Well, as many of you are probably well aware, much happens when you’re in travel, as you’re whizzing by scenery that could make your heart stop. And then the lines on the road disappear just as darkness falls, and your heart speeds up like a drum at a rock concert. You come across crazy drivers, and compassionate ones. Your car, or was it the pavement, makes funny sounds while you’re surrounded by wheat fields without a Toyota dealer in sight, and God Alone Knows how long it would take for AAA to get to you. You drive through cities that confuse the hell out of your GPS, cities that were surely designed by mad geniuses men. You navigate through freeway loop-de-loops that certainly were dreamed up by one of the 50 roller-coaster engineers in the nation (well, that’s what it felt like, anyway!) You see clouds in the distant sky that look like illustrations out of a children’s book, fantasy clouds I call them. And you see clouds that are nothing short of nightmare clouds. Of course, the nightmare clouds are the most, what’s the word?, eventful. You drive through country that’s most bleak and drips of desolation, and you wonder, am I in the USA? And yet, that country, with all it’s desolation, feels like the perfect place to live and forget about the world, perhaps because the world has forgotten about those places. And then you drive back into California, with it’s crazy speeding and traffic and over-crowding and the concrete canyons and say, “Thank Allah I live here!”

And that, in a nutshell, is the story of our trip. Not enough, you say? Well, I’ll tell you about the more interesting bits of the above summary in a little bit.

You'd be surprised how much fit in there.

I must take leave of you all for now. Please remember me and my family in your prayers. We’re quite nervous about driving all this distance. We thought we’d like the opportunity to see the land we live in, but now…maybe flying would have been a better idea. But, it’s all about the adventure, right?

Be good, and keep on smiling.

Packed up, and away we go.

Last week, our new camera arrived, and this week we’ll be going away to the Mid-West for a course my brother is interested in taking. We decided to go by car, all of 2000 miles, and of course road trip means Camera Must Be Packed. Since I purchased an additional lens and a few filters and a couple spare sets of batteries, and these are all relatively sensitive things that should be packed properly, I needed a camera bag to pack it all into. Of course, in the course of looking around for an appropriate gadget bag, we found those that were too small, too large, just right but can’t be shipped in time, or simply perfect but too expensive. My brother, while looking at the one I was considering which was both slightly weird looking but just the right price, said, “You can make those,” pointing to the ones that were too expensive.

And I, like an idiot, agreed. Now, don’t get me wrong. I could do it. But there was absolutely no reason for me to cop to it. Except for the fact that I did not want something that looked like a glorified lunch pail. Pride cometh before the falleth*, people. If I could tell you the amount of grief it put me through, to do simple things like stitch in pockets, put in the zipper, and the mother of all battles: putting in the foam, I would. But I can’t, because a) I have too much respect for your sanity, and b) more honestly, I’ve got a trip that I still need to finish packing for.

I will leave you with this, though: Just because you can does mean you should. Coz then you know you really could. Yes, I’m glad I went through the grief. Next time, I know what to do to make my task easier. Oh, look, there will be a next time!

*falleth isn’t a word, is it?

But last month, I realized I’d better use those photos I took, or my memories will be lost forever. Oh, the horror. For the last month, I’ve been sorting through the pics, trying to decide which ones I really want to upload. I don’t even know how many I selected, but I know that it’s a lot. Oh, wait, I just checked, and see that I’ve got 221 + 219 vacation pictures. Now, I know why I was so terrified of beginning the editing process.

I got to thinking, “wouldn’t it be nice if we could automate the edit, resize, and watermark process?” I know that Picasa does allow for Batch Edits, but you’re on your own with resizing and watermarking. Then, I got to remembering seeing something about Actions, a PhotoShop concept I was too intimidated to look into. Well, put four hundred and eighty photos on one side of a scale, and intimidation for PhotoShop on the the other side, and you can guess which scared me more. So, I fired up Google in search of the easiest explanation and how-to guide for PhotoShop Actions.

What are Actions? They’re a recording of the steps you take to edit a file. So, if you’ve got a bunch of steps that you automatically do over and over again, those steps are the perfect candidates for being saved as an Action Set. I found a simple tutorial for the Watermark Action on DPChallenge that is worth looking into, if you’re into processing your photos with PhotoShop. Do you know how long it took to edit half my pictures? Just a couple of interrupted-with-other-activity hours.  My pictures finally get a chance to be eternally saved on the great wide web.

If anyone has any other processing actions worth knowing about, please let me know about them. I think I can really get into this whole action thing!

