The da Vinci Yawn

the davinci yawn

I bought The da Vinci Code (the book) last June, so I had it for about a year now. At first I thought I will start reading it on the airplane which was supposed to take us to our vacation (which didn’t happen). So I delayed reading the book until my next flight, which was the flight that took me to my current home last September.

First of all, I don’t know about you but reading in an airplane never worked for me, I don’t know why. After arriving and settling down I tried my best to finish the book before the film is released. The book was my companion on the long train journeys for exmaple, but most of the times I read it while I was doing the laundry in the laundry place (you know, the place where you use coins for the large washing and drying machines) so there is always a connection in my mind between the book and doing the laundry. So washing machines reminds with the book, and the book remind me with washing machines some how.

After about 8 months of reading I realized that I’m still in chapter 21 or something like that (out of 105 chapters)! I am not much of a novel reader, but 112 pages and Langdon and Sophie still haven’t left the Louvre!! That was too much garga for me!

I almost gave up, but when I finished my course and my essays I decided to give it another try, specially now that the film is released. I am still reading while doing the laundry, but now I also read a chapter or two every night in bed before sleeping.
Last night I reached chapter 60, and things are just starting to get more interesting :). I can’t say that I’m impressed with what I read so far, but I can’t give my artistic and art historical opinion untill I finish, so wait for the full review en shaa Allah.

From now on I will start my own da Vinci counter. At the end of each post I will write down just how far I am :).

The da Vinci counter: (60/105)

The History of Moayad.com

moayad.com logo

Before becoming the blog/website you see here moayad.com passed several stages, some of them were good, some were bad and others were plain ugly. Today I was looking at some old files on my hard disk and found a folder called web, inside it was most of the old sites I created throughout the years, one of them of course was moayad.com.
So here it is, the moayad.com timeline:

1- In the beginning the domain moayad.com was owned by a UAE company called Al Moayad General Trading Est. which is a company specializing in importing industrial products. One happy day the domain was dropped and I grabbed it ;). I still have the main page of their site stored on my computer but I can’t post it for you.. you know.. copyright issues :razz:.

Sorry Al Moayad guys 🙂

2- When I first registered the domain I didn’t know what to use it for, so there was the coming soon page:

Black Coming Soon

3- At that time I had the moayad.8m.com site but I wasn’t sure I wanted to copy the same stuff to the new domain. After a while I wanted to make changes to the site, so I changed the colors.

White Coming Soon

4- Ramadan came; and I got better at flash, so it was only natural to flash-up the site with a nice animation.

Ramadan Flash

5- After a while I got involved in the Starz Station project, and got even better at flash, so I spiced the flash animation a little more. The site was still showing the coming soon sign because I didn’t have time to work on it. I also, for testing reasons, installed a community forum and opened it to the public. Of course it was a dull sleepy forum but I didn’t expect much of it, I was deeply involved in Starz Station and its real forum.

Flashed-up Coming Soon

6- When the broadband revolution started one of the ideas I had for the site was to make it a video portal, something like iflim.com and heavy.com which were new things at the time. I did post a strange video featuring Mr. Mohammed Al Awadhi :). But that was it, no more videos, nothing else was posted at least. Maybe I will post the videos I prepared here in the blog soon.

7- Lots of things changed; Starz Station ended, Muslim Starz came, I got married and I needed a serious professional personal website. So I cracked my fingers, pulled up my sleeves and started working on the site you see here today.The slow update fever stroked me again because the original site was made using static HTML and Flash, so it was a nightmare to update. So after a while I just changed the home page to a blog and subscripted to flicker, it is the magical solution.. for now at least :).

There is one thing missing in this time line which is the.. time. Actually I am only sure of one thing, I registered the domain in 2000 and the latest major updates happened in 2005-2006, you fill in what’s between :razz:.

Traveling Back

travel

The term is over and I’m alive again. Hopefully, this time I will be more committed to the blog and to all my friends who I miss so much. Yesterday I kicked off my return to the net with a new set of photos on flickr, today I finished my Naji Al Ali series, and new comments on my favorite blogs and forums will start soon en shaa Allah.

One thing I noticed while writing this post is that Microsoft Word (which I am using right now on a PC) does not know what a blog or flickr is! I had to teach it these new words! This is just to show you how fast we are moving, and how slow Microsoft is adapting. 🙂

In the near future I’m planning on working on my dissertation for the university which will be about internet art, so expect more internet art here in the blog, and I will start working on getting an admission for the PhD level, so wish me luck. On the other hand, you will hear some good news regarding Muslim Starz soon en shaa Allah. I don’t want to talk about it now, but soon you will know. 😉

What do you think guys if I started writing some posts in Arabic? There are some issues which are hard o talk about in English and it won’t interest the English reading viewer anyway. Would that be nice?

I’m really glad to be back 🙂

Web Art #1

In this series I will display some websites which I think are Art Works by themselves. Some of these sites are really cool and trendy, others are just plain weird.. just like all contemporary art.

So what make a web site an art work?

Well, it’s a complicated subject which we will discuss as we go along.

I will start with a site called:

unCONTROL (www.uncontrol.com)
uncontrol

unCONTROL is what its author Manny Tan call ‘Algorithm Art’. A collection of visual experiments Tan programmed using programming and scripting languages like Flash Action-script and Java which creates interactive moving elements inspired by things observed in nature.

Web Art still hasn’t got a clear academic definition, but this site has the interactivity and the “Neen” bits, so it could be counted as Web Art. What could be questioned is the fact that each one of the experiments is somehow separated from the others. Each experiment could be thought of as a different work connected only by the navigation interface.

So could unControl be thought of as an Art Gallery instead of an Art Work?