hilarious nostalgia coming up

My brother, bless him, got us tickets to the Rush concert in Portland in late June. The set list looks heavily nostalgia-driven for our generation. HERE.

“Working Man” as the final encore is genius. That’s way, way nostalgic, before my time even. Actually, I think that song is even pre-Neil Peart.

It does surprise me somewhat that we’re seeing all these rock bands touring heavily as the musicians enter their 60’s. The question is how long can it keep going? Will there be a few bands where the guys are playing at 80?

iPhone vs. Blackberry

My iPhone broke mid-afternoon today, during the conference. It was one failed part– the button no longer works, meaning that I’m frozen inside the telephone options and cannot get back to the main screen for email or anything else.

My Blackberry also eventually broke, again due to one part– the thumb-operated selector wheel on the right-hand side, which I believe no longer exists on the Blackberry. Good if not, since it was an ergonomic disaster leading to much stress on the thumb.

*The iPhone lasted for 1 year and 7 months before breaking down.

*The Blackberry lasted for 2 years and 3 months before breaking down.

Blackberry service is better in Egypt, for whatever reason. The iPhone does this weird thing with email downloads where it will show you the name of the emailer and the title of the email, but then the little wheel will spin for sometimes another 3-5 minutes before the message appears. It’s frustrating.

Blackberry never does that here, and I also like the red flashing light to alert you to new email, which the iPhone doesn’t have. I’m also not someone who uses a lot of iPhone apps.

So, after dinner I’m going out to buy… a Blackberry. The rush purchase is necessary given how much multimedia presence I need while running this conference for two more days.

Ennis posts

I’m on the run tonight and so can’t sit down to read these posts, but it looks like Paul Ennis has two interesting speculative realism-related posts. HERE (extracts from a Facebook debate) and HERE (concerning his upcoming lecture in Basel).

busy today and next two days

One of my duties as Associate Provost for Research Administration is to run the annual AUC Research Conference. This year’s conference started today, at the Tahrir Campus (yes, directly on Tahrir Square). It will move to the New Campus for the next two days.

I received a lot of great help on this, especially from young Ali and Kristina in the Social Research Center, who are two of the more organized people I’ve met in awhile.

Our first keynote speaker went today, and was well received indeed. It was Prof. Abdullahi An-Na’im, who holds an endowed chair at the Emory University Law School. He specializes in human rights, and is best described as an extremely liberal Islamic legal theorist, liberal enough that his keynote address was called “A Democratic State Cannot Be ‘Islamic'”, on the grounds that Islam has no meaning unless people can choose not to be Muslim. It is views like this that made him the target of a fatwa from Iraq a few years ago, apparently. He’s lived in exile from Sudan for over two decades, and I was told today that his mentor was executed by hanging in Sudan.

In any case, it was an energizing day, the best opening day we’ve had for the Research Conference in my 11 years here.

Below is a photo of Professor An-Na’im. (Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia will be our second keynote speaker, on Thursday.)