Swedegeek’s Blog

Day 3 in Cairo, still packed. We started with a couple hours at the Egypt Museum where a massive amount of antiquities are on display. Statues (many many shapes and sizes), sarcophoguses, and numerous other items from daily and pharonic life. Covering 1000s of years of artifacts in 2 hours is no justice but highlight was King Tut collection. So much gold!

We then made it over to the Citadel, a large fortress from 100s of years back which also has an amazing mosque built by the original Muhammed Ali in 1830. Plus a great view over nearly all of Cairo. Our second great tour guide who was amazing to have at the museum did not disappoint at the Citadel either.

Last stop was Cairo market area. This is about exactly what you’d expect from packed little shops as far as you can see trying to peddle their wares to every tourist walking by. Everything is negotiable. Couple good stories from there too.

It’s midnight and we leave in 3 hours for Luxor and Nile cruise. Excited but I should get some sleep. Probably no wifi until retun to Cairo on Friday. Until then, I’ll continue with the picture taking. Peace out.

Posting from my cell phone so this could be rough. Jet lag seems to have hit me as it’s 2am, we got up at 7am and have to get up again at 7… yea in 5 hours.

Well my loss of sleep is this blog’s gain. One word… Pyramids! Wow, how utterly amazing. We went into 2 today. Words nor photos can do them just. They are absolutely immense and amazing.

We were among the very last to get into the Great Pyramid of Cheops today. It’s a bit of trek up into the burial chamber, but very worth it. The chamber was basically emptied out by the time we got there. So we decided to try out the acoustic properties due to the special construction. Amazing echo and reverb for such a small room. Was very cool.

The Sphinx was also part of today’s tour. Its size pales compared to the Great Pyramids, but still extraordinary. Craftmanship of the adjacent buildings is still quite visible and hard to believe considering the lack of precise tools so many thousands of years ago.

After the tour, but much crouching in pyramids and hiking all over, we enjoyed some tea and snacks at the Four Seasons in Giza. Uh, rather nice place. Oh, and Jill had to argue with our assigned security guard, his boss and some police major that we didn’t want him to follow us around for the evening. That’s a story itself.

The evening plans finished with dinner at a great Lebanese restaurant. Then hanging out at Ali’s apartment again. Tomorrow is the Egypt Museum to see even more of this ancient history.

Okay should get some shut-eye so I make it through the day. Good night.

Greetings, loyal readers! Don’t want to be too anti-social with the travel crew, but I got a quick chance to check some email, so thought I’d fire off a quick post as well. We got in 2am Cairo time after about 16 hours of fly time and a 9 hour layover in Amsterdam yesterday. Having arrived at the Detroit airport at 7pm Eastern time on Wednesday, and only 7 hours difference in time, that meant 24 actual hours of plane, airport and layover time. Whew!

Amsterdam was a bit chilly and rainy, but we managed to see the Anne Frank House as well as the Van Gogh Museum. The house was a very moving experience and the museum had a lot of special artwork that. After hearing a lot about both places before arriving, it was pretty amazing to get to see them. We also wandered through the streets around Central Station and had some pretty tasty meals.

Morning in Cairo started at 11:30 for us. We’ve arranged to have a driver in a van at our disposal for the week, so we got picked up by Jill and grabbed some breakfast-lunch on our way out for the day. We then went to see an ancient, but still very active, Coptic (original Egyptian Christian) church that was built in the 3rd century. It’s known as the “Hanging Church” because it’s actually built on one of two old towers, so the majority of it is suspended about 20m above ground. I love heights!

We then went to a park where we could see the Citadel, watched the sunset behind the mosques and listened to the 6:00 call to prayer being sung throughout the city. Pretty cool to hear it in surround sound like that. We then went to a very authentic Egyptian restaurant for a delicious meal. Dinner ended with us all taking turns puffing on a couple of shishas… that is… hookahs. We were up in smoke.

Tomorrow is going to be a trip to the Egypt Museum and/or the Pyramids of Giza. If we miss one, we’ll catch it on Sunday. Then, Monday starts the flight to Luxor and cruise to Aswan. Should be very exciting. Hard enough to believe we’re just in Cairo.

All right, I should join the crowd again. There are already lots of photos to share, and we’re only a day into it. Many more to come!

Just a little while ago, I went through approximately 100 posts from the Lifehacker.com. That may seem like a lot, and it kind of was, but I pre-lifehacked my Lifehacker reading. After much cajoling, I finally was convinced to start using Google Reader. To sum it up, it’s awesome. All my favorite sites with an RSS feed can now be read from a single source. How lifehack-ish is that?

Now that my brain is full of all sorts of neat ideas to save time, money and sanity while enjoying it all, I need to share some of these with you my loyal readers. I recommend the following for all three of you. Some of these go to other sites, but I found them first on Lifehacker. (more…)

Okay, this one is likely a bit more unrealistic than the Cairo announcement. It’s more of a bizarre story from last week. It was about 5:30 and I was still working away at my desk. I had my headphones on listening to Playdio.se and their crazy Swedish DJs. Out of the corner of my eye, I see this guy walk past my cube. (more…)

Well, this past Thursday evening, Megan and I bought tickets to fly to Cairo, Egypt next February. In less than a month, Megan’s sister Jill is moving over there for at least a year or two, so we decided to take advantage of the opportunity to see such a different part of the world. As of right now, a majority of their family is going, with at least 6 of us going and possibly more. I say the more the merry, but we’ll see what happens with expanding the tour group. (more…)

And… If You Wanna Teach a Man to Fish, Teach Him to Fish!

It’s a month old now, but I’ve been meaning to write on this post that, from its title, claimed to be a tutorial on Unix-based command line redirection. I use *nix systems on a regular basis, and I actually got suckered into clicking to this article. It was a waste of time. And then I got even annoyed by thinking about things on a deeper level. I hate thinking. (more…)

Last night I went to 2 very different events. Right after work, the head of Google’s Ann Arbor office, Grady Burnett, gave a presentation at the Lansing Center. From there, I stopped at home to pick-up Megan, then we went to a played called “Meeting in Munich” at St. Paul Lutheran Church. (more…)

Yep, I’ve been a bit lax in posting for the past month, and I still have a couple unfinished posts I need to get back to. But, I just read a great synopsis of the find command for *nix-based systems and had to share it. For those of you working in such environments, and don’t know the power of this utility, you definitely need to check it out. I’ve used a good many of the options described in the article for my own purposes. Everything from to just a straight up ‘find this file’ to using it in a quick bash script to purge archived files older than 6 months. Combine find with the xargs command (also mentioned in the article) and you can do a sorts of cool file manipulation in a single line. Fun stuff!

So endeth the lesson.

Just a quick post here to point out I’ve added a library section to the site. I wanted to have a place to record the books I read and see if I can provide a quick summary for anyone interested. I’ve already put in a few entries, but figured I should point it out here since you have to scroll down a bit to see it. Maybe I should add a link up top that points to it. Good idea!