Has COVID-19 been a forced experiment with WFH?

I’m thinking about Ottawa where the two biggest sectors are gouvernment and technology. Both industries always wanted to experiment with all employees working from home eventually. However, the blessing came when the pandemic started and everyone was kicked out of the office.

This paradigm shift was a free experiment for consistent WFH. Soon, organizations started to see what an advantage it was to close down their offices. Rent, Internet, Utilities, Parking and so on were no longer a consideration for payment. These organizations reaped these benefits of huge cost savings.

Now that everyone is at home paying their own Internet services and whatever else needed to work from home such as larger desks, more screens and so on without having to expense them to the company.

There are currently hundreds of thousands of gouvernment employees working from home. Their offices are a massive maze and I can’t imagine how expensive it is to run their offices. Now, this is all gone.

As for me, I really can’t adapt to working on the same desk all day. I try to talk walks between work and home projects to gain a different perspective hoping that I would regain some of that energy lost.

I am hoping that soon enough I’ll be working in coffee shops and Universities. Essentially work wherever I want without my boss breathing over my shoulder. I vaguely remember reading research that working in theses kind of settings enhance creativity and productivity.

We’re currently in uncertain times but it seems that this forced experiment has been a success. I’m one of the very few people who hate working from home mainly from the isolation and the fatigue that results from it.

Me

At the end of my teenagerhood, I was used to being the center of attention and being popular. I was a model son, a model student, a model social king, a model speaker; a model in religion; as viewed by others: a perfect person. I was the pride of my parents and the focal point for everybody else creating jealousy and envy.

However, around 6 years ago, my life started to change a bit. I was no longer an example for everybody to see. In this past time, I moved out, I’ve took part in vices, tried things I was forbidden to do, developed a mental condition, renounced my religion, and finally got the chance to express myself.

I was expecting for my family to distance themselves away from me as I was no longer the perfect son. Nevertheless, I found out that extended family members and family friends were sifting through my reddit account, my Instagram, my Facebook and so on and was way more popular than I have ever been. What was unraveled was a completely different somebody, one who has changed: no longer the perfect Ahmed. The attention came back as rumour mills and quite some drama, which people love so much.

it makes me feel strange that the most frequent visitors to my website are family members overseas, employers and recruiters. That’s not exactly the kind of people I want to read my stuff but then again, this blog is an opening to the deepest parts of me and it’s enticing.

Online, it’s a completely different story. I’m absolutely unimportant. No one cares about me, I’m just someone hiding behind a website and a blog that appears to most people, a babble of nonsense. We are dreaming of popularity but maybe it’s not the best thing.

I desperately throw my content on all the social media accounts that I have only to drive little traffic. Whatever projects I’ve done are just becoming passion projects for me, not something that others care about.

My blog doesn’t have a direction, it’s just my mind going crazy and throwing up inspiration that randomly comes to me. My blog is me and nothing more. I’m one of the billions of people on Earth and the several millions who have a website. I’m starting to realize that I’m nothing special, why would anyone care about what I have to say?

In the real word, I might be generating a lot of buzz because of certain life choices that I made or exposing conditions that I have. However, online it’s a completely different story: I’m nothing. Just a dot.

I’m sure many bloggers and website authors can relate to me. There’s a pressure for popularity but it’s in vain. No one cares that Ahmed El-Hajjar wrote about his change in career or why he was angry that day.

To my many friends who blog, vlog, stream and so on, I feel your pain. You want to express your freedom but there’s no one to express it to. If someone else has posted the exact same content as you, their stuff might have become unstoppable and viral because of connections they have to a certain industry or perhaps survivorship bias.

I have almost 40 blog posts that is aimed at a large audience but in reality, I’m just talking to myself. This has been more than 3 years of shouting on my side and silence on the other side of the door.

It might sound that I’m frustrated and I’m angry though the dryness of my text doesn’t help but I do feel anxious. What I wrote are subjects that people don’t care about. I started looking at every post, every sale, every view as a passion project.

Inside me, I feel this innate pressure to become big like the others but that doesn’t seem to be my fate. At the end of the day, this is for me only and there’s a select few who have joined me to see what a random stranger on the Internet thinks.

I’ll soldier on and keep at it keeping my expectations at the bottom. It’s just me.

Transforming Ottawa Computing Group into something more Social

Ottawa Computing Group started as a technology and computing enthusiast social club. The idea was to bring your computer and work on your project and talk about it at the same time. People helped each other work on their projects and show off what they were doing. However, I noticed that this was actually somewhat rare.

What I noticed is how often people went off topic whether it was psychology, philosophy, automotive, photography and technology of course. People came together to have interesting discussions and the computer was sitting there being unused save for a very few.

The meetup lost it’s original purpose and it’s time I take it into a different direction. I’m hoping this will attract more people to the meetup and widen the breadth and variety of specialists. I want the group to be the most freeform meetup that is available allowing people to do essentially whatever they want.

