Tony Abou-Assaleh

Drinking my medium roast coffee with sugar and cream and eating my uber expensive organic (or not?) blueberry muffin at Just Us Cafe on Barrinton Street. Editing my paper for a big conference, minding my own business, not bothering anyone.

- Tony?

I think I just heard someone calling my name. Maybe I imagined it.

- Are you Tony?

- Yes .. ?

- Hi. I’m Craig. Nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you too.

The man goes to put some sugar and cream in his coffee. I’m puzzled. Sure I’m bad with names. Sure I’m bad with faces. Sure I met him somewhere, he remembed me, I didn’t remember him. But, what was that “nice to meet you” business all about?

Continue reading ‘Wrong place, wrong time, right name’

The second heavy snowfall of the week on Friday night, November 21, 2008, as well as the following Saturday resulted in 25 to 35cm of snow on the ground. Some areas were hit harder than others. Add to that the drifting snow effect that resulted from strong winds blowing countless tiny snow flakes from one side of the street to the other, and you end up with differences in snow hight in excess of 10cm between houses on one side of a street an another.

Guess on which side of the street was my house?

Continue reading ‘Snow in Timberlea, Nova Scotia’

This is a live blog of the Dalhousie CS seminar by Dr. Colin Cherry of Microsoft Research, Natural Language Processing Group entitles “Syntactic Movement in Statistical Translation”
Continue reading ‘Live Blog: Syntactic Movement in Statistical Translation’

I am yet to see a publishing platform that is simpler than posterous. With a single email message containing normal text you create your personal blog and make your first post. No signup, no email commands, no hassles. It’s that unbelievably simple. I didn’t believe it when I heard, so I had to give it a try. Check out my posterous blog.
Continue reading ‘The Simplicity of Posting on Posterous’

Today I became a happier WordPress user because I managed to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 with a surprisingly easy process, as well as migrating to the latest K2 release. The short story: install the WordPress Automatic upgrade plugin, run it, correct failed actions, upgrade the K2, migrate footer from the previous K2, et voilà! I am very impressed with the new admin interface of WordPress. It took a few minutes to understand where is what, but WOW! Neat, organized, and pleasant.
Continue reading ‘Upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1 and K2 RC6′

This week I reached a new milestone in my coffee-to-thesis conversion project. As you can see in the picture of my Perks Coffee Gold Card, I have completed stamped every cell on it. Mind you, the number of stamps doesn’t correspond exactly to the number of coffees I had: it was a mix of coffee, tea, double stamping on Fridays, multiple stamping from the pretty girl at the counter, and coffee for friends.
Continue reading ‘Thesis Made of Perks Coffee: Milestone in Coffee Drinking’

During my first real off-campus consulting job, my client asked me a simple questions, “are you enjoying working on this project?” My answer was less simple:

I wouldn’t do for money what I wouldn’t do for free.

Ever before and ever since, this principle has been my guiding principle in all that I do for money. I wouldn’t take on a project if it wasn’t interesting enough that I wouldn’t mind doing it for free. I follow this principle in my consulting work, in my employment, and in my volunteering work. But only in the latest that I actually do it for free.

This principle is about loving what you do and enjoying it beyond the material reward. It is about contributing to the project and wanting it to succeed because it is interesting and valuable, not because there is a pay cheque waiting for you. And it is about selecting projects that provide you with additional benefits and rejecting projects of limited personal and professional value.
Continue reading ‘Don’t Do For Money What You Wouldn’t Do For Free’

Darkness of the day

and brightness of the night

Fairy tales of truth

of the horseless knight

Sleeping before noon

waking by midnight

Dreaming of the life

sleeping in the light

Silence lost in screams

of this peaceful fight

– Tony Abou-Assaleh, May 22, 2008, Halifax, NS.

This week, GenieKnows updated its Local platform with a few new features:

• Map caching has been optimized, providing faster map load time
• The map projections has been switched Mercator, the industry standard for online interactive maps. The streets now look more natural at zoomed-in levels.
• All Empire Theatre listings in Canada now include showtimes. Try a search for showtimes in Toronto, or movies in Halifax to get a list of the Empire Theatres in the city, along with other relevant results.
• All user contributed business listings and updates, as well as suggested related web sites have been included in this release.
• Web 2.0 fever has you? Feel compelled to share a business or a results page with family and friends? It is easy to do so using the ‘share’ menu. You can post pages on Facebook, MySpace, and StumbleUpon just to name a few.

In a recent media announcement of this release, I was quoted saying:

If there is a feature that you’d love to see on our Local but we don’t have it yet, let us know through the feedback link on the website. We are committed to improving our platform to better service the end users.

And it is true! I take user feedback very seriously and read every single one of them. So make sure you let me know what you’d like to see in the next release. Who knows, the Genie might grant your wishes.

It took a while to get everything sorted out and in order, but now it is official. GenieKnows is sponsoring Stephen and me at this year’s Cannonball Run One Lap of America. It gets even better, GenieKnows is now an official sponsor the event. The press release came out earlier today from Mark Harper, VP of Strategic Relations. The press release is reproduced below.
Continue reading ‘GenieKnows Sponsors the Cannonball One Lap of America Race’