I started writing in 1996, at the age of 11, but I eventually threw away everything I wrote in 2000 and decided to start fresh. At the beginning, it was exclusively all French poetry, until 2003 when I noticed I knew enough English words to venture in that area as well. I also have some random Arabic poems here and there. The problem though is that my last poem dates back to October 2007 and it saddens me.

Given that I believe I actually did have some sort of talent, which many of my friends / teachers / random readers on PoemHunter seem to agree with, I think it’s a total shame that I stopped. If you’re wondering whether I didn’t have anything to get out, darn it, I left my country, family, friends for a whole year in 2008-2009! If that isn’t poetry-inciting, I don’t know what is. So reason or no reason, the fact remains that I haven’t rhymed in over 2 years.

I think I need an incentive, a reason to awaken the poet inside, maybe a bit of exposure for my early work to remember how great it felt when I received criticism, or maybe just the satisfaction of knowing that I’m being read, somewhere by someone. Heck, I don’t know what is required to get the beast back up and running, but I’m going to try my best. I don’t want to look back in 30 years and say that I didn’t fight for my gift or that life got the best out of it. Plus, I used to love those highly emotional moments when I ended up suprised by my own writing as the words flew from my hands as if dictated by a superior force. It was transcendingly spiritual.

So what’s a girl to do in order to awaken the poet within?

Well, I’ll make a pact to myself to post one poem as a Note on Facebook every weekend.

It can be a new poem or one of my old writings, which at some point in time will run dry and leave me with the necessity or writing something. I happen to believe it’s a good strategy and it’s not as optimistic as my A Poem A Day venture from years ago, so let’s see how it spans out.

As for the choice of Facebook, it’s only for the convenience of visibility, plus control over comments and privacy. The notes will be public for everyone, and if I do manage to get my poetry juices flowing, I will post the new writing on PoemHunter as well.

A few days ago, MyMemory reopened their Clearance Store. Though the name might scare you, there are often a lot of gems in there, like digital camcorders from Sanyo and Panasonic, bluetooth stereo speakers, cases, solar battery chargers… The deal is that all the items in that Clearance Store are subject to a 40% discount with the SAVE40 discount code on checkout. Now this may not be the best deal in town, but when you factor in the fact that some of the items there are already discounted to 30% or 50% or 75%, then it becomes quite obvious that you can easily get out with amazing bargains. The catch is that you never know when an item will be out of stock or get taken out of the Clearance Store, so if you find something there today, it might not be there tomorrow. The good thing though is that every couple of days some items are out and others are in, so if you don’t find anything interesting now, check again later on.

Personally, I snagged the Marware CEO Premiere Leather Case for iPhone 3G and iPod Touch for 3GBP. MyMemory had a 75% deal on it, putting its price down to 5GBP, which is a steal in and off itself, but with the SAVE40 discount code on checkout, I got it for 3GBP (5$), delivered for free to my door. Ain’t that awesome? I’ve been trying to get one for my friend but they instantly went out of stock and now they’re back to a 7GBP price

If you’re looking for any of the items I mentioned above, or any cheap accessories like memory card readers or cables, I think it’d be 5 minutes well spent if you took a look around that Clearance Store.

• I didn’t have the background knowledge : my first and only S60 phone was the 3250 XpressMusic, which was already aging by the time I started blogging about it.
• I didn’t have the right context : I was a 4th year Pharmacy student which obviously has nothing to do with technology, and I was bound to Lebanon which made it almost impossible to get to any important conference or tech showroom or anything.
• And most importantly, I was a girl, a very daring girl in a boy’s world.

I quickly realized that these 3 issues would stand greatly in my way to build an identity online, especially the female part. I wasn’t a pioneer in the field, with Darla Mack having opened the grounds and established herself in the online community, so I took more than one lesson out of her book, but I understood that it would take me double if not triple the time and energy, compared to a guy, to “get there”.

I reckon that at the time, I didn’t know where “there” was, but I wanted to get to it. If you think back to 2007, that’s a time with no Twitter, only a handful of important and respected blogs, and almost no way to get your voice heard. You had to sit back and wish that someone somehow ends up on your site and enjoys what you wrote. You also had to wish that one of these someones ends up being an important writer on another site and finds it relevant to link back to you. Those were the days, yeah. But it definitely was a challenge to create one original content after the other, just preparing the blog for when the day comes that it’s famous.

