An American in Jordan

You’ve got to love it when a political candidate can laugh at themselves. Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live has been garnering a lot of talk lately. Last night, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin hosted SNL and played along flawlessly.

Ridley Scott’s latest film, Body of Lies, starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, is set to release this fall.  In this thriller, a CIA operative in Amman who is trailing a high-ranking terrorist gets some unexpected help from the head of Jordan’s intelligence agency.

Any thoughts?

Wikipedia article

The Safari browser on the iPhone is a marvel in that it displays a web page the way it was meant to be displayed rather than a dumbed-down version. For most web sites, this is a welcome thing, but when it comes to blogs, I want to get past all the sidebars and extra graphics and move straight to what I want to read: the posts.

Some bloggers have created an iPhone-friendly (or mobile-friendly) version of their site, but it takes a lot of time, a decent knowledge of CSS and a test environment in order to pull that off. So for those of us who are a little short on one or more of the above variables, there is now a solution.

Welcome WPtouch, a plug-in for Wordpress that strips away the fat on your blog and presents the lean, mean content in a most fashionable way.

Once the plug-in is installed, you have the option to designate which pages are viewable and assign icons to those pages. Posts are easily visible in chronological order with small badges indicating the number of comments for each post. The viewing of comments and the option of displaying the comment form can be enabled or disabled.

The coolness factor of this plug-in grabbed me right away. After a few seconds, the logical part of me kicked in and I began thinking, “How often would someone check out my blog on a small mobile device like an iPhone?” And then the wheels kept turning as I determined that my goal should always be to make my site more accessible in any format and so it certainly wouldn’t hurt to install this simple and free plug-in in order to make my little corner of the world a better place.

A taxi driver friend of mine is none too pleased at the moment. He pulled over in front of a hotel to drop off a passenger, but because he pulled over in the middle of the road next to a line of parked cars, he was stopped by a police officer and ticketed.

Now if you believe my friend’s story, he’ll claim that he pulled over with sufficient room for traffic to pass. Despite the fact that this man is my friend, he’s also a taxi driver, so I’m going to liberally interpret the phrase “with sufficient room for traffic to pass” to mean that cars were probably forced to swing into the opposing lane of traffic to get around.

In this situation, I have little sympathy for my friend. While I never enjoy hearing about the misfortunes of friends, I am an avid proponent of the crack down of traffic laws. If the government and police force is actually beginning to step up on this matter, I applaud them.

A word of caution to our governing bodies, however. Such an operation must be handled with kid gloves. Enforcing an instant crack down on laws that have previously been loosely moderated will only cause problems. Many people are not aware of proper traffic laws and therefore, are not aware that they are breaking them.

People are going to begin complaining that such a crackdown may be akin to punishing a kid for touching something when you never told him/her not to touch it in the first place. This excuse has only partial validity. Any person with a Jordanian driver’s license should have taken a written driver’s test, which includes necessary traffic laws and precautions. But again, the government’s lax enforcement of traffic laws has been interpreted by many as freedom to bend break the rules.

I would suggest starting a safety campaign to remind the public about common traffic laws and their consequences, perhaps through the newspapers, billboards and other public notice points. Warn the people that tougher enforcement is on the way. If such a campaign is executed correctly and expediently, the government cannot be held at fault for doing their job and the public can’t rightfully complain about clubbing tactics.

Perhaps we’ll see safer, less crowded streets in the near future. That would be a nice change.

Thinking about starting your own business and in need of an identity? Looking for a brand new sign for your barber shop? Are you a government ministry looking to spruce up the interior of your office? If so, you have come to the right place.

Rather than pay someone for such a simple task, why not do it yourself? It’s easy! All you need is…

• A copy of Photoshop
• No talent

That’s right; with absolutely no talent or experience, you can create a hideously-designed signage atrocity that will blow the socks off of your competitors. My easy-to-use, step-by-step guide can show you how:

1. First off, there’s no need to figure out the exact size of the sign that you want to create. Just get the proportions close, and the printer can enlarge it if necessary. The only thing you will sacrifice is crisp clarity, but a little blurriness never hurt anyone.

2. Pick some retina-burning colors, ideally ones that don’t match. The brighter and gaudier the colors, the more they will attract attention (and thus, customers). Using Photoshop’s gradient tool, use any sort of gradient pattern to create a background.

3. Choose a picture or piece of clip art as an illustration to represent your business or venture. The picture should not match with the background color and should be only mildly relevant. Images with copyrights or images of celebrities are preferable.

4. Using Photoshop Layer Styles, add an overly-large drop shadow to the illustration. When the layer looks like it is floating several centimeters from the background, you can stop playing with the settings and move on to the next step.

5. Copy the illustration, mirror it, and reduce its opacity to 20% to create a “watermark” effect. Place it on the opposite side of the banner.

6. Type the name of your place of business. Your font doesn’t necessarily have to be anti-aliased.

7. Create a border around your text and add an embossing effect using Layer Styles. Feel free to add a drop shadow, as well.

8. As a courtesy to the non-Arabic speaking world, add the English translation below the Arabic, but be sure to misspell it. This is easily done; just fail to consult a dictionary or neglect to ask any English speaker for the correct spelling.

And there you have it…a professional business sign that is as good (or better) than all of the rest in Jordan.