Monthly Archives: July 2011

Pottermore Registration

[EDIT] I have successfully registered in Pottermore. 

For an early look into Pottermore, click here.

I have yet to gain access to the Pottermore registration interface (blame it on Sunday oversleeping) but I figured I’d post about the process to facilitate it for those who, like me, will attempt to gain access in the next six days.

When you access the Pottermore website, you will find a riddle for you to answer. Today’s riddle (or clue as it was named) was: How many breeds of owl are featured on the Eeylops Owl Emporium sign? Multiply this number by 49.

Once you get the answer, which in this case was 245, you have to use it to access a new webpage that will give you access to the magic quill.

To access this new webpage, you need to write down your answer at its end, meaning: http://quill.pottermore.com/245 (tomorrow’s answer will be different, so the addition naturally changes as well).

Once the new page loads, you’ll have to locate the Magic Quill, which for those of you who don’t know, is sort of a book where the names of every wizard and witch is written so they can be invited to Hogwarts once they turn eleven.

Once you locate the Magic Quill, you will be invited to start your journey – literally.

Once you “start your journey,” you go through a series of registration steps where you have to fill out your name, email, age, country of residence, etc…

If the person wanting to register is below 13 years of age, they only need to provide a first name and their guardian/parent’s email address.

Once the data input is done, you are presented with a list of famous magical people, including your name.

Then you’ll get to choose a username, which is not a free process apparently: they give you a selection of five usernames to choose from. Hopefully you’ll get to change that later on, but I doubt it.

Then, after selecting your username, a confirmation email is sent to you in order to activate your registration.

When done, you will be prompted with a new page telling you that you will receive the email telling you that you can test Pottermore in the coming few weeks.

Good luck everyone.

Rue Huvelin – New Lebanese Movie

And the series of interesting-looking Lebanese movies continues. After blogging about Nadine Labaki’s upcoming movie, Where Do We Go Now, it’s time to put the spotlight on Rue Huvelin.

For anyone who doesn’t know Beirut well, specifically Achrafieh, Rue Huvelin is considered a landmark. It is where the prestigious French system based university “Université St. Joseph” is located.

Slated for a November 17th release date, Rue Huvelin is a movie about the Lebanese student movement at the time of the Syrian (direct) occupation of the country, between 1990 and 2005.

The movie’s official summary is as follows:

In 1990, the Lebanon War ends with the Syrian army’s takeover of the Presidential Palace, signaling an ensuing fifteen years occupation. One of the consequences of this period was a general sense of collective retreat and apathy among the population. On Huvelin Street, where the Middle East’s leading Francophone university (Saint-Joseph) settles, a group of students opposed to the status-quo decide to break the silence and rally a pacifying resistance movement in the heart of Beirut at the close of the 1990s. Their resistance was a struggle between two opposing worldviews: between a liberal and freedom-loving lifestyle of a group of friends and compatriots, and between the oppression of authorities and the indifference of society.

Are you interested? Cause I sure am.

Soul Surfer – Movie Review

Soul Surfer follows in the Hollywood footsteps of movies such as The Blind Side, a true story based drama with a central Christian theme.

Bethany Hamilton (AnnaSophia Robb) is your regular teenager in almost every way, except that her blood is “salty water” – she lives to surf. Surfing is who she is and it is how she spends most of her time, in her Hawaiian hometown. However, fate has it that a shark attack causes Bethany to lose her left arm. If the attack had been two inches higher, Bethany would have lost her life as well. She lost 60% of her blood before she was rushed to the hospital where she struggles for her life and barely grasps to it.

It is then that Bethany’s struggle towards normality begins. How do you lead a surfing-based life with only one arm? How do you do your basic home chores and help around in the most basic tasks with one limb less?

With the help of her Youth Pastor Sarah Hill (Carrie Underwood) and her parents (Helen Hunt and Dennis Quaid), Bethany regains her footing, learning the most valuable lesson of her life: with love and faith, you gain a new perspective on life, one that allows you to see the workings of God even in tragedies and allows you to come out triumphant.