I kept putting small goals to myself, month after month: my first link on an important blog, my first interview, my first review, my first interaction with other bloggers… Then I took the most important decision of my blogging career when I emailed Ricky Cadden asking him if he wanted a second writer on Symbian-Guru. Sitting now and thinking back to it, I believe I couldn’t have made a better choice of a blogging venue. After almost 2 years of working with Ricky, I know that we agree on the most important decisions and that we blog from the same perspective. We love technology, but only when it improves our real life and not when it interferes with it, and we write from a personal point of view. I don’t know if Ricky ever doubted his decision because of the fact that I was a girl, but I respect him a lot for making that choice and giving me a chance to show what I had.

32 months after I first launched Dotsisx on Vox, I look at the path taken and can’t deny being proud of what I’ve achieved. I’ve trialled a total of 17 phones (recently being able to land a prototype of the Sony Ericsson Satio), as well as numerous accessories. I’ve been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and I was invited on two trips recently, the first to visit the Carl Zeiss factory in Aalen, Germany and the second to the Nokia World 2009 event in Stuttgart, Germany. I believe I have a great relationship with representatives of Nokia in Lebanon, France, UK, USA and Finland. I also started writing on FoneArena almost a year ago and enjoy sharing my experience and knowledge with the editor, Varun Krishnan, recently being able to help him get an invitation to Nokia World 2009 for himself. Of course, I’m not stopping here and there is a new set of challenges to attack.

What pushed me to write this long tirade isn’t the pride of sharing my accomplishments, but the need to prove to everyone who is doubting themselves that it CAN be done. I don’t know what your problems are, but look, I had 3 and I came through it. I believe my strength came from the fact that I never hid those disadvantages, on the contrary, I shouted on the roof whenever I could that I was lebanese and a pharmacist, I also emphasized on my gender more times than I could remember. By acknowledging them, I was able to build an identity that is even more unique and more unforgettable than many others. 10 days ago, during Nokia World 2009, it became clear to me that I was now picking up the fruits of this strategy: when you’re the only girl in a room of 15 male bloggers, the impact is much easier to make, on everyone.

I’ve been around long enough to see many blogs and writers rise incredibly fast, and fall even faster. Plus, we’re now at a time where it takes one original article, a Twitter identity and a couple or retweets to become known. The success is much more easy than it has ever been, but don’t fool yourself. There are a thousand others who also have an original article, a Twitter identity and some retweets You have to find in yourself the will to continue despite the tough times, as well as the originality to differentiate yourself form what the others have to offer.

I won’t bore you to death with details, but here’s the small snap of it all. My lab team works on certain proteins who are essential for cancer processes. My wickedly heavy goal is to bring all their 15+ years of work into fruition, by proving that these proteins can be used in some sort of combination therapy strategy with traditional chemotherapy in the future. And today, yes today, I proved it.

I look back at when I first came into the lab, in January, a pharmacist who knew zilch about research. I didn’t know how to hold a pipette, let alone do any of the complicated research stuff. A week later after I joined the team, my lab director talked to me and I found myself with that huge project resting on me, and just me. I don’t know where I got the guts, but I went for it. Even though I received tremendous help from my colleagues in terms of how to actually do stuff, I had to rely on my guts many times a day to establish my own protocols, make my own choices.

I made the decision to carry that project to fruition, and although I hit dead ends and repeated many times, I spent the past 6 months finding ways past the hurdles, and putting everything together. Until Tuesday. Tuesday I launched the first experience that would give me the first answer to my question: “does it work? can we kill more cancer cells by using this new strategy?”. The experience went on for 4 days, and I got my answer today. Hell YES!

Granted, the scientific purists will say that this is one experience and has to be repeated 3 times to be proven valid. Granted, I’m working on mouse cells and not human cells. Granted, I’m working in a controlled environment and not in a living human being. Granted, this is only a proof of concept, the actual drug has to go through at least 10 years of stages before going to market and being used, but everything starts somewhere. This is the start. I MADE THE FIRST STEP.

I don’t pretend to cure all cancer types tomorrow. When I joined medical research, I said to myself that I want to bring even the smallest contribution to whatever disease I end up working on. I achieved that. In 15, maybe 20 years, if I see a drug being marketed for colorectal cancer using this new strategy, I can look back in all pride to today, to all the - TwitPics - I uploaded - from this - experience, to the promising first result of yesterday and finally to the Twitpic I uploaded from the moment of truth, and think to myself: I started it all.