We’ll only be bridged together by a coffee shop or at least a Zoom online meeting for now. I’m very excited to hear what people have to say about this and would like to have my members share their ideas either commenting on this blog post or on Meetup.com.

Some thoughts on my blog ... one with low readership and no ads

For the past week, I’ve had huge inspiration to write. It was a waft of creativity that suddenly came to me. I’ll admit that recent life events have put me under emotional pressure and my main coping mechanism is writing. It’s very therapeutic and keeps my mind occupied.

I don’t remember when I started this website, but my first blog post was published on April 15, 2017, almost exactly three years ago. Ever since I started my blog, I knew I wanted to make it directionless. No focus. No subject of interest. Just anything. It was my way of talking about whatever interested me at the time.

My readership is really low, just a few hundred per month, with a few spikes every now and then when someone posts one of my articles on a popular website or if I do that myself. It really doesn’t matter to me, I don’t expect my blog to go viral. Maybe one day, a single article will catch on.

Being someone completely opposed to ads, I don’t host any on my website or my blog. This ruins the chance of making any money on the website but honestly what’s the point with such low readership. I don’t know if it’s worth making a few dollars to annoy people with what I consider annoying and obnoxious content.

One thing I’m proud about my blog is the variety of subjects I’ve covered. My most popular blog post Why I hate the weekends…, discussed an interesting subject that I didn’t even realize was related to work ethic until I actually finished writing it. It was initially just a rant.

I’ve explored subjects that no one else has talked about such as Automatic Transmission Simulation in Games. For a great part of my teenagerhood I always wondered why Automatic Transmission in games differed in behavior than the ones in the real world. I never found a single game that simulated it correctly until I came across a few obscure titles that were quite accurate. It’s a popular read surprisingly and analytics reveals that many searches land a click on my article; which is actually the first result. I received some emails as well thanking me for covering the subject wondering why no one else was curious about this. I was also confused why I couldn’t find any resources on automatic shifting schedules in games.

Some topics are humorous while others a bit more morbid. Some are rants while others relate to experiences I had at work. There’s no logical progression to the blog, it’s a random series of ideas that come to my mind. My goal isn’t popularity but rather putting on paper what I’ve been thinking so long about.

I’m trying to expand my breadth of subjects especially ones concerning my personal life as scary as revealing on a website that has my name, my phone number and my full address in plain sight. I might lose a job opportunity because a potential employer or client read something that they didn’t like on my website or blog, however I have the choice to express my freedom.

I have a few personal stories already written just waiting to be published in my drafts section, one day it will make it here. I do want to write a detailed post about Electronic Stability Control, a safety net in vehicles that prevents skids; I find it incredibly fascinating. The depth I’m planning is more than a small section in a book or a Wikipedia article. I also have a soft spot for FM Synthesis, my favourite method of generating sound that will detailed soon alongside some masterpieces that have used it to create beautiful music.

If you’re one of the few RSS Subscribers or occasional readers of my blog, I promise what’s coming up ahead will be at least mildly interesting.

- Ahmed (cdahmedeh)

I'm afraid to write about my personal life here.

My blog has explored a huge mess of subjects from the technologically related, to the automotive focused, to some obscure aspects of gaming and even a few laughs. However, one thing I always avoid was talking about my personal life, I’m too scared and here’s why.

At one point, I had an extremely long blog post about some misadventure in my life that was very personal and honestly revealed secrets about my past and my present condition. I decided to eventually remove it despite its popularity and relegated it to an unlinked part of my website only accessible by a certain URL. I only share it with those who are curious or in the appropriate communities.

For many, their blog is a journal of their life; what they’re struggling with. Like me, they’re brave enough to put their full name on it but there’s a really big caveat: Employers.

My entire perspective can be altered and skewed by those who creep up the most on me, those who are considering to hire me. I don’t hide my website on my resume, it’s right there on the corner. I can see in my analytics when a potential employer browses through my website and honestly they spend more time than the average reader.

My blog has an angry vibe to it, which is honestly my primary emotion before I fall into anxiety and depression. I consider myself a vocal and passionate person and whatever I’m going to write is going to be worded strongly and boldly.

I want to write about my life desperately yet I’m afraid that those who will guide my career will judge me for who I truly am: a broken and troubled person. I’ll be thrown out of the choice pool because I decided to express my freedom and complain about what ails me.

I didn’t realize how much employers search you from your LinkedIn profile to your Facebook account to anything else with your name. My name and username show my website as one of the first results in addition to other searches. If they could get a hold of your reddit account and dating profiles they would.

I don’t know anymore what criteria employers and clients use to judge their potentials. It’s been from experience to my volunteering and unfortunately a ‘background check’ of my online presence. Sometimes I wonder how an album of a trip to Cuba has anything to do with your performance and skill set, but let me tell you, every picture will be looked at.