I am by no means a sappy Christian. I struggle with my faith on daily basis. But Soul Surfer is one of those rare movies that demand nothing of you except to sit with an open mind and watch. It doesn’t preach. It doesn’t try to serve arguments about the existence of God, it simply shows you how Bethany found God in her life, as she stood on the precipice of a tragedy, the day before the rest of her life.

AnnaSophia Rob delivers a great performance as young Bethany. Her performance is highly nuanced, showcasing both aspects of her character’s character meticulously: the carefree teenagers and the tragedy-struck woman. She showcases Bethany’s struggle in a highly natural way and doesn’t shy away from asking those most crucial question in situations like this: why me?

Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt deliver performances that are representative of their acting caliber. They are the parents horrified by the troubles of their little girl, as they simultaneously put up this invincible facade to get her through her ordeal. But it’s Bethany at times who has to tell her dad not to cry.

Carrie Underwood holds her own in her movie debut as the youth pastor Sarah Hill. She is in about five scenes where she serves as guidance for Bethany and she does her job as a supportive character with flying colors. I had no idea what to expect from Carrie because I have never seen her take on a serious acting role of this magnitude before (although she has shown some acting chops in her Just a Dream and Temporary Home videos as well as a comedic side in a guest role on How I Met Your Mother) but I was pleasantly surprised. She held her own, did not over-act or under-act and gave the character the amount of emotion it deserved. And no, I’m not being biased.

All in all, Soul Surfer is one of those feel-good movies that actually make you feel ecstatic by their end. And even the story could have been this saccharine tale with the happy ending resolution, it doesn’t feel like this in this movie, mostly because you know this is not fiction – someone actually went through all of this. When Bethany is asked, towards the end of the movie, if she could go back and not go surfing on the day she got attacked, her reply was: “I wouldn’t change what happened to me because then I wouldn’t have this chance, in front of all of you, this chance to embrace more people than I ever could have with two arms.”

And when the end credits roll with real life footage of the real Bethany Hamilton, you remain in your seat, transfixed by this young woman who, against all odds, beat her tragedy to become one of the world’s most important surfers today.

8.5/10

Facebook For iPad – Overview

Let me get this out there: I do not like jailbreaking. I tend to stay away from it like a cat avoiding water.

But when I heard that Facebook hid some sort of easter egg in its iPhone application, I decided to take the plunge. How bad could it be? I figured the worst case scenario would be restoring the iPad’s software in iTunes.

Why jailbreak? Well, the easter egg in question was actually Facebook’s long awaited Facebook for iPad app. It turned out that by changing a number in the app’s build, it converts to the iPad version. Pretty cool, no?

If you want to test it out for yourself, there are plenty of guides online. And quoting the ever-wise J.K. Rowling: ” If you have to ask, you will never know. If you know, you need only ask.” (hint)

Now let’s get down to what’s important: the app itself.

It could be the iPad’s bigger screen but the app feels more natural on it compared to the iPhone and similarly to the Twitter app, whenever you switch between landscape and portrait orientations, the app changes its layout accordingly. Not groundbreaking, obviously, but the only thing that changes w/ the iPhone version is the 180 degree switch.

Always present on the bar on top are four different buttons: the first one from the left opens up a sidebar on the left which has quick shortcuts to your news feed, profile, messages, events, places, friend list, photos, as well as some of the groups you joined or were forced to join (what’s up with that by the way?).

The second one opens up a friend request list. The third one opens up your messages and allows you to reply to any new message right there.The last earth-shaped one shows you all your notifications.

Similarly to the iPhone app, your news feed has three additional shortcuts to post a photo, a status or check in places. Sliding your news-feed to the left, in order to have more space to the right, while you’re in landscape mode, gives you a new sidebar: Facebook chat, equipped like the iPhone version with speech bubbles.