So go ahead, you can shoot me now, I’d die a proud and happy human.

I don’t recall how I stumbled on Mycroft Project in the first place, but I do know that ever since I’ve found it, it’s been a huge time saver. What does Mycroft Project essentially offer? It’s a part of Mozilla’s developer network and it just lists search plugins for Firefox, for almost every site or service you could ever want to search. You simply click on the plugin and it’s added to your search bar uptop. I hear you asking for examples, so let’s go:

Google Images: As a blogger, I am always looking for images for my posts, and as a researcher I find myself often times looking for a specific figure showing some relevant data for my project. Google Images is part of my daily routine and having quick access to it is a huge deal.

Flickr Tags: same reason as Google Images, except that it gives me more “human” results.

Pubmed and other NCBI resources: Pubmed is the holy grail for medical researchers with millions of articles, and accessing it with a simple click, no questions asked, makes me love using it even more.

Localised Wikipedia : sure, Wikipedia in english is cool and all, but what if you want to search Wikipedia in other languages, like your own country’s language? This is a list of all Wikipedia related search plugins, and it lists the localized Wikipedia sites as well.

Wolfram Alpha: the new computational knowledge search engine (or whatever other complicated name they have for it) is starting to make its effect, but it’s always easier to access it directly without having to open its main page.

Dictionary and Thesaurus : English being only my 3rd language, I find myself often times looking for the definition of a word, a synonym to replace it with, or simply to see if I’m spelling something correctly. I usually use the Merriam-Webster tools on those lists.

LetsSingIt song search: I usually have all 4 of these plugins installed, but the one I use the most is “lyrics words”. This plugin allows me to search all of LetSingIt’s database for a particular set of lyrics. I don’t have to know the song’s name, nor the artist, nor the album, just 4 or 5 words from any part of the song and LetsSingIt usually pumps up the whole song info page with full lyrics. Wicked.

IMDB: The Internet Movie Database is my go-to site when I want to check any movie/actor information. Mycroft has a plugin for the full site as well as for the TV section.

Mycroft Project itself: this one is definitely the best of the best! Whenever I find myself using the search function of a site quite often, I run to Mycroft to see if there’s a search plugin for Firefox, until one day I noticed that I was using the search function of Mycroft itself quite often. That’s how I decided to get Mycroft’s own search plugin.

These are a few examples of search plugins I have inside Firefox that make it easier for me to access my results without having to browse to each individual website, wait for the page to load, find the search bar, click inside it, start typing, then get my results. Of course, Mycroft has a full library of other plugins and I’m pretty sure you’ll find everything you want in there.

As a bonus, here is the Dotsisx tip for even faster search: use the keyboard shortcuts. In Firefox, clicking Ctl+K will get your cursor to the search box, start typing right away if the search engine you want is selected or else scroll to your seach engine with ctl+up or ctl+down then start typing. I’ve been using these plugins for over a year now, and I can’t stress enough on how much time and bandwidth they have saved me. Go try them, and if you find a search engine worth adding, be sure to drop a comment here.

Rebtel uses this awesome concept that I’m sure many other services also use (but I ended up on Rebtel, so I’m sticking to it): I give it my parents/friends phone number in Lebanon, be it a Mobile or a Fix telephone number, and it hands me back a local number here in France. When I need to call them, I simply dial this local number and Rebtel will take care of connecting the call back to Lebanon. Price varies depending on the country the call is originated from and the country the call is addressed to, but from Paris to Lebanon, it costs me 0.09EUR per minute to call a fixed line and 0.16EUR to call a mobile line. WAY below the 1.5 EUR that my operator charges, even if you add the fact that I’m still being deduced on my operator’s 2hour/month local calls allowance.

The best part about Rebtel is that it allows me to manage my contacts via its website, but also offers a mobile portal so I can manage my contacts on the go, as well as an SMS interface. This means that wherever I am, if I need to call an international number in Lebanon or elsewhere, I simply launch my browser, hit my Rebtel contacts page, add them, and boom, I receive an SMS with the new number from which I can instantly dial it. Practical. Way more practical than any phonebooth-requiring cards, plus I can add as much credit as I want to my account via PayPal.

