions because it was down for the entire month of June!!
For the last week, we got really fed-up...so me and my collegues asked Ms.Dina if we can actually do any other task...she then told us..we must complete this first or we can work in parallel with something else which is the "Pricing Strategy" they should use.

I was like okay, we were taught that in the previous marketing course...the 4 Ps and all...this can be interesting...actually the so-called "pricing strategy" was doing another excel-sheets of prices of challets, show-space..etc. NOTHING was new!
We were doing all the dirty work that apparently none of the employees wanted to do because it was very much time-consuming and unbelievably boring!

And while we were doing all this...Amr and the gang were doing nothing but ordering food 24/7, chatting on the msn, NEVER being on their desks, checking magazines and commenting on different Ads...I remember Amr once giving an excellent marketing analysis of an Ad...he looked unhappy and he said "La..el bent dih regleeha msh 7elwa"....NOW, THAT'S MARKETING!

This was one hell of a place for real...I wish for a better chance at a much more "respectable" company this summer inshaa Allah
(P.S: This was an unpaid internship...yalla 3shan tekmal :))
So an advice for anyone who was interested in this company in particular, you may want to reconsider your decision :D...especially for a summer-internship offer!

Microsoft after 3 weeks :)

Hii Guys,


This is a post which came into my mind to post it while I was talking to my friend when we were discussing his post about his company, but for the first time in my blog, I don’t advice anyone who’s not happy with his current job to read it, as probably it will not help him except by making him either curse me or hate himself more.

Any way, what’s this post all about?

It’s about Microsoft, although I’ve post a previous post on Microsoft before, but all the information inside it was available on the web on their site, in other words there’s nothing I’ve tried by myself when I posted it.

This post will talk about my experience here in Microsoft after 3 weeks; also it will contain all the information needed to finish the “The Journey to USA” episodes.

Now in addition for what I’ve mentioned in my previous post (which by the way is the exact things that I found here), let’s talk about Microsoft from my personal point of view, first before jumping into details, I just need to mention something:

This is a company which anyone could make anything whatever its cost to make it better, I could think about it as my second home now and the place I could do anything in-order to help it be the best.


Why I said this?!

Again before jumping into the details, I could summarize how Microsoft is treating its own employee in only one paragraph and then discuss the points I’ve met till now.

In short, imagine some guy and his wife whom are being married for more than 15 years and they did everything in-order to get a baby but in vain, and suddenly the miracle happened and they god a child, now if you could imagine how they will treat him, then you’ve got an initial idea of how Microsoft is treating us.
Before you continue reading these points, please read this previous post at first.

Now let's take it point by point:

1. Starting from the first day here, the amount of care is amazing, could you imagine that they have a big team here which only mission is to help us getting started?!
   No, I don't mean getting started in paper work (like SSN or Driving license or such things), nor renting/buying a home or car, no, I don't talk about such things, I talk about getting started on MS itself, know about MS culture, know more people, know about optional training and meetings, things like that, this team will be connected to every new employee for about 6 months till he/she started well with MS, not only this, also another team for new graduates like me, which will stay with us for about one year, making us get started on places here, holding events, making a good network between every new graduate, etc.
2. There's no Egyptian kind of work load, and I mean by Egyptian kind of work load those Hany has mentioned in his post, which simply means that they accept weird delivery dates and force the developers to work at least 12-15 hours x 7 to finish it, no here as far as I've seen till now personally and from people's discussion that even in shipment period, the work is around 45-50 hours per week, and in normal it's 40-45 hours, also if in shipment time, you've worked only the 40-45 hours/week, no one will kill you, but if you worked more, every additional hour over the 40 hours is 1.5X normal hour, not only this, but also you got bonus, and thanks certificate and good degrees in your evaluation form.
3. Work here is task based not time based, which simply means that the Egyptian way of you must come X hours per day is not the case here, here you come whenever you want, leave whenever you want and work wherever you want to the number of hours you like, no one will ask you to come in any time or leave in any specific time except when you've a meeting or something like that, otherwise you just have a deadline for your task to deliver and you're free to finish it in the way you want, and by the way I know that many people will say: "Yes, but this deadline may force you to work 24 hours per day", no this is not the case, it's normal deadline, not super un-expectable deadlines.
4. No upper orders of "Must" type, any thing here is of "Should" and "May" type, which means that every one including those whom are here from just about 10 min., can say his/her opinion about anything, technical or structure based, and if he's reasonable, his comments would be appreciated well, as example, if someone has joined product X from about 1 day only, and he saw that the next version will contain feature A, B and C, he could hold a meeting and tell people that feature B is not good and they need to replace it with feature D which will be better, and they don't end the meeting except after all members got convinced with the better solution and features set, no way that you could say your opinion here and they told you something like: "Ohhhhhh, you can't say your opinion, these features have been set and revised from people having much experience than you, you must be in the same experience first", this kind of answer is well known in Egyptians culture of doing Management, tell me a name of a company in Egypt which you can send an email to the CEO telling him your opinion about some sort of stuff and he accepts it if you're reasonable?
5. No one will kill you here if you got anything to do during your task period which gonna delay you from its deadline, and I don't mean that kind of things like being in the hospital between life and death or such very urgent stuff, I mean any other normal/slightly over normal has happened.
6. The weird Egyptians way of that developer must hate his manager and this is the only case for this manager to be good is not the case here at all, here managers and really greattttttt, if you came here, you couldn't ever differentiate between a VP for any big product and normal developer, they talk in the same way, dealing with you in the same way, no way that because person X is a big manager to talk with you with a way like as you're a kid or servant, I'll give you a simple example, in my first day, I got my direct manager name/office number wrong, so I went to someone and knocked his door and said: "Hii, they told me that you're my direct manager", he looked at me and was very surprised, then he asked me to take a seat and started talking with me about life and my experience in MS too far, and things like that, and then he picked the phone and started talking to many people trying to figure out who's my manager till he found him, and know what?
   This guy whom I went to his office was Paul Flessner, Senior Vice President, Server Applications, a guy with a very very big position in Microsoft, and he didn't make me feel that he's that big at all, he was dealing with me in a very friendly way, and I didn't notice about his position until I talked to people here about what happened.
7. Again, management here is great, my manager here as example, he hasn't ever ordered me with anything, every task I get here is done through the way of asking my opinion about doing it, even in the first week, he has had a meeting with me discussing my job roles and at the end he asked me whether I'd like to work in this position or not, do you imagine this!!!!
   Even if I don't like it (although it's not true), I can't say this, because of the really amazing way he's dealing with me.
   Also when he gives me anything to do, it's done in a very rare kind of friendly behaviors, even if he wanna give me a new task and found me talking with someone in non-job related stuff, or doing something, he just leave and come back when I finish!!!!
   In Egypt it's is the same with only one different, this is done from any Employee toward his manager, not the inverse case like here.
   
8. People, you can't ever imagine how they are smart, kind, great, helpful and amazing, during my first and second week (and actually till now), every day I have someone in my office greeting me and talking with me about myself and then asking me if I need any help and offer me to go to him/her directly in case I need anything, and they are not only developers, managers too, have you seen this ever?!!
   Managers (and big manager), not only from my team, but from all other teams, passing by a new hire office and asking him if he needs anything?!!!
   It's really amazing!!!
   
9. Trust, from the first day Iam trusted on really very very expensive and important/critical stuff, I got the whole SQL Server Engine code on my machine, and I've read/write access to both current and future version of SQL Server, I could even take it on my laptop (if there's enough space to hold this huge code), and take it home or any other place with me.
   Also have access to a very big lap which contains multi-million dollars machines.
   They really trusting employees here to be a part from the company, as they are not just employees, no, they are treating us as we're the company and we're the company's assets.
   
10. No way to be asked that if you gonna take a course or two to come and work your 8 hours per day after you finish, no, courses here are calculated from your working time, you could even spend a month or two taking courses only, not only this, also if you thought about taking a master degree or PhD, it's calculated from your working hours too, only this?!!
    Nooooooooo, also if your additional degree is related to your job my any mean, they pay about 60% from your expenses in this degree, can you imagine this?!!!
    Can you tell me the name of any other company which is doing all these?!!!

Really if I talked days and days it's not enough to give them what they deserve, this is a company which any one could make anything whatever it is to help make it better, and this is a company I LOVE SO MUCH.

