I went a bit crazy for the short period when i wasn’t biking here in Cairo. (more…)
October 18, 2007
October 17, 2007
Cairo is like a cat—القاهرة زي قطة
Cairo can be graceful and beautiful, suprisingly friendly at some times and strikingly ornery at others. But boy is it ugly when it gets wet! Okay, this is a ridiculous metaphor, but whatever. Last night and this morning, there was some crazy weather here in Cairo: high winds, thunder and lightning and a pretty substantial amount of rain, particularly for the desert. I was pretty excited, actually. I’ve loved watching thunderstorms since I was a kid in Ohio. That and fireflies were the two things I missed most when my family moved to California. Plus, I actually like riding my bike in the rain, too, as long as I’m not working and it doesn’t rain for weeks at a time (messengering in Seattle in late fall sucked).
October 15, 2007
Welcome to Grey Wool Knickers!
This blog is still pretty bare, and I haven’t yet migrated a lot of content from my previous static site at the-alarm.com, but I’ll get there. I’ve spent entirely too long setting this thing up, so I’m going to take a break for a while and allow GWK to fill up with content over time, in due course. Please feel free to leave any comments or to contact me via the link on the sidebar with your input on the site, its functionality or its content.
An interesting piece of information: before I got in touch with my ISP to set up this blog on their servers (thanks Electric Embers!), I tried to set it up on the WordPress.com site. It turned out that I wasn’t able to connect to the site. Somewhere along the line, between Cairo and the WordPress servers, the connection was being blocked. I was eventually able to connect through a proxy server. I might be so bold as to suggest that the Egyptian authorities had blocked traffic to the site (just the main site, not its various subdomains), which would not be out of character. They control all internet traffic in and out of the country. In any case, I just checked and it is no longer blocked. I’m not quite sure what would motivate the Egyptian authorities (or whoever else was responsible) to prevent people from setting up blogs (all of the blogs hosted on the subdomains of wordpress.com were accessible, oddly enough, so people could read and edit already created blogs) for just a couple days. Then again, much of what the Egyptian government does seems quite arbitrary.
