GuruStop.NET

For many years, people used to laugh at the World End 2012 prophecy. This year, people’s joke was that we’d be very lucky if we manage to get to the end of 2011 even!
Yeah, 2011 is such a bloody, surprising, rich, optimistic, pessimistic, and loaded year. So many events, so many famous deaths, so much fire, so much energy, and indeed, so much hope.

Seems we are lucky anyway. We’re only less than two weeks close get into 2012, Many have either started their holidays already, or just about to.
Unless you believe that year is the end of the world truly (no, not discussing it even!), that alone should make you optimistic :-)

The title “Year O’clock” is not mine, it’s my colleague, Steven Nagy. I may talk about the origin of the name later, for now, let’s say it’s a friendly internal new year’s resolutions cheer-up message.
Few days after I responded to it, I thought I’d share my response with you too, after removing some customer identifying parts and adding some context to a few parts of course.

The Year O’clock Email:

Just Three Questions

1. Work related highlights for the year

   • Been across 4 different big clients in the same year. Really enjoyed them all

Technically, I have just reached 25 years today, February 24, 2011. Of course if we agree to ignore the time zone difference between Sydney and Greater Cairo, as it’s still February 23 in there.

Originally I didn’t plan to write about it, although I had very nice comments on few  posts about couple other birthdays (lost in blog move I guess). Now that I look behind, my life was always moving so fast, and I have always been feeling it moves too slowly (to the extent of screwing things trying to get them earlier than I should).  Now looking back, it’s weird.

Most of life as a kid I used to prefer sitting with older people, like their talks, reading, etc than the usual interests of other boys around. This kind of got me fewer friends (with –only little- help of being an Albino, which is not usual in Egypt). Things got slightly better by university time but I used to live with different personalities.

Today (technically yesterday, since it’s 3:26 AM already while I’m starting this), Mr. Adam Mohamed Meligy finally arrived home, after staying 9.5 days in nursery. This –dear audience- given Mr. Adam arrived to our world only in October 5, 2009, a date that the entire world will (sooner or later) always remember!

Mr. Adam is now taking a personal cover, pretending to be a normal baby, while he is pretty professional, he cannot sometimes hide his special natures, being relatively quiet compared to normal babies, and highly responsive to touches and (believe it or not) spoken notes/requests.

These are things that the world will remember once Mr. Adam finishes his first big achievement in the field he will take up for living (God Willing). Some other small details matter more to the family, both his grandparents –for example- note him as their first grandchild. I –personally- recognize him as my extra chance in life! If I fail to manage to be another Anders Hejlsberg/Martin Fowler, Scott Guthrie/Brad Abrams, or Scott Hanselman/Rob Conery/Phil Haack (still trying), Mr. Adam has a bigger chance; else wise, he’ll be digging his road as a notable figure in some different field (God Willing).

Yesterday I changed my twitter username from @Mohamed_Meligy to just @Meligy.

Why?

I have been thinking about this step for a long time, as my tweets are relatively long, and when I want to to allow people to re-tweet. With my old username, I used to have to write at max 120 characters per tweet to allow re-tweet (leaving 20 characters out of the real 140 characters limit to “RT @Mohamed_Meligy: ”). With my new twitter username I can use up to 128 characters (leaving 12 for “RT @Meligy: ”). I know I ‘m a person who can make nice use of those 8 extra characters, but is this worth doing? For sometime I thought: No.

My old username has some nice features. First, it includes my full name, so, that’s nice for people who don’t know me very well. Second, it has been around for over a year and over ~2390 tweets! That’s something!! People got used to using this twitter username when replying to me (mentioning me) and I did my best to put it everywhere in my Google and Facebook profile and blog and everywhere, and also used it with many twitter applications that require entering username/password.

The “BTW” Announcement

Hey guys, remember when I posted my engagement to Mona, the cute smart kind beautiful super cool sweetie?

Well, we have got married :).

It was on Friday, January 23rd. I’m writing this after the honeymoon vacation, which was practically a honey half moon vacation, due to work conditions in this speed world!

So, how is that going?

Based on my small experience so far, I’d answer a question some friends asked on mobile phone…

YES, marriage is GREAT, but of course only when you marry the perfect person that best fills in all your feelings. It’s very hard to find. Usually, you don’t search for that; you just find THE ONE accidentally. When you do, you know it, and your life becomes just nice, and, all fun. If you don’t, God be in your help.

Thankfully, I have found my one, and I can assure you, life with her is really sweet. I truly feel like I need nothing from this world when we are sitting together at home. This girl just rocks :).