However, I would like to ask those people who are so full of rhetoric about how this is an achievement for their communities a few questions. I’d also like to tie in those questions against a backdrop of progressive American feminist thought that rejects utterly the concept of objectifying women as a positive step in a woman’s journey through life. Oddly enough though, when it comes to women of color, victory for a woman in the more “prestigious” beauty contests always seems to translate as a victory for that entire community of color. But, looking down the wide lane of history, how much of a victory for African America was it when Vanessa Williams won Miss USA 1986? Did African American women, let alone the community at large, make either modest or substantial inroads into mainstream society? I doubt it, and here’s why. So, if 10% of African American men between the age of 25-29 have been incarcerated for some period in their lives, and if more African Americans are in jail than in college, and if the number of African American men in jail has grown 5 times over what the numbers were in 1982, then how much of post-victory bounce did the African American community gain from the Miss USA contest? Well, that’s just the men, one might say. Ah, but I’d wager that what happens to men impacts the women and children much more than a crown placed on Vanessa Williams’s head.

If it sounds incongruent that I’m tying together beauty pageants wins with statistics pointing to the downtrodden-ness of the African American community, allow me to make a more explicit parallel. Today, Arabs and Muslims are seen in a most negative light. In a recent study, it was revealed that Islam is the third worst brand disaster in the world. Naturally, Islam is not the disaster all by itself–it’s how Muslims are perceived that impacts how Islam is thought of. Against this hopeless backdrop, please let us remember the results of the Gallup Poll released last year with respect to Muslims in America. As I wrote last year:

It reveals our incredible racial diversity (nobody in the Muslim American community should be surprised), our amazing levels of education (again, should not be a surprise) second only to Jewish Americans, and that our gender economic parity is unparalleled.

All the same, the crown of Miss USA appears to be the true stepping stone to success:

The others who were thrilled with the development included Wassim Mahfouz, Executive Director of the Lebanese American Heritage Club. He said: “Arab Americans will now look to Rima to carry the torch. She is one who embodies the confidence, ambition, determination, and commitment that we know our strong energetic community members have.”

I understand his position calls for him to make some sort of ebullient statement, but I have to assume that he means what he is saying. My question is simple: if Miss USA 1986 had zero positive impact on a much-maligned and abused community, realistically, how much of a positive impact will this victory have for Arab Americans? Won’t the next suicide bombing just wipe out the post-victory bounce faster than you can say “hell, no!”?

As for mainstream America thinking that this is some sort of real victory, allow me to say, What the hell? For the last fifty years, you’ve been banging on about how a woman has no business being judged by the merits of her face and body, how that reduces women to being sex objects. Yet, here you all are, saying that a woman being objectified is a platform of achievement. Do Muslims, nay, people of color come with different standards? When white American females are thrust into the spotlight on merits of their beauty, they are sex objects, but the rest of the world’s female population, particularly Muslim women, well…covering up and pursuing a brain-based field of occupation are actually our forms of disempowerment! And speaking of the politics of beauty, let us not forget how relentlessly Mrs. Sarah Palin, quitting Governor of Alaska, was derided for her beauty pageant past. Her beauty pageant victories were seen as an indictment on the capabilities of her brain.

With regards to the Muslim population of this country seeing this as some true victory that has “helped” increase the Google searches for Islam, can I just ask, what brand of hash are you guys smoking? Ok, so they are googling Islam with a different image in mind. And then what? They’ll  a) see that she does not pretend to represent Islam, thus b) making her relationship to Islam irrelevant and c) go back to reassociating Islam with less beautiful things with the “knowledge” that, well she’s not a good Muslim* anyway–she’s a good American! Because good Muslim = bad American and bad Muslim = good American.

Now, if this leads to, twenty-five years from now, a Muslim American being elected President, I might eat back my words. But only if there is a consistent upward trajectory in how Muslims in this country are viewed and treated. Objectification is not, in my mind, a great start.

And who was the idiot who decided that ridiculously beautiful people can be judged to more or less beautiful than each other, when really they are all pretty much equal in terms of beauty?

*That Miss Fakih is a good or bad Muslim is not a judgment that I am advocating.

To start with, it doesn’t shock me that non-Muslim countries would want to ban symbols of Islamic faith; after all,  since Muslim countries have imposed limitations on hijab and niqab, how can we expect any better from non-Muslim nations, especially in Europe? Turkey and Tunisia are notorious for giving women a hard time with the hijab (hard time meaning they’ve banned it in government buildings and universities in the case of Turkey) and women in Morocco are regularly face discrimination while hijabed, although there are no laws in place to officially make life for hijabis difficult. I recall a Moroccan friend during college telling me that she wanted to hijabify her life, but her aunt would tell her father, and then she’d be on the first plane back to Morocco because her father would be outraged. Outraged over the fact that his daughter is covering up more and that he is losing control.  Imagine women in those countries wearing the niqab! So, my anxiety over women in the West being prevented from wearing the niqab is not as great as it could be, considering we’ve got our own intra-Muslim hijab bans to deal with.