That's why you won't found any Microsoft Employee who doesn't love Microsoft as much as you could ever imagine :)

SIFE

Hello Everyone...
I came back from college today, somehow taking a break because it's a thursday and I was already not willing to attend Mohammed Mouneer's and Nancy Agram's concert in the university..hehe...so I was spending sometime reading my mails and all.
I checked my uni mail and I found a mail titled "SIFE"...I didn't know what actually this was so I thought I might take a look.
A poster in the mail was posted and a link to SIFE's website, so i opened the link..that's where I knew about it a little...

SIFE is the "Students In Free Enterprises"...It's a US headquartered non-for-profit organization whose aim is to improve the quality of life and standards of living of people through teaching the principles of free market economics and entrepreneurship (that's what the site says)
Well I thought like how?!!

I read more, it's actually an organization whose members are from businesses and universities who do proposals for projects and actually "do" the project in a later phase to help achieve the aim of SIFE mentioned earlier.
Students work in teams to do such projects and implement them; they gain leadership, communication and presentation skills through-out this activity.

I got interested in the idea...but i couldn't register with them online so I got the contact information of their office in Egypt and I phoned them. A guy answered me and gave me Mrs.Fatma's (the head of the SIFE team in Egypt) cell phone number (What an invasion of privacy..that's what I thought!) but anyways, I thought well...I'll call her anyways!

I called her, introduced myself and told her that I am an interested student in the activities of SIFE and I would like to join...she was very welcoming and very friendly, she even talked to me as if i was her own daughter. She gave me a clearer idea of the projects they do and whom I should contact in my university.
She told me that the AUC group was the team winning the competition they did last year for the "best project"...they did a project for poor women making mushrooms and selling them, also another project for high-school students to teach them how to make a CV, behave in an interview and also taught them some communication skills..that was in around 12 schools in Egypt...
Mrs.Fatma was very happy that I was that enthusiastic and she asked me to begin right away with my mates in college...so I'll be thinking inshaa Allah of better projects and pray for us to win this year :)

I think stuff like that might make Egypt a better place, with better educated citizens, with better systems...with the helping and sharing..we can be more united, we can actually get out of the bottle's neck (as most people say)!

Here's SIFE's site in case you want to know more about it:
http://www.sife.org

If you're interested in SIFE, please join...you will hopefully make a difference :)

New Member :)

Hello all,


In the whole previous period it was me alone posting tons of posts about everything, now it's the time to see someone else posting in my blog :)

Here you're my new partner, her name is Nouran, she's almost 20 years and she's studying Management in GUC.

Although I didn't know Nouran for a long time (since we knew each others few days ago), but she's one of the most respectable persons I've ever met, and to be honest, nearly the only "sane" girl I've ever met (I knew that girls gonna kill me now :P ).

Any way, everybody, hot welcome to my new partner here, and hope to see more posts from her soon :)

Welcome Nouran to my world :)

New Member in Meshref's Blog

Hello Everyone...
This is Nouran, Mohamed's friend...I am just new here so I don't know what to write or say but I promised Mohamed that I would write something..so here it goes...
Although I haven't personally met Mohamed but from our chat I've sensed he's a really good person with a good heart and quite good manners...i really see in him something special and i believe he's going to be something great in the near future inshaa Allah :)
Despite him loving life in the US, the guy is alright..lol...
No seriously, he's a real gentleman..God bless :)

Nouran

The Journey to USA (Part 4)

Hii again,

Long time, right ;)?

Any way before I continue, here you're some news:

I created my technical blog on msdn blogs at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/mmeshref

Also you could access the both blogs after that through:

http://www.mmeshref.com


Now let's continue :)

Last time I stopped in Friday, so next day we went to pick up my rental car, and as expected, we lost because Iam not good at reading US maps, so instead of going for 5-6 miles only to my car pick-up location, we went for about 14-18 miles to found ourselves in Seattle :D!!!!

Any way, we enjoyed the day there, and visited a lot of places and played in the Game World, here you're the photos:

http://www.mmeshref.com/album/USA%20Relocation/index3.html

Now, it's the time to return back, but there's a problem, we don't know the way back home, also the way to pick up the car, so what's the solution?!

