It’s your chance now to enter the world of commercial airlines or travel agents, or to enrich your information about the commercial side of the airline world. The book is based on the latest updates of specialized resources in the airline business. The book is written in English with most of the important topics translated into Arabic.

The book contains:

• A full list of definitions for the specialized terms of the airline business
• The legal and the commercial framework of airline operations
• Passenger transportation, special types of passengers, and passenger compensation
• Passenger ticket and conditions of carriage
• Baggage transportation
• Fare calculation in detail with full explanation of the dynamic nature of the fares.

You can take a look the topics covered in the book by clicking here.

For more information about the book, the content, download a FREE preview copy of the book, and buy an electronic copy of the book as a PDF file, you can visit the book’s website at: www.taxiway.org . On the website you can also participate in discussion forums and a lot more.

Real leaders are not people who can point out what is wrong. Almost anyone can do that. Real leaders are people who can make things better.

via The Best Leadership Advice I Ever Got – Marshall Goldsmith.

This is a great advice. One that I have been very slow to learn.

The world should be shocked at the systematic destruction of Somalia’s capital Mogadishu and its residents, says lobby group Human Rights Watch.

The organisation told the BBC the city had become a zone of free-fire between government and insurgent forces.

It said if such a situation was happening anywhere else in the world, like Georgia or Lebanon for example, it would be considered a travesty.

via BBC NEWS | Africa | Somalia is ‘most ignored tragedy’.

This is a shame on all world powers who brag about seeking democracy and wage wars in the name of human rights. Unfortunatly Somalia does not have the geo-political value to make them move.

Luckily there are those pirates. Maybe they will shake the attention of the world a little bit about the situation there.

The only thing that I couldn’t understand was why poetry?

Today I know. It’s not poetry itself .. It seems that statements which does not truly have a definitive meaning are so powerful in justifying the unjustifiable. A statement like “we have to take action now before people loose faith in the banking system” is currently justifying and intervention plan of 700$ billion. A statement like “the boat which does not have anything for god will drown” encourages people to give part of their gain in business for others (which is a very good result by the way but I’m talking about the idea itself).

I don’t really understand the depression that I feel here. It’s a developing country with the requirements of success at it’s reach. Although, the market is still badly under-served and controled by monopoly in major industries.

One more thing which makes me crazy is the social life and the mixed culture created by expatreates. You can barely feel an identity for this country.

I feel so sad each time I’m in the Doha airport. I believe that the good times need more hard working than the bad times. And I feel the time of boom is getting closer to the end.

A £1m clock called the “time eater” has been unveiled at Cambridge University by Professor Stephen Hawking.

The author of A Brief History of Time was guest of honour when the unique clock, which has no hands or numbers, was revealed at Corpus Christi College.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Hawking unveils ‘strangest clock’.

US raids on Taleban and al-Qaeda targets in Pakistani territory have caused outrage in Pakistan. And that has added to the loathing that some people there have long felt for the way that the US conducts itself on the world stage, as Owen Bennett-Jones discovers.

“I would rather live in the dark ages under the Taleban than be subservient to any foreign power.”

The unexpected comment comes from an urbane, sophisticated and, I had always thought, Westernised Pashtun lawyer.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | Turning to the Taleban in Pakistan.

This is a wonderful report about America’s failure in it’s war of winning “minds and hearts” in Iraq and Pakistan.

America, you’ve got it wrong !!

Complacency is the self satisfaction that makes the person unaware of possible dangers. 

LiveWorld Launches LiveBar™, Enabling Brands To Seamlessly Overlay Social Networking on Any Web Page in Minutes

Social Networking and Community Solutions — LiveWorld.

The new product from LiveWorld seems promising. I didn’t see it in action yet but the idea is worth noticing.

When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.

Findings – As External Barriers Disappear, Internal Gender Gaps Widen – NYTimes.com.

I read this article after minutes of writing about differences between men and women. Well, this is dicussing many of the questions in this regard. A wonderful study.

What comes to my mind is something very annoying to me as someone in the business environment, but it’s very much more annoying to the customer. It’s the gap between the marketing department and other departments in the value chain.

Those days I was disturbed by two advertisements. One of them is for a bank where the advertisers promise you the moon but the actual service is crap. The other one is for 3G service from a mobile company where the service itself was not completely ready.

As the argument of the book goes, wouldn’t it be better for companies to focus their financial attention on more relevant areas (like R&D and innovation). At the end of the day this is what brings the true and authentic publicity.

For sure many differences are there. They vary between places, cultures, religion and many other. What I need to know is the real biological difference between male and female. All the differences which are there may be environment related. Men seem much similar to women but the differences are inforced by culture.

But c’mon .. there is a difference .. we all now that .. but what is it.

The other day I was listening to a BBC business program and one (female) commentator was discribing with world with female CEOs. The argument is long but what grabed my attention is that fact that women are much more emotionally complex than men. While men show a stable easy-to-figure behaviour, it is very hard to know what a woman wants. It is very hard to please a woman especially if you’re trying the logical approach.

If you are in a relationship with a woman, don’t waste your time trying to convince her logically. You’d better stimulate her convinience with the issue. Make her laugh and lead her indirectly to what you want. (Am I right .. women readers.)

This is probably one step further toward my discovery of the actual difference between men and women.

The thing is that Microsoft has been so ignorant about it and insisted to pull Windows XP out of pdoduction. All this in a time when Apple are making huge advancements in their products and opensorce Linux is becoming more user friendly than ever.

Apple’s Biggest setback is that their OS works only on Macs and Linux is that it’s still, inspite of the improvements, not user friendly enough. But can Microsoft afford the cosequences of their arrogance. That remains to be seen but I guess that Vista is the historical mistake Microsoft will never forget.

I have tested the speed of my leased line service of 256Kb/s. This is the result I got (which is fairly acceptable).

The variance between the advertised speed and the actual speed is becoming a problem in the world. Go to speedtest.net to test yours.

I think it’s worth mentioning that based on data from this website, a study by a team of students from Oxford university was made examine broad band quality over the world. It tuned out that only Japan has the broad band quality to cope with next-generation internet application. Read the BBC article here.

Memorial services have taken place in the US to mark the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Al Jazeera English – Americas – US marks September 11 attacks.

Regardless of the debate about the truth of the US government official story of the events in 9/11, what happened afterward has definitely turned the world into a worse place.

I wonder if anybody feels more safer in his country after 7 years of the so called ‘war on terror’. It is unfortunate that the American strategy in the war on terror has inflamed the situation rather than getting any positive results.

I would not comment on what happened couse everybody knows. A world meant to be devided into two and a strategy mixed with political interests has proved to be a failiour in all aspects.

I would wonder what next. The devide in the world is widening more and more into two camps. The second camp is apparantly going to be led by the former Soviet power backed by natually wealthy nations and hardliners.

Who’s right and who’s wrong? I don’t care. What I care about is that if we continue to follow the strategy of alienating the other and puting each of our political and economical interests first, the world is moving slowly towards a third world war.

I have some hope in the newer generation. When I see Obama and Sarkouzi innitiating talks with the other I see some light at the end of the tunnel.