My interest in Gold and the US Dollar grew in the past couple of weeks, as a person who is not that much into the financial world I didn’t care much when a friend started talking about the gold rise and how the dollar will become worthless soon. Well as much as that seemed a bit over the top and a very very far fetched thought yet the whole scenario intrigued me and I started reading more and educating myself about how things are playing out in the markets worldwide.

Between the truth and lies and the conspiracy theorists and the opportunists I had a huge struggle in really fully understanding how is this thing working, but the big picture got clearer day after day.

The Gold reached record highs in the past 9 days, and every day you would read the same kind of headline “Gold reaches a record high”. Every Day!! Yesterday it reached $1195 USD, but then news broke from Dubai stating that Dubai requested debt ’standstill’, that lead to fears in the worldwide markets, this caused a sell-off in commodities and stocks, while the U.S. dollar gained against its rivals.

The Gold dropped to a $1130 USD an ounce after reaching $1195 USD, as of the time of writing this post the gold is at $1176 USD. So this seems to be just a temporary drop that wont last long.

Did Max Keiser predict this back in February 2009 ?

Max Keiser Comments on the current events:

More to come soon ……

Barcelona have officially announced that the deal that will see Zlatan Ibrahimovic move to Barcelona and Eto’o to Inter Milan is complete. This transfer started with a rumor and kept growing with speculation on the price and who is in the exchange too, as it was reported earlier that Hleb will go on loan to Inter Milan and that Barcelona is going to pay 40 million.

In my opinion Ibrahimovic is CURRENTLY better than Eto’o, and he will do well in Barcelona, while Inter Milan will struggle for a bit with Eto’o as the player will suffer injuries from the tough defense style in Italy. I hugely doubt it would be able to perform as well as he did for Barcelona.

I watched Eto’o while playing in his National team and he does not seem to be as effective as when he has the kinds of Messi and Xavi and Iniesta behind him. We need to wait and see, this season is very very interesting in the three leading European leagues.

After being bombarded with FOREX ads all over the internet, it seems you cant dodge those ads anywhere you go even if you have any kind of Ad Block, I finally caved and decided to try this FOREX thing using virtual money (Practice Account).

One of the easiest and friendliest user interfaces seemed to be ETORO, having both novice and advanced modes. So long story short I tried it for few hours and gave it a long thought and I decided that its an interesting thing to learn more about before jumping on with real cash. Yet I later caved again and wanted to deposit some money but not to go crazy and try to take it slow.

The next day I get a phone call from ETORO middle east customer support, and I was amazed that he spoke Arabic, although talking about FOREX in Arabic was awkward but I had a long chat with him, and he kept going on and on how etoro is the best invention on the net (ya right), I didn’t mind it as I was eager to know more although I knew he just wants to make a sale.

Everything was fine until I asked him a question about money transfers via credit cards and PayPal and if they support it and so on, the second I mentioned PayPal he went crazy, and asked me what’s my nationality I told him “I am Jordanian”, so he went mad again and started insulting all Jordanians!!! that we are cheap and etoro is not for “my” kind of people!! So I taught him a lesson on how to treat future customers and ended the call.

Just minutes before his call I was thinking seriously to deposit $500 dollars to try it out, and also to try the “Islamic” accounts, but after that unprofessional rude unacceptable treatment how can I do so?? Few days later I am chatting with a friend and FOREX came up and he told me nearly the same thing happened to him too!!

What is wrong with these people? Are they expecting FOREX professionals to talk to them? or are they expecting new users to deposit thousands of dollars from the first try? Their whole pitch is that they are user friendly and that their system is “EASY” for beginners?! Actually their minimum deposit is $50 US Dollars. Although I think etoro is an attractive and simple system yet they really need to seriously filter their customer support employees for the middle east and employ those who are pro and who knows how to effectively and respectfully communicate with their customers.

A while ago Facebook allowed their users to choose usernames which is going to be used in a url linking to their profile, after the username was chosen it cannot be changed. So just like when you buy domains (at least for me) sometimes people can go crazy and choose usernames that they might regret later.

Facebook is now giving its users one last chance to change their usernames, no more changes after this time (ya right), so if you want to choose a new username you can do that by going to “Settings” then “Account Settings”.

But after millions of Facebook users already chose a username, finding a good one might be difficult, and I advise you to choose your name rather than any other thing you might think is clever or funny.

After Klaas-Jan Huntelaar move from Real Madrid to Stuttgart have fallen, it looks like Arsenal is interested according to “The Sun” and ready to get him for €19 million.

Real Madrid wants to sell and Arsenal has a limitted budget, so although this report from “The Sun” is believable, I still have my doubts, as an Arsenal fan I watched wenger season after season getting linked with many players and I cant yet put my hands on it but this deal does not seem right. I think Huntelaar might move to Tottenham.

The latest promo on MBC:

I can see the MBC network executives pulling their hair now, but no one can blame MBC, no one could have predicted this kind of chaos. Fight after fight year after year and it never ends, an actor/actress is leaving or being removed, some even being offered big bucks to move to other series !!! The fighting even reached between fans who are now in two or more teams, those who blame the director who is controlling everything now as a producer and those who accuse the actors to be troublemakers for asking more money, Yes this is the level it reached to?!

Bab El 7ara is the series that was reminding us of the beautiful old simpler times, pressing on going back to  traditional values, good manners and bravery in a society that is so polluted in our current days. How can I believe the actors in their roles any more now after seeing all what is happening in behind the scenes??