The simple solution is to get a GPS, so we went to radioshak, and I got a very nice GPS which is colored and has a speaker system which will guide you through voice in addition to normal maps on the screen to any place you want to go, also it contains tons of places in which Iam using now every day to go to any place, as example if I want to go to a cinema, I open Cinemas sub-directory and told him to find the nearest one to my current location, and then choose the type of route whether shortest time or to avoid high ways (good in rush hours) or 2 other options, then route, also if I miss any route, it'll re-route the path to a new route depending on my current location, so it's dynamic routing instead of static one, also all these combined with that its screen is touch screen, so I could use both the buttons or touch the screen whatever is easier for me.

Here you're my GPS:
http://www.magellangps.com/en/products/product.asp?PRODID=1038

Really it's cool, up till now I don't even know how to return home, I just open the GPS in any place Iam currently in, and open favorites and click home->route->shortest time.
Then back home, isn't it really cool ;)?

So we used it and went to pick up the car, and then went back home.

In the evening Mostafa was going to meet a guy also I went to meet some people I knew here at MS, so when we came back he told me that he has met with Chris and Mohamed Helal, so in the next day we went with them to a kind of restaurant and also Khaled Aggad and Mostafa El Ehmali were there.

Next day it was our NEO, and this is the next and last episode in this series, so, just wait for it ;)

Stay tight ;)
To Be Continued.....

The Journey to USA (Part 3)

Hii Guys,

I know that this post has taken much time more than the previous two, that's because as you know that yesterday and the day before were the weekend days here, and so I went with friends to some really weird places (which if found sometime and intension I'll post about them).

Also, there is something which is really amazing, it was snowing last Thursday, I wasn't having the camera at that time, and when I arrived home I have just taken one photo in the dark for the snow when it was in its way to vanish:

Now back to the old topic, let's resume what we've cut in the last part :), last time we stopped at the moment we put our feet outside Sea-Toc International Airport.

After we've picked the car, we went to the key pick-up location which we were having the map for it, for those whom don't know the meaning of key pick-up location, it's simply a door with numerical keypad in which we've a secret number to use on this keypad to open the door and pick up our key and apartment information, here you're a picture for how it's looking like:

After we've picked up our keys, we found that our apartment location is exactly beside the key pick-up location, here you're some photos for the apartment:

My Room (a little blurry)

Mostafa's Room

Washing machine and dryer room

Dinning room

Kitchen

Another photo for the kitchen


One more photo for the kitchen :D


The TV and DVD Player


Living Room front image

Living room rear image

Our apartment door is the one under the stairs, its front window
(actually my room window), is the one in the far bottom left side


Another view for out living location from outside.

View for our living location (note, between the trees in the far viewing distance, is located our working place which is building 35, so as you see, we can just walk for less than half a mile to reach our offices :) )

After that we discovered that we're really hungry, so we went to search for some food, and we lost until we found chilis so we entered and eat and then went back home to get some sleep to be ready to make any thing new in the next day which was Saturday :)

That day was really amazing because a lot of things have happened in that day in which were really fun :), but why to jump into any details about them?!

Just wait for the next post to know more about them, so...

Stay tight ;)
To Be Continued.....

The Journey to USA (Part 2)

Hii Guys,


Here you're the part 2 from the journey, where I've stopped last time?!

Yes, on the very weird thing that has happened, you know what is it?

Simply when the pilot has left the gate, we have moving with the aircraft for about 8-10 min on the ground until we get to the run way which was really sooooooo far from the location we were.

So we stopped and wait for the taxi, and we waited and waited and I noticed that many aircrafts are coming and leaving and we still remaining in our place!!

Till the pilot announce that the aircraft is facing some technical problems and we need to head back to the gates location to fix it!!!

Then ok, we went back and waited for about one hour, and then he said that they haven't made any success till now and they will try for another 30 min and if they succeed, then we'll continue, otherwise we'll be routed to another aircraft!!


We waited for the additional 30 min, then he announce that the problem is in its way to be solved, and we waited for another 20-30 min and then he announce that it's fixed and they are gonna re-fuel again because we wasted a lot of fuel, funny huh :D?

Any way, we left and we have most of our flight over dead regions, really no way that any creature could be living on these locations, here you're some samples:

This picture was over Island where it seems to be dead as you see.

Also this one was over Island too.

This one was over rocky mountains.

Rocky Mountains too.

We continue flying for more than 10 continues hours until we reached Washington state (for non-US aware, there're two Washingtons in the United States, one is Washington DC which is the US Capital and it's located in the east, and the other is Washington only which is located on the Northwest and this is the one Iam referring to).

