140 characters of trauma

These are concise formulations of 8 different cases I have seen. All are in 140 characters or less. All people mentioned are refugees.

This is just an experiment with this format.

  • Her dad vanished when she was young. They detained & tortured her twice to know his whereabouts. 5th year in Egypt. No contact with family.

  • Tortured in 3 incidents. Electricity & walking on spiky plant. 2 broken bones. Doing OK as a delivery boy. 3rd year …

@gazamom writes about her day long ordeal in Cairo airport transit area

in «Local & Regional» by moftasa

I hold a Palestinian Authority passport. It replaced the "temporary two-year Jordanian passport for Gaza residents" that we held until the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the mid '90s, which itself replaced the Egyptian travel documents we held before that. A progression in a long line of stateless documentation.

It is a passport that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry to my own home. This is its …

Jaiku: No more international SMS

Jaiku announced yesterday that they will support SMS to the US only. Jaiku was down for more than 24 hours because they were converting the software to an open-source version called JaikuEngine.

They will also stop feed-fetching which was a nice feature that created a Facebook like mini-feed (or FriendFeed like) on the users' homepage to follow the activities of your friends on other sites.

In short, Jaiku now is going to be pretty useless …

Men are never sure who is the real father of their offspring. This created the legacy of honour.

I am no expert on this. This is entirely out of my anus.

Primates, like humans, like all organisms are interested in passing down their genes. Both females and males, are programmed, biologically and thus psychologically, to do so.

Females have a critical advantage over males because they own the means of producing offspring. They are always sure that their kids are theirs. That their offspring carry their own genes. Both, however, are not programmed …

State security is now following YOU!

in «Experimental & Humor» by moftasa

The way Twitter notifies you by email about new followers brought me an idea. What if instead of user X is following you, something more serious was following you. Something evil that usually follows people.

State security is now following you on Twitter

If you think it was a sick joke or that it ended prematurely, I don't care much. The coolest thing is that I created some inane controversy of tweets, blog posts and copy-cats to feed my ego for a …

Mobile Shop: Job opportunities are for men only

in «Politics & Human Rights» by moftasa

mobile shop logo

I receive wrong emails often. Sometimes they are funny but usually plain boring. I also receive around 5000 spam messages per week.

Today I received the following email from Mobile Shop HR department. They have two job opportunities. The first is something called "Sales Maker" and it seems to be gender specific. The other is called "Net woek Admin" and it requires, among a list of technical stuff, good command of English language.

Language issues …