Yet MBC will still be profiting hugely from “Bab Al Hara 4” this year and the 5th season next year. I believe even if MBC just show a black screen with the words “Bab El 7ara” written in Arabic on it will be enough to catch millions of gazing glued eyes.

The first two parts of “Bab El 7ara” were too good that anything coming after that would find a gigantic audience, we all know if “Bab El 7ara 3” was shown first no one would care to follow it. It is being speculated that this season is well written and will avoid amateur mistakes that happened in the third season. I guess we can only wait and see.

And here is the “Making of” segment in the MBC Morning Show:

No one was enthusiastic about Al-Libiyah, yet the people wanted to listen to Hamdi Qandeel in any possible way, even if it was audio files being downloaded via the internet. But the show did start on Al-Libiyah and although there was always technical problems with the sound and color, but people watched, a huge number of audience the new born channel would never ever have dreamed of.

But problems keep following Hamdi, for unusual reasons the General Manager of Al-Libiyah channel was jailed for couple of days for reasons related to Hezbollah (don’t ask me am as clueless as you are), and since that day “Qalam Rasas”  never aired. Only five episodes were aired since the comeback in March. We later knew that Al-Libiyah channel which was a private channel, was nationalized by the president of Libya Muammar Al-Qathafi.

And here the same Mona Elshazly announcing this on her show “Al3ashera Masa’an” “10 O’clock”:

Now I have been hearing that a deal is in the making between him and Al-Manar channel, funny enough, that is the TV channel of Hezbollah. Will the deal work out? Will it get cancelled few weeks later? Who knows? we shall wait and watch.

Here is the last episode of Qalam Rasas on Al-Libiyah for those who missed it:

Since the rise of the internet I always heard of projects of online universities, virtual universities, online only universities and even FREE online universities. But every time the end result was disappointing, with some of those projects either ridiculously very expensive, not accredited or the project simply gets cancelled for funding issues.

So that is why when I heard about the UOP “University of the People” I was not that shocked, and I just thought it will be the same old story, big idea with disappointing implementation. And don’t get me wrong it still might lead to that result, who knows? But this time this feels a bit different.

Few years ago many universities made their course materials available online for free, video lectures, audio lectures, slides, notes and even assignments. The leading university who took this bold move was MIT “Massachusetts Institute of Technology”. Many other universities followed MIT’s lead such as Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, UCLA, Yale, Washington and many more.

The University of the People is a non-profit university, its main goal is to give the chance of higher education to all people around the world for free or very low prices. The university is mostly comprised of volunteers, professors, librarians, master level students, computer programmers and professionals. 

The university is still not accredited, but this is normal as it is just starting and it needs to follow number of rules and get evaluated to be able to get accredited. The university is going to be offering two undergraduate degrees, a BA in Business Administration and a BSc in Computer Science. More bachelors degrees and masters degrees such as MBA is expected to be added in later stages.

The university is accepting now applications from students around the world, but in the start they will only accept 300 students, the plan is to reach to 10 thousand enrollments within 5 years. The fees are minimal, for enrollment it will range between $15 to $50, and for exams between $10 to $100, it all depends on where you are living.

On the 24th of April 2009 the UOP started accepting enrollment applications, and on 14th of May 2009 a new website will be launched. 30th of June 2009 the enrollment deadline for the fall semester. 20th of July 2009 the notice of acceptance to UOP orientation courses. 9th of September 2009 the Fall Semester starts.

At the moment the best way to contact the university is via email, although they provide a phone number but you will have to be very very very lucky to get a human to talk to you, 99% of the time you will be forwarded to voice mail. You should get a quick reply to your email during the weekdays.

One reason a lot of people are optimistic for this to work is that the peer-to-peer learning experience actually exists online, according to a survey by the Sloan Consortium (a nonprofit group devoted to integrating online learning into mainstream higher education) around 4 million students in USA took an online course in 2007. The founder of UOP sensed the power of peer to peer learning while working on www.cramster.com which is an online study community that offers help for students on their college homework and assignments.

Of course if the right tools are available and the community is well built and the professionals are there to help, this could be a dream come true, this could revolutionize online education. But for this to fully succeed a lot of factors should work together perfectly to reach to the kind of success this kind of idea deserves. Many people who are eager to study and get higher education will be happy to hear this news, people who missed out on education, this could be their second chance. This could change lives, we just have to wait and see.

On my clock it was 2:49 AM when I felt the tremors in my room, I was reading my favorite blogs and I felt the bed shaking and then I looked at the mirrors in front of me and they were shaking, although these kind of tremors became more normal during the past few years, yet I still do freak out and panic whenever they happen because I keep wondering if this could be the BIG one.

As usual I quickly went to the USGS website to check what happened but it was still not reported, then I checked twitter where I found couple of people asking the same question I had, DID YOU FEEL IT?

Maps after the jump…

View My Saved Places in a larger map

The weird thing is that the problem wouldnt happen on all pages, but whether or not the page has the problem you can always Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C to copy the whole contents of the page without any problem. Well i was using IE Tab 1.2 because it was the last version that didnt crash firefox when i switched views from firefox to ie (of course i used MR Tech Toolkit to make that possible). So i decided to upgrade to the latest version of IE Tab (1.5) to see if it crashed and it did. I thought it maybe because of another addon was conflicting with it and that didnt help either, so i’m back to square one. So i have the choice now whether to enjoy copying/pasting or use IE Tab. Hope this solution helps someone.