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.

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.

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!

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.

• Google Calendar goodness (and stop the no scheduled events emails)
  Good read on making use of Google’s handy Calendar application.
• Top 10 Network Utilities
  Fun list for the geekier crowd. Coming in at #2, DD-WRT router firmware is something I’ve been meaning to try on my wireless router for some time. And earning the #1 spot, I’ve been making use of Hamachi for nearly 2 years now and highly recommend it for extremely easy and secure VPN connections.
• Mastering the Windows Key
  This is a good one for any computer user. Despite debate and evidence to the contrary, I’m a firm believer in the keyboard being faster than the mouse at least in such cases as covered in this short video clip. I already use all of these shortcuts to save time navigating Windblows (aka, Windows).
• Use Google Calendar for Long Term Memory
  Another Google Calendar article, but with a twist. This covers recording stuff in the past for future reference.
• Retirement Savings: Setting up a Roth IRA
  Some good info on getting your Roth IRA going. (from Get Rich Slowly)
• Apply the 80/20 Rule to Your Life
  It’s a widely held economic theory that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. That theory has been extrapolated to many different areas. This article applies it to your life.
• Launch: Parallels v3.0 Now Available
  I’m still not a Mac fan, by any means, but this Parallels software keeps pushing me. To have a solid Unix based system with a professional GUI AND be able to easily run the obligatory Windows apps sounds very appeal. Oh, wait… they’re still outrageously expensive. All the same, it’s interesting to read what’s going on there.
• Delete a Locked File in Windows
  I’ve wanted/tried to do this on numerous occasions. The Geeks Are Sexy blog tells you how.
• Da Vinci’s Streamwriting Technique
  I haven’t read through all of this one yet, but I think this is supposed to help you get your thoughts out on paper (or text editor) to help you achieve your goals. Let me know if it works!
• Simple Way to Save: The 60% Solution
  This article isn’t quite as drastic as it sounds. It’s a good read on how to avoid over-managing you finances and still have plenty for savings, retirement, plus some fun money even after all the bills are paid.
• Finances: Devote 15 Minutes a Day to Frugality
  Megan would probably claim that I spend hours on frugality everyday, but these are some good money-savings tips. Check out the rest of The Simple Dollar for more great financial tips.

Okay, those are some recent highlights. Head on over to Lifehacker.com to read more fun tips.

He turns around and notices me and says something. I’ve got some serious Swedish techno blasting in my ear, so I don’t catch what he’s saying. I hit mute and remove the earbuds. The gentleman was looking for the Lansing Chamber of Commerce, which used to be on the floor above mine. I let him know the Chamber moved a few blocks away before it heads to its new location. Figuring that’s all he needed, I started to turn back to my monitor. Boy, was I wrong.

Turns out, the guy is one of the biggest developers in the Lansing area. And he decided he wants to chat with me I actually first met him awhile ago (been so long I didn’t fully recognize his face), so I knew about his sons attending Minnesota schools like mine. That gave me a few minutes to get into a comfort zone talking with someone I would normally think has no reason to even given the time of day. I then find out why he wanted go to the Chamber. He’s trying to offload a building he owns and was looking for some ideas. Now, he didn’t mention this outright but it was pretty obvious. How? Because he tried getting me to buy it!

Yep, that’s right. I was offered 175,000+ sq. ft. of real estate from a Lansing legend. He was planning on pitching this property to someone and I happened to be it. While I’m fairly certain he was mostly joking, I politely declined. Wowever, he didn’t let up. Did my company want it? Did I know anyone looking for a building? Did I have any ideas for it? He did offer me a “big check” if I helped him get rid of it, but I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to give him a real lead. Just not my mental focus at any point during a typical day. I did throw him a couple ideas for it, which prompted him ask if I could run the place if any of those ideas got setup. Persistent little bugger. Apparently, he does have other possibilities in the works, but he was certainly looking for a backup.

We definitely had an enjoyable and (for me, at least) memorable exchange. Not very often someone like me gets 10 minutes of one-on-one chat time with a local mover and shaker like that. I guess if I anything, I learned that if you have a plan in mind, make sure you follow through with it even if it doesn’t go as expected. I’m pretty sure that’s why I was offered to buy a huge building and I’m equally certain that’s how he got to be so successful.

The Randomness Continues

Still reeling a bit from the exchange with the real estate mogul, I found my way home. I ate dinner with the misses, and headed off for a meeting at church. Things ended early there, so I decided to run down to Barnes & Noble in East Lansing. I had a couple gift cards from my birthday, so I was looking to take advantage of the free “money” before I lost them, as I’ve been known to do. At the store, they announced there was a buy-2-get-1-free sale on all classical music. Before I knew it, I was flipping through CDs. Woohoo!!

