I’m back. As some of you may already know, it wasn’t just about the moving and school. In fact, I was frustrated over some stuff in my life, and I was depressed. I tried to solve that by consuming extra amounts of Vanilla Coke and Cheetos, but, apparently, that was not enough. I’m not completely healed, but I thought I should get back to doing this anyway.

Also, I want to thank you all for your wishes, and for asking about me.

No, I’m not back, and I don’t think I will be any time soon, for that matter. As school is coming back, and I’m moving to a new apartment, plus other stuff, I won’t be able to do any online activities for two weeks, maybe more. So I’m going to miss you all, and miss doing this, but if it’s any consolation, you won’t be bothered by my useless rants for some time; something that can be good for you, I think. Anyways, see you later.

I have not been blogging as usual during the past two weeks. I was going through some stuff, and it’s been a bit strange around here lately. So I’m gonna take a break for some time. I won’t be blogging for about 7-10 days. See you later.

When I linked to the AP story on the use of Bluetooth technology few days ago, I did not think that Saudi media would pay attention to it, because we often read similar stories in the Western media, and as I said, the story told nothing new.

However, today, I read this story in the printed edition of al-Hayat newspaper, which reports the reaction of some Saudis to the AP story. All the people interviewed criticized the American media because they think it misrepresents Saudis, and gives the wrong image about them. “The officials of the United States are responsible for the media errors on the government and people Saudi Arabia,” Saud Salim, a webmaster who graduated from an American university, said.

He blames the American Department of State in particular, for what he called “double scales.” Huh? He blames the American government, while he, in the same time, admits that American media is “free.” I think this is weird.

“The reporter does not indicate that people like Reem -if he actually had met her- exists in other countries, including his own country,” So’ad Abdul-Aziz, a university student, said. I don’t understand. The story was about Saudi Arabia. Why would the reporter ever consider mentioning other countries? This student does not seem to believe that the reporter has talked to a girl called Reem, and she doubts the reporter’s intentions.

The story refers to the AP reporter as a man, while the reporter is actually a woman, and her last name suggests that she comes from an Arabic origin.

Manal Mohammed thinks the American media represents Saudis with extreme inferiority, includes many misconceptions, and generalizes some individual’s acts about a whole society. She says the likes of Reem and Abdullah exist, but thinks they are a minority. “How many are they? 1000? 2000? Or even 100,000? The population of Saudi Arabia is about 20m, and this report tries to give the impression that all the 20m are like Reem and Abdullah,” she said.

I’m not in a position where I can make a statement about how many people out there who are like Reem and Abdullah, because that would also be a generalization. I don’t even use Bluetooth, because my phone is not equipped with this technology. But I reread the story, and I could not get the attempt to give that certain impression she was talking about. What about you? Have any of you got that impression? Do you think that American media is biased when it comes to Saudi Arabia? Or let me be more specific: Do you think this story was unfair to Saudis?

Here is a good piece on reading from the Guardian.

Browsing through the MozDev.org projects, I found some really interesting extensions for Firefox. Here’s three extension that you might would like to try.

BloggerBar
This extension adds a toolbar to Firefox that allows you to search through your Blogger’s posts, and user profiles, and use the well-known BlogThis button to post from your browser without going to Blogger website.

BookmarksHome
This extension makes a startup page out of your bookmarks, and you can change the look and feel of the page using a highly customizable stylesheet.

Menu Editior
I have more than 30 useful extensions in my Firefox. Most of these extensions add new functions to the right-click menu, and this causes to menu to become very long; very long that some functions are no longer usable (read I can’t see them on the screen). This extension helps me to make the menu shorter by deleting those that I don’t use frequently.

Allow me to paraphrase Farah this time: Allow me to poke!
Arab News reports that a “telephone and Internet campaign complaining about women in the workplace has prompted communications provider Mobily to shut its women’s call center and consider having separate telephone numbers for men’s and women’s services.”

I have read previously a fatwa on this, but never thought it would emerge to a campaign that would actually force the company to take such action. I can’t believe that those lunatics started calling women to harass, and insult them. What kind of sick minds these people have?