WA from air was really cool, I saw MS campus from there but I haven't got the chance to take a photo for it, but any way, here you're some photos for Seattle (WA Capital) from the air:

Ok, that's enough for today :)

Next time I'll be talking about our first impression about US and our first steps in US :)

Stay tight ;)
To Be Continued.....

The Journey to USA (Part 1)

Hii Guys,


As I promised you before that I’ll post my journey details on episodes, so here you’re the first episode written from inside my office in building 35 in Microsoft Redmond HQ.


Let’s start from the moment I left my house and jumped into the car heading to the airport.


We arrived to the airport at nearly 12:00 AM, March 03, 2006.

I’ll skip the moment of saying goodbye to my family members because those moments were the hardest moments in the whole story.

Any way, after that I headed with Mostafa to the airport to wait for KLM flight which is supposed to leave at 2:50 AM.


Then we’ve waited will 2:40 AM, and then we went to the gate, and as usual, in Egypt airport, the flight which was supposed to leave on 2:50 AM, left on about 3:30 AM.

Any way, we’ve taken off, and the flight was good, and the best service I’ve found on both KLM and Northwest Airlines, is the Games & Video on Demand system, in which you could choose to watch from tons of movies and TV series which are all new, and the movies were sometimes on the cinema on the last season (some of them were still in Egypt’s Cinemas till that time), also you could play games, send SMS, watch news, and many other services, here you’re a photo on how the system was looking like (Click to enlarge):








After that, we landed into Amsterdam International Airport, with a temperature of Zero (it was the first time for me to see the sky snowing), and then we stayed in Amsterdam Airport for about 5 hours, and here you’re some photos for Amsterdam’s Airport:

Mostafa in the Airport.

It's me this time :)

Some Cool cars we've found in the Airport:

Our Northwest Airlines Aircraft which was going to take us to US.

Any way, after the 5 hours period, we went to the gates again (by the way I forgot to tell you that Amsterdam Airport is really hugeeeeeeeee, it contains about 60 different gates or more), and then we got our normal interrogation about our visit to US, why and to whom, etc.

Then headed directly to our aircraft where something very weird has happened, you wanna know what is it?!

Wait for the next episode ;)

Stay tight ;)
To Be Continued.....

First Day in Microsoft

Hi again,

Although I promiced you that I'll post all what happened in the previous days soon, but I haven't got any PC yet to make this, so all what I can do is to post photos with small comment on each photo till the moment I put some full posts on them, this time I have uploaded some photos which I've taken during my first NEO (New Employee Orientation) day in Microsoft.

The most thing that was really amazingggggggg today, was inside Microsoft Museum (of course the great and un-believable care and benefits Microsoft is offering to us and which I'll be talking about them later), these things are:

You remember Minority Report?
Remember that Tom Cruise was wearing a special gloves to make things move on the screen using his hands?!
I've used and played with the same system today, but without any gloves, just my hands!!!
Look at the photos link at the end of this post to see them ;)

I've a huge number of posts waiting to be published as soon as I got a PC or a laptop for myself, which will be no later than a week or two.

Enjoy the photos and meet you again tomorrow with NEO day 2 photos :)

http://programmingplanet.net/album/MS%20First%20Day%20(NEO%201st)/index.html

Stay Tight ;)

Live From Redmond (Part 1)

Hii Guys,


Today it's the first time for me to post any thing in this blog from a place which is outside Egypt (except for Amsterdam's comment).

Any way soon (as soon I buy a new laptop and get some time), I'll post every thing, but for now, I'll leave you for some pictures until the moment I write the next post and comment on every sinlge one:

http://programmingplanet.net/album/USA%20Relocation/index.html

C U soon :)

Final Count Down, Day Zero

Hii Guys,

Again this is my final post before posting from another Country :D

Any way I did many things in the previous days, and I'll just mention them here as points and may discuss them later when I get some time:

1. Change money from the Bank.
2. Buy a lot of things (many of them are really weird!).
3. Meeting a lot of people and making a lot of family visits.
4. I don't remember what else.

The most thing which is really amazing, is the way we'll pick up the keys for our house when we arrive to US.

But this is another story, I'll post it as soon as I arrive and have internet access with tons of picutres.

Stay tight ;)