So my phone calls problem was solved, but my messaging problem remained, and it was more important as I tend to use SMS more frequently than calls. So I spent countless hours on Google trying to find a service that allows me to send international SMS at a decent price until I stumbled on Wadja.

Wadja is a nice social communication portal offering tons of features that I have yet to explore, except for one feature that I’ve mastered. After signing in on Wadja, you can set out to compose messages, these are either email, SMS or SMS plus (which seems more like MMS to me). The cost? Nothing. Zilch. Zero. Free SMS sending from/to any country in the world. Pretty darn awesome! The best part, which is the one feature that matters to me the most, is that Wadja has a nice mobile site: m.wadja.com. I’ve signed in there and saved my Compose SMS page as a bookmark on my phone’s browser. This means that whenever I’m out, all I have to do to send a free international SMS is click on that bookmark from my phone, and compose the SMS. Even better is the fact that I can choose what my recipients see when they receive the SMS: my Wadja username or my phone number. I opt to use the phone number, which makes it easier for them to reply to me via usual SMS.

Of course there are limitations: an SMS is a maximum of 92 characters because Wadja adds a small sentence at the end saying that the SMS was sent using it, and I’m pretty sure that Wadja can’t send more than 4 or 5 free SMS per day (although I have yet to read about this anywhere on their site), but the fact that it works for casual SMS’ing, that it has a nice mobile website, and that it saves me 0.30EUR per SMS (price that my operator charges for international messaging) makes Wadja priceless in my opinion.

There you go: Rebtel and Wadja have been saving me tons of money ever since I moved to France. So make sure you pass them along, but whisper their names carefully. We don’t want operators finding out about them

One way I have been able to maximize the use of Firefox is through Extensions. Many of you know that Firefox is an Open Source browser and that there is a very active developer community behind it, building extensions which are small add-ons that can be installed on top of Firefox to perform certain tasks. You can browse the full list of Firefox add-ons here, or you can keep you eyes on The Dotsisx Blog to see my favorite ones, and I’ll start with Undo Closed Tab.

Undo Closed Tab offers one of those functionality that you know you’re missing but never bother to really look for. I’ve noticed for a while that I sometimes close tabs then need to re-open them. Usually I have to open a new tab, then go to the history and click on the one I closed inadvertently. Undo Closed Tab simplifies this: it’s a simple button that you can add to your main Firefox toolbar, and when pressed, it’ll reopen the tab. The best part is that it’ll re-open it in the same position in which it was closed. Undo Closed Tab also has a drop down menu that allows you to see the last 10 (by default, but it’s configurable in preferences from 0 to 99) closed tabs and re-open any of them.

I won’t go to a length to say that this extension is a life saver, but I’ll say that it’s the most practical add-on for Firefox and that my work has been much easier ever since I’ve started using it.

Truth be told, no matter how well I adapt to Paris, I will never be “at home” here, I will always feel like a tourist who doesn’t belong here. That’s why I know that no matter how, I’m coming back.

But the way the local media here, as well as all international media, presents Lebanon and the political situation, makes it so hard for me to explain why I love this country so much. This is where the “It’s All In Lebanon”, an ad campaign by the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism, comes into play by capturing the essence of my country so amazingly well. It’s a 44 seconds ad and it’s all totally true, even the Rio part. People who know nothing about my country except the Israeli-Syrian conflicts, will be speechless when they watch it, I bet. One thing though that I find missing is that it focuses on the country and the landscapes, but fails to show the friendly population and the ancient heritage. Nevertheless, it’s the best ad that has ever been made about Lebanon, and I will now memorize the YouTube link address as well as download the ad to my phone, so that whenever someone asks me about my country, I know what to answer.

I present to you, my country, Lebanon:

So I Google’d “Lebanese Elections” and after two or three hours of reading, clicking links, and struggling with my deadly slow internet connection, I had gathered enough info to satisfy my small curiosity. But, like I do with technology-related info, I wanted a decent blog with an RSS feed to follow. I know myself well enough to say that I won’t go check elections-related websites again, but if I subscribe to an RSS, it’s different. It will show up in my stream of news and I will end up at least reading the headline, which is better than nothing. In the end, I’m Lebanese and I should care.