With the mad rush that is a classical music sale, there was one other person and the music section employee there. The other customer was a taller guy with a long red ponytail. He started asking the B&N employee some questions about different recordings. Not getting much help, he started directing inquiries my way. It was then that I realized he had quite an Irish accent. Anyway, I was able to answer a few of his questions, which only got him asking more. Even the guy behind the counter started listening and writing stuff down. Again, with just the three of us in the music area, he had nothing better to do.

The Irish bloke turned out to have been recently turned onto classical music, so I certainly wasn’t going lose the rare opportunity to help him pick decent recordings. I’m rather convinced more people would appreciate classical music if they could actually be exposed to great recordings of great works, not all these mediocre versions of obscure works that are often played on public radio. However, that’s a bit beyond the scope of this post. At any rate, we got him all fixed up with some Rachmaninoff piano concertos, some Mahler and (my favorite!) the Herbert von Karajan with Berlin Philharmonic recordings of Brahm’s symphonies.

As we chatted some more, I found out he was in town visiting his adviser from when he worked on his Ph.D. at MSU’s Cyclotron. He even knew a guy I from undergrad class who came to MSU to study nuclear physics. Craziness. That then led to us debating the “coincidentalness” of our meeting. Being that I was taking on a Ph.D. in advanced physics, I somewhat conceded to his argument that it wasn’t a particularly big coincidence. However, had I explained my already coincidental run-in with the Lansing real estate maven, I might have helped my case. In all, we had a fun chat. It was an entertaining end to a rather interesting evening.

I must confess, the whole process of shopping for plane tickets happened much faster than I would have liked. It all took place within about 24 hours; definitely not my style of doing most things. But it was good for me, because that means I’ve already accepted that I’m not really going to be in the driver seat at any point in the planning of this. I’m just along for the ride… er, flight. All the same, we have the tickets now, and that’s extremely exciting. A trip to see the pyramids, the Sphinx and all the other ancient history and art located in that region has been on my list of “things to do” for quite some time. And having a “local” tour guide (Jill, and, more likely, her boyfriend Ali) for most of it will make it all the more enjoyable and flexible. Jill is already shopping for cruise ship tours that run down the Nile River to see the Valley of the Kings, Luxor and the like.

With a trip such as this, the plane tickets are usually the largest expense. However, my frugal mind is already tallying the other costs that are sure to incur. And, actually, I’ve already made the next purchase towards the trip: a small but hefty book on Egyptian art and architecture. Additionally, I’ve also begun researching new digital cameras, since we’ll certainly need to replace our now long outdated Canon PowerShot S40 before going. If I can effectively use my powers of negotiation, there might even be two cameras in our future. But that might be as likely as the Sphinx asking me a riddle while we’re over there.

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.

The post literally mentions the most elementary use of the > and >> operators, and that’s it. That alone is not a waste. Redirection is indeed a powerful capability, and it’s good to spread word to the masses about its usefulness. However, there is a bit more to command line redirection, and the fact that the author provided no other information about it is a shame. And that leads to my main point…

Selfish blogs suck.

In all fairness, the post in question and the site are coming from the Mac OS X point of view, where the target audience may not necessarily be command line fanatics. (Not getting into any anti-Mac talk here. Only saying the average Mac user likely does not use the command line often, if at all.) However, my issue is not just with the limited scope, but with the selfishness of the article.

If the intention is indeed to teach newbies (and not just make money from ads), shouldn’t one combine some concepts that might not otherwise be thought of by the reader on their own? I realize there are people who automatically fire off the RTFM response, but the supposed target audience will not even know where TFM is. Go ahead and leave extra stuff out of your post if you have not the time or desire to add it, but show the readers where they can find it! Don’t leave them stuck on your site if you’re only going to tell a part of the story. Alas, what I can only see as the desire for a few extra pennies from AdSense got in the way of an otherwise decent tutorial. No, let’s call it a tip. Which brings home my second point…

If you’re going to teach someone to fish, show them more than just how to tie a hook on the line.

Such a limited post with no hints at more information is not only selfish, but it doesn’t do the reader much good. The very first comment on the post sums this up nicely. The commenter, a self-proclaimed idiot in command line use, thanks the author for the “insight”, and then asks why/how they would use this. Even better, a responder offers a cryptic g++ execution as if to suffice as an example. I really doubt someone asking about command line redirection recognizes such compiler calls from the shell.