However. The arguments presented for banning the niqab are so preposterous as to make me want to pull out my hair in frustration. (Yes, I’m not hijabed as I write this, so pulling my hair is definitely an option.) I mean seriously, France, niqab as an agent of widespread and debilitating crime? Seriously? So once the ban of niqab is in place, I guess criminals, who are so eager to follow the law, will both a) never don a niqab for purposes of robbing a bank or grocery store or mugging someone in the dead of night in a dark alley in downtown Paris and b) they won’t find other means of concealing their identity, as in with ski masks and the like? Because, you know, criminals are so lacking in creativity that they won’t even realize that there are other mechanisms besides the niqab that will aid them in being, um, criminals. In fact, they just waited for centuries for the niqab to wash up on the shores of France in order to commit crimes while concealing their identities. Because, you know, there are and have never been any other means for concealing identity. Not the ski mask, not helmets, not scarves wrapped around the lower face. None of those have ever existed until the niqab came to France and gave your law-abiding citizens a means to turn criminal.

Ok then. Now that I’m done with my lightly sarcastic dismissal of the security argument, how about the fact that banning things usually never has the intended consequence? Ban drugs, and what happens? We’ve got a War on Drugs that has been waged since I was a kid, and shows no signs of letting up. We also have all sorts of gun bans which, while they have dropped the percentages of assault rifles in circulation, have failed to eliminate the use of assault rifles in the carrying out of violent crime. If bans on drugs and guns, relatively difficult items for the average niqabi to gain hold of, are largely unsuccessful, how successful is a ban on a significantly easier piece of material going to be for the determined criminal?

In addition to that, fining the woman who wears the niqab is as nonsensical as nonsensical can get. The premise behind that particular piece of legislation is to prevent women from being “forced” into wearing the niqab by their domineering husbands, brothers, and/or fathers. First of all, fining the woman who’s being oppressed into donning the niqab is nothing short of oppression. Secondly, should those men actually be stupid enough to force the niqab on the women-folk of their families, what will prevent him from not allowing them to leave the home in the niqabless state? Won’t this just promote the “Talibanization” of Muslim households all across France, a condition where Muslim women who are forced into the niqab cease to have lives outside their homes? Just think about this for a moment. As for those women who are not forced into it, and I’m willing to go out on a limb and speculate that they far outnumber those who are forced, wouldn’t they just not go out as much as they otherwise would? I know I would, for as long as possible anyway.

Have you really thought this argument through, oh masters of France? Because it sounds like you’re coming up with an excuse you all know to be incredibly lame but you’re convinced it’s not as lame as saying you just want to ban Islamic symbols. Honestly, if you just came out with the truth, I’d have a lot more respect for your position. If you just said that France is not a nation that believes in the practice of Islam and thus all practice of Islam ought to be confined to the home and masjid, it would be honest. Insupportable in the face of calling yourself a democracy (secular or otherwise), but refreshingly honest.

Let’s raise our glasses of chocolate milk to idea of an honestly conveyed reason for the niqab ban.

I’ve been shopping for the perfect camera for the last six months. That’s right, six months. At first, I couldn’t decide if I wanted a DSLR or another bridge camera in the point-and-shoot category. So, I figured I’d just find the best one of each category and decide later. Just finding the best of two different types of camera has eaten away hours equaling weeks of my life. Among the bridge cameras, I really liked the Canon Powershot SX20, except that I didn’t like the way it did something (I forget what). So, then I ran into the Panasonic FZ-35, which seems to take awesome pictures, and I went so far as to download the User’s Manual and took a look at it. I kept it in my Amazon Shopping cart, and moved onto thinking maybe the bridge cameras are too bulky; perhaps what I really need is one of those nifty little compact point and shoots. After all, the best camera is the one you have with you–and the compacts are such a cinch to keep in my handbag. So, I found a couple of models of those that were great in that they are not only compact but they also have a good zoom factor. I picked out the Canon Powershot SX200 IS and the Panasonic ZS-7, filed them away in my Amazon shopping cart and turned my attention to the DSLRs, but I was scared of this category. Scared for the price, for the bulk of the cameras, for their complexity. I didn’t want to face this monster.

