Finally, after years of “What the hell is this?!” KACST, the government body responsible for Internet in Saudi Arabia, decided to clean up the blogsphere and they started with those hosted on BlogSpot servers.

As you may expect, this blog is blocked. My other blogs Yawmyat and Pharmaddict are also blocked while my Amr Diab blog is still available. It seems that Amr Diab is not interesting enough; so I should do something about it! But believe it or not, Muttawa is not blocked yet!

I’m not sad that no one in The Magic Kingdom can read my blogs anymore, because this will never stop me. I will start another blog for Saudis and this blog will still alive. I’m just sad that I’m not gonna be able to read some of my very favourite blogs. I will miss reading Zaydoun‘s and Salam Pax.

Earlier this year, KACST blocked the whole BlogSopt domain but they unblocked it few weeks after that. I thought that was it. They made a mistake, they corrected it and they will never do it again. But I was so wrong!

My favourite blogger Zaydoun wrote a good advice on this whole censorship thing: IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, DON’T READ IT!!

No good, they blocked it already and they can’t read it :(

Don’t care about Sarah or the email wars? Here’s something interesting.

While I was reading some of my favorite blogs, I found some links to some different Saudi blogs.

The first blog is called “The Religious Policeman” or what we call here Muttawa. The writer concentrates on one of the evil government bodies here, but also about life in general in the “Magic Kingdom.”

The other one may not be interesting as the first one, but it’s also good. The first post for this blogger states it all:

Welcome to the Magic Kingdom. This is what I see and hear in the land of sand and black gold.

These two blogs will be one the top of my list as they are the most related to my blog. Credits go to Zaydoun, the best Arabian blogger out there.

When Google announced that they will give 1 GB of free space to every user for their new free mail service Gmail no one could believe it. But the other free mail services providers felt the earthquake and decided to expand the mail boxes of their users trying to prevent what seems to be a whole migration to Gmail.

But no one could offer what Google offered, 1 GB of free space.

Yahoo! gave their users 100 MB after what they called improvements even I could not feel any improvement but the extra space.

Hotmail are intending to offer more free space later this year giving their users 250 MB, but COME ON! This is nothing comparing to Gmail’s 1 GB.

Now, there is one real competitor to Gmail. His name is Maktoob.

Maktoob is an Arabic free web-mail service [also available in English] started few years ago and they worked really hard to build what they call the biggest Arab community on the Net. The last week, Maktoob announced about their improved mail service with 1 GB of free space for their users.

There must be something special about the name Sarah, at least for me.

My grandmother’s name is Sarah. Four of my cousins called Sarah. So, I’m so familiar to this name and I don’t know why do I have good feeling about it.

More Sarah? Tow years ago I’ve been to the hospital in order to have my very first surgery which was an open heart surgery. What an operation to start with! I had a case called ASD and I tried the cardiac cath but it couldn’t work it out.

After the operation, I had to spend a week in the hospital to recover. [BTW: after this kind of surgery your body will be like a piece of wood!] Here comes Sarah! My nurse-in-charge was an American mid-thirties woman called Sarah. She was so beautiful. Blonde hair, blue eyes with a charming smile and she looked after me very kindly.

Sarah, and the rest of medical staff of course, helped me to recover faster than expected. You may not believe that I enjoyed the days I spent in the hospital. You know, it’s just amazing to be looked after like a kid from everybody!

I’ve been over the Net for many years now, and when it comes to questions about it, friends and relatives usually refer to me. The truth is, I’m not that deep into it, but I just look like I do.

Although, it’s been many years, but I did not try to buy anything over the Net until last month when I decided to have a credit card for the first time in order to try shopping using the Web.

A lot of people here don’t trust that kind of shopping because they think it’s not safe. They don’t even like to shop using the phone. For people here, when it comes to shopping, they want to go down there to the market where they can touch the stuff and bargain for the best price.

I’ve decided to buy some books form Amazon. It’s just my first try to buy and I thought it’s best for me to try a respectful site which has a good reputation as the best retailer on the Net.

As a blog-addicted, the two books I bought were about bolgging and they both had the name of Rebecca Blood on their covers. The first is “We’ve Got Blog” and the second is “The Weblog Handbook“. I will write a review for the books after I finish reading them as they will not arrive until the second or third week of July.

The England team have lost to Portugal 6-5 on penalties in the Euro 2004 quarter-final match. I am feeling really disappointed that the Three Lions played very well but they finally lost.

They were just unlucky to lose the rising star Rooney. He got an injury in the first half and then substituted. Maybe it was going to be different for England with Rooney on the pitch.

England 4 – 2 Croatia

Scholes, Rooney (2), Lampard 


The Three Lions advances to the next stage, where they will face Portugal in the quarter finals next Thursday.