If the original poster had simply added a few outside sources (see below), it could have been a vastly more valuable post. Other than a quick “try it out” at the end, there is no hint that other facets to redirection exist. What about a suggestion to add & to the end of the command to run the job in the background? Unfortunately, I see this “Quick! Let’s post something, anything!” approach all too often in the blogging-for-dollars world that exists these days. Even more disappointing is when the major aggregator sites validate theses types of posts by put putting them on their popular pages, which is exactly where I found it.

Sure, no one (especially, yours truly) is perfect, and the blog that is the current target of my angst is by no means the worst offender of such things. Also, by nature, the Web is a tangled mess of all sorts of good and bad “stuff.” I just like to think these grumpy, old man posts I make every so often might do something to create more good than bad. In the end, if you happened to read this whole thing, remember to follow the spirit of the World Wide Web and make sure to spread around the link love. It makes everything more useful and me a little less grumpy.

Oh, if you came to actually find out more about command line redirection, please check out these EXTERNAL links:

• I/O Redirection from the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
• Redirection and Process Substitution
• Wikipedia Article for Bash (the default OS X shell - with segment on Redirection)

And, should you desire to be a better blogger, try these on for size:

• Zen and the Art of Remarkable Blogging
• How to make ‘related articles’ for your blog

Google Reveals Trade Secrets

Okay, so they didn’t really. Grady’s talk and slideshow were rather mundane, actually. The Ann Arbor office is Google’s headquarters for it’s online sales division, so he discussed AdWords and some fluffy stuff about why Google chose Michigan for its new location. The event was put on by the Lansing Ad Club, so it was definitely more geared towards marketing professionals than anything. And honestly, I think any marketer that was already using the AdWords product would have gained little, if anything, from the presentation.

At the same time, it was interesting to hear some about the inner workings of Google and how they keep an entrepreneurial spirit alive in such a large company. Apparently, their new office has been broken up to represent regions (by latitude) of Michigan and the conference rooms on each floor have been named after cities in the regions. He also shared some personal stories of current employees to show they are actually hiring people coming out of the state’s colleges. Then, he went into a more forward-looking segment, talking about connecting with those who have yet to experience 24/7 Internet. I wrote down a few of the numbers he shared in talking about user-proliferation, but I don’t feel liking digging up my sheet of notes. Suffice to say, they were rather impressive.

In summary, considering the $35 entrance fee, I personally didn’t really get my money’s worth out of the event. The one take-away idea I did get was that AdWords can be used to test the popularity of various search terms. The reports from those keywords can then be used to determine tweaks to you website, brochures and other marketing materials. That’s an excellent tactic I’ve already added to my arsenal. People say getting one useful notion out of such a presentation is a good thing, so I guess it was good I went.

Spring Arbor Drama Brings Holocaust Play to East Lansing

The second event of the evening was a play put on by the Spring Arbor University Drama Department. “Meeting in Munich” was written by an SAU professor, but I don’t remember his name now. The work begins with a condensed and translated speech by Adolph Hitler. The professor played Hitler and read the speech in a manner worthy of the original madman. It made all of the old films clips of Hitler’s speeches even more frightening to actually here the translated version spoken as opposed to subtitles. Not that this was the first I realized, but I was very much reminded of how deranged the man was.

The second half of the play was 6 years prior to the speech by Hitler. It depicted a scene the was likely prevalent throughout Germany. A split congregation in a Catholic church argued over allowing the integration of their youth groups into the Hitler Youth, a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. With stormtroopers marching in formation at the onset of the service, there was obvious support for Hitler amongst the church members. Others were greatly concerned that their children were being sucked into an ungodly and unsafe organization by a man who thought himself God of Deutschland. It ended with those speaking out against the Grand Chancellor being escorted from the church for questioning.

For a group of student thespians, this was a very powerful presentation of an extremely sensitive piece of history. There was a question/comment session after the performance, and one of the audience members said she found herself not breathing at times. There was a definite intensity to the acting.

Then, our pastor shared something that I can imagine stuck with quite a few people. He mentioned how the current state of the world (school shootings, wars, genocides, etc.) leaves him more and more seeking absolutes to restore order to all the chaos that surrounds us. But, the play showed him how Hitler and the Nazis used promise of absolutes and order to post-Word War I Germany to get the citizens to buy into his plans. That haunted Pastor, and it haunted me. What was even more frightening was that in trying to choke down the Tom Delay biography, he says something disturbingly similar:

There is a God and, because this is true, there is absolute moral truth.

That just sent chills up my spine. While I certainly could make an entirely different post on that subject alone, let me just say I was all the more thankful that man was eliminated from making any more substantial impacts in American politics. Let’s hope it stays that way.

So, that was my evening. Google and Nazis. Not a likely combination, but certainly thought provoking all the same.

So endeth the lesson.