Your Facebook profile page is very similar to the way you see it using the regular Facebook website, adding to it the two iPhone shortcuts to post a status or share a picture.

Facebook Places has been given a rather interesting layout where you get to see where your friends have checked in on a map.

You can also see your friend list and albums similarly to the grid layout in iTunes: big thumbnails that feature the album cover or a friend’s profile picture.

Overall, the Facebook for iPad app is pretty neat. Using it is intuitive and it merges the computer version of Facebook and the iPhone version quite well, which is what the iPad is all about: your computer experience in a mobile form.

The app looks nice, as you can see from the below pictures, and I think all the different shortcuts are rather smart. It basically comes down to this: I guess Mark Zuckerberg is eating his words after saying they have no interest in developing an app for the iPad seeing as it’s not a mobile platform. Because from what I’ve seen of the app, they’ve put more work in it than the iPhone version. This can be considered as “beta” and it’s less buggy than the iPhone app I’m using.

Good job Facebook.









Dear Lebanese, Stop Selling Your Country Short

Lebanon is not a perfect country. It has its obvious and grave flaws. But it exists.

It might be rickety. You might think the foundations are not solid. But the country has pulled through too much: civil war, several occupations, invasions, Israeli wars…
We pride ourselves on being resilient. We describe Beirut by saying it’s a “phoenix”, albeit quite cliche, always rising from the ashes.

But I digress.

What we also do is bash our country left and right, up and down. And every direction in between those anytime something we do not agree with happens.
Let me illustrate this.

The most recent example is the arrest of Zeid Hamdan today, after being accused of libel against the Lebanese president, following a rather useless song.
The moment Zeid was taken into custody, Lebanese twitter and Facebook users were up in protest. The Facebook page dedicated to freeing Zeid gained about 2000 followers in a few hours. All good, right? I mean, the arrest was ridiculous. The law upon which the arrest was based needs to be revised. It’s no longer 1926 when our constitution was “inspired” by the French one at the time. France changed theirs. It’s high time we change ours.
Another side of the Zeid Hamdan arrest was a lot of Lebanese people bashing their country, some calling it a useless place, others calling it a failure of a nation, while some called it a piece of sh*t.

In another example, some people have expressed their desire to change their citizenship and abandon this tragedy of a country. The cause for such feelings? Some beaches in Lebanon only allow couples to be admitted.

Some have called the nation a failure because our phones are not cheap and our internet isn’t fast. The basis for that comparison? A country whose system is a failing monarchy.

Others have expressed that sentiment when they got stuck in traffic. I’m sure those people haven’t heard of the ridiculous traffic that hit L.A. a few days ago, or the traffic that lasted a week in China. But you know, you’re Lebanese. You nag.

Just because our political system is in a perpetually fragile equilibrium doesn’t mean the whole system is a failure. Just because power transfers easily doesn’t mean the country is a failure.

And you know what the most ridiculous thing is, our expectations are so low of anything Lebanon-related that we’re willing to believe any rumor that defames the country as a whole. I’m sure you all remember how NewTV decided to announce that our National Anthem is stolen from some dead quasi-Moroccan kingdom, which named itself “The Kingdom of Peasants.” The news spread like wildfire. Some of the Facebook statuses and tweets at the time: Even our anthem is stolen. We’re such a ridiculous country.
And what do you know, the whole rumor turned out to be false. It turned out that those Moroccan peasants stole our anthem. I wonder, why weren’t the NewTV people arrested for defamatory behavior against the whole country?