Back I went to reading CNET reviews and Amazon user reviews. I learned that some DSLRs have LiveView (where you can use the LCD as the viewfinder) at the entry level and some don’t. Some have smaller sensors and the sensor size matters but the megapixels don’t as much matter. Some cameras are built on a Four-Thirds system (whatever that is!), and those are great, but the lenses are very expensive. There was so much information flying at me, I didn’t know which way my head was spinning, or if it was spinning at all! Eventually, I ran across the one site that made things so much simpler. They’ve got a image sample feature that allows you to compare the pictures of different models, in addition to having reviews of most cameras on the market today. Now, this image comparison thing is the absolute best thing since Google. By the time I found this website, I had already pretty much settled on the Canon XS, for the fact that it is an entry level camera with a great feature set for a price I can live with (well, kind of). So, here I am, looking at the camera comparison page, wondering which camera I should compare the XS to. I compared it the bridge cameras, the compact cameras, the Nikon D40, the Nikon D5000, and of course the XS did better than the point-and-shoots by miles. With respect to the Nikon D40 and D5000, I wasn’t blown away enough by the image quality difference to change my mind from the XS.

And then, I saw something in the camera list that triggered a memory in my mind. Over these past few months, I’d seen something somewhere about the Pentax K-x, but I didn’t pay it much mind. Until I saw the camera’s name on the drop down list of cameras to compare the XS to. And when I compared the sample images from the Pentax to the sample images from the Canon, my mind was made up…almost. I started comparing the K-x, an entry level DSLR, to higher model Canons, and I could hardly believe my eyes. I can’t imagine how such a gem of a camera, with respect to photo-quality anyway, could be such a well-hidden secret that it is number 32 on Amazon’s Best-Selling DSLR list, lost in a plethora of Canons and Nikons.

While I still don’t know which camera category I like best (insert groan here), I know which DSLR I’d want. And if you’re wondering which is the website that helped me so much, it’s the popular Imaging Resource website. If you’re on the hunt for a new camera, this is one place you must visit when trying to narrow down the list of must-haves.

Now, I must go meditate over whether I really want a DSLR or not.

The next ten times you hear a kid ask you, “Why?!” do him/her a favor and give a real answer.  As opposed to the rest of us dummies, whose why moments were stifled to the point of extinction, the kid will learn the power of why and just might end up building the next piece of gadgetry that we simply must have.

And if you don’t have any kids around to bug you to death with “Why,” then just start learning to why everything around you. It’s never too late to become an inspiration. Besides, asking why and irritating everyone around you is just plain fun. (Don’t overdo it, though; you might end up being a frustrated blogger. Don’t ask me how I know.)

In 2009, the average American watched more than 151 hours of TV a month — an all-time high

84% of people check their PDAs just before bed and as soon as they wake up — and an astounding 85% peek at their PDAs in the middle of the night!

One survey found that over a third of smartphone users would pick their BlackBerry over their significant other if they had to choose one to live without!

and the first one doesn’t shock me too much. I mean, more Americans were unemployed in 2009 (and in 2010!) and probably need something to take away the job-less days. TV is usually a sure-fire way to fill in time when you desperately want something to do, but either can’t find that something or are too depressed to make the move to at least try.

I can make sense of the second statistic, too, because you have to check if you missed an urgent call or text message during the day. It’d be like not checking your answering machine when you step back into your house, and then realizing days later that you missed the birth announcement of your best friend’s baby–it always happens that when you don’t check, important stuff comes in. Checking the phone on waking up, well, that makes sense to me, too: it’s my clock/alarm clock/calendar all rolled into one tiny package. I don’t have an alarm clock with gigantic red LCD digits glaring at me, and the wall clock is too far away for me to read without my glasses on. And for some reason, the first thing I think of when I wake up in the middle of the night or at the first sign of light is “what time is it?” Time is one of those all-important markers which, if you screw up, ruins your whole day. So, checking the phone might just be more innocent than the mark of Connection Addiction.

But the third stat? What the heck is up with people choosing their gadget over the significant other in their life? Either they’re just filling time with people they know are wrong for them, or they are just really cold and disconnected. Well, there may be a few other reasons, but those are the top two explanations that occur to me.

How much have you scaled back your Connection Addictions (if you ever had one)? I know that in the past few weeks, my sister and I have been replacing Internet time with cooking (in her case) and sewing (in mine), and it’s been awesome. I keep thinking to myself, “why did I stop sewing? That was such a dumb thing to do!” As far as hobbies go, it’s way more productive and satisfying…but fulfilling the Connection Addiction is definitely easier. Cooking and baking just leave so many dirty dishes behind, and sewing requires all the cutting, and thread snipping, and what-not…but the internet is clean, clicking fun.

But it doesn’t leave snazzy outfits hanging in your closet. Or tasty treats on your kitchen table.

What have you given up for the Internet, if anything?

(Yes, I’m “trademarking” the term Connection Addiction. Unless somebody else already has.)