The problem that I faced is that I didn’t find ANY decent politics website around the Lebanese elections. All of them are either biased towards the opposition, either biased towards the euh-what’s-the-opposite-of-opposition?-damn, either funny blogs written by strongly opinionated people who are biased towards not being biased ie. they point the silliness in both camps. That’s a diversified coverage and while I enjoyed some witty posts by the 3rd category, none of the blogs are ones that I would want to follow daily. I really don’t care about what someone thinks of the leaked Jumblat video where he bashes his own allies and all Christians, I just care that the video was leaked with a link to it. I’ll form my own opinion, thank you. I also don’t want a blog that calls the FPM as the “Aoun-led-prosyrian-FPM” nor one that calls the LF the “assassin-Geagea-led-LF”, I just want a blog that says FPM and LF, no adjectives appended. I’ll add my own adjectives, thank you.

Then I realized that I wanted a blog like the ones I usually follow in the technology industry. Ones that spoke numbers and facts. So what if politics were as easy to understand and talk about as technology products? What if politicians came with a Spec Sheet?

When announced, their parties would send around a Press Release talking about how awesome their politician is, but no one will be surprised as Engadget would have published leaked info about him some months earlier. Thousands of sites will publish the press release as is, copy/paste baby! Mobile-Review will be the first one to post a review (in Russian first, then translated to English) of the politician with detailed pictures and videos, as well as comparison pictures with other politicians on the market. A while later, some elect people would get to trial the politician and say what they think about him/her, unless he is made by Palm in which case no one will put their hands on him for months. Come to think of it, it would be really nice if we could trial a politician before choosing him for some kind of important seat.

• If the politician isn’t touchable, tons of American-based bloggers will bash him. If he is touchable, the same tons of American-based bloggers will still bash him, unless he has a fruity logo on his back.
• If he’s an important politician made by Finland’s best, it will be months before anyone else can enjoy his company, but some people will rejoice by laying their hands on a prototype-politician with half-baked opinions: he sometimes forgets what he’s doing and stops moving, other times he restarts his sentences or movements. He also has some half-finished aspects of his personality: his eyes can’t capture images clearly or his voice has too much hiss, for example.

A bit later, people would get to meet the said politician and form a very precise opinion about him, and if you Google’d his name + review, you would get more than 140.000 results. You could also find him on Amazon with a rating system, and several reviews. If he’s a one-starer, you clearly wouldn’t want to pick him as your next representative in the government. If he’s a 5-starer, you are probably safe, but you should really look closely to see if the deal isn’t too good to be true, after all the devil is in the fineprint. And last but not least, you could Ebay him when you think you’re ready to move to a more efficient politician model.

Wouldn’t life be easier?

As with DealExtreme which is my one-stop shop for small gadgets, I needed a retailer that accepted PayPal payments, offered decent prices as well as worldwide shipping and, if possible, for free. I ended up finding the best of the best, with free and fast worldwide shipping: MyMemory.co.uk. MyMemory has prices pretty similar to those of Amazon UK, but when you take count of the currency rate exchange, you end up sometimes with prices much lower than your local Amazon shop, or the other online retailers that deliver to your country. For example, currently MyMemory has the Sandisk 8gb microSDHC card for £19.99 (equivalent to 22.65 EUR), whereas the Amazon.fr site has it for prices starting 34.05 EUR: that’s around 50% increase in price if I wanted to shop in Paris!

My advice would be to check your country’s local online stores first, then compare the prices with the ones offered by MyMemory after taking into account the currency exchange from British pounds. Another rule I always follow is to never buy the highest capacity card or flash stick, because it’s usually double or triple the price of the one beneath it, which is an outrage in my opinion. For example, now the highest capacity for microSDHC cards is 16GB, so the best deal in my opinion is to get the 8GB microSDHC.

Personally, I have already ordered two 8GB Sandisk microSDHC cards and one 16GB Sandisk USB flash drive from MyMemory. One of the two 8GB memory cards I had ordered arrived as Class 2, while I specifically wanted and paid for the Class 4. I sent a message to the MyMemory support team and got told to send the card back, unopened, which I did. A few days later, I was sent a true Class 4 8GB microSDHC card, with the USB adapter (which I hadn’t paid for in my original order). During the whole time, I kept in touch with customer support: they answered fast and precisely to all my questions.

It’s with service like this that you end up becoming very loyal to companies and retailers, and I have to admit that MyMemory has earned my respect pretty fast. Apart from memory cards and flash drives, they also sell DVDs, printer ink toners, as well as laptop and gadget cases. I haven’t tried any of these yet, but I have my eyes on them, in case.