This is historically a chronic problem in Lebanon, selling the nation short while idealizing a foreign ideology as it might be the quick fix to our problems. In the 1950’s and 60’s many thought that Nasser’s Arabist ideology would be the great fix for Lebanon. People thought that his brave speeches and anti-West sentiments is what the country needed. Yet I wonder if those people realize that Nasser turned Egypt into a police state, banned political parties and demonstrations, evicted countless minorities, lost at countless wars which bankrupted Egypt, and even used poison gas on people in his war in Yemen. Meanwhile during that time Lebanon was in the midst of a golden age , yet people called for his brand of Arabism thinking it would solve things. And shockingly we have erected a statue to such a bloody dictator right on our own sea front promenade.

We lament our sectarian system and lack of national semblance. Let’s take a closer look at our neighbors that we envy so much. Sudan has recently split into two states. The South finally won its independence after years of bloody civil war, and yes a civil war longer then the Lebanese civil war! Southerners revolted against a forced campaign of Arabism and lack of freedom. In Iraq where Kurds were victims of genocide, they now have their own autonomous zone, and the state acts as a loose federation. Morocco has witnessed a huge rebel movement in its Western Sahara province which now has its own autonomy. Egypt for the last three decades has seen spats of sectarian violence where the Coptic minority still does not have the right to build churches. And one can only begin to imagine how Shiites are treated in the GCC states.

This may come as a shock to many Lebanese but Lebanon is still #1 in the region for media and civil rights. According to pew polls %97 of Lebanese Muslims view Christians favorably while only a dismal %48 of Egyptians do and far ahead of the Arab nations, and for bizarre reasons we say that we aren’t a model of coexistence. Our literacy and education rate is one of the highest in the region and Lebanese universities continue to attract students from across the region. Even Western critics admit that Beirut is the most cosmopolitan city in the region as well as the culinary capital. While many in the Arab world are dying just to ask for presidential term limits, better civil society and free elections, we’ve continued to be on top in those fields for years.

People need to start dwelling on the positives. YOU come from a nation that has produced poets like Khalil Gebran and singers like Fairouz. YOU actually have the freedom to criticize your own state – regardless of what happened today. YOU actually have the freedom to start your own NGO. YOU have the freedom to vote for a political party of your choice. YOU have the freedom to wear what you want. YOU have the freedom to protest for change. YOU have nature reserves. YOU live in the most diverse nation in the region. YOU have banks that weathered the financial meltdown. YOU have cabinet ministers that actually respond. YOU have freedom of press. YOU have the freedom of how you want to identify, i.e. Arab, Phoenician, or whatever.

A few days ago, #BlameTheMuslims was a trending topic on Twitter. People thought it was racist because they missed the point. A Muslim girl started it as a sarcastic approach to how Muslims are portrayed in media. Her initial tweets?
– My battery died. #BlameTheMuslims.
– My shirt got dirty. #BlameTheMulims.
– I’m sleepy. #BlameTheMuslims.
You get the picture.
With some Lebanese, their lifestyle regarding their country is like this.
– My food is cold. #LebanonIsAFailure
– I can’t go to the beach because I don’t have a girlfriend #LebanonIsAFailure
– iPhone is expensive! #LebanonIsAFailure
– It takes me two hours to download a porn video! #LebanonIsAFailure.

So dear Lebanese, when you start selling your country short and whoring your pride around so other people start making fun of you and your heritage, you become a failure. Think about the people that read or hear your words before uttering them. Odds are, if someone non-Lebanese says these things about your country, you’d be all up in a fistfight. So why do you say them?

Look at what others in the Middle East are facing before you start complaining again. Take pride in your nation instead of constantly selling it short, and envying others. If we actually took more pride in our own nation and its unique diversity there would be more national cohesion instead of fragmentation. Let’s appreciate what we do have and work towards a better common future. A lot of what we need for change is right under our own noses. Lebanon is a middle income country, and many of its neighbors are ranked much lower, so stop and think about what they’re going through and what it really means to live in a failed state.

We have a long way to go. And compared to more advanced countries, we fall short in many aspects. But at least be proud of what you have accomplished.

Take this symbolically

PS: Thank you to my awesome friend Boulos for his great input and help in making this post.