How to buy a used car in the US

Occasionally, one of my friends wants to buy a used car in the US and I found myself repeating myself over and over so I figured it's more efficient to write down my experience instead of answering individual requests:

Steps:

1. Determine a budget
2. Determine a few make/model/year-range combinations
1. the purpose of this step is to constrain your search in next steps. This is important because comparing deals in the market is much harder when you are not constrained to a few such combinations. 
2. find out which make/model/year-range combinations satisfy the following constraints:
1. within your budget
2. available in the market (e.g. http://www.craigslist.org/)
3. have good specs (e.g. http://www.edmunds.com/)
3. generally speaking, Japanese makes have a good reputation of being reliable and cost-effective. American makes are usually cheaper but less reliable (their average expected lifetime is considerably shorter than that of Japanese cars). European makes (especially German) are also reliable but more costly to maintain.
4. if you have child(ren), I recommend getting a van (or an SUV). Other vehicle types are usually too small for your child(ren). 
5. given the (high) prices of gas in the US, an important detail is the average miles per gallon (MPG) for a given make/model/year.
3. Hunt for good deal(s)
1. best of all: try to find a trustworthy person in your local community who wants to sell his car (which has few problems).
2. decide whether you want to buy from a dealer or an owner. Dealers have to make money, so a (normal) dealer's price will be a few hundred dollars more expensive than a (normal) owner's price. However, you will be far less concerned about frauds if you buy your car from a trustworthy dealer. Imagine how anxious you would be when you want to finalize the deal with an owner you don't know, and give him/her a few thousand dollars!
3. http://www.craigslist.org/ is a good place to start looking. 
4. consider trustworthy local dealers (which are hard to find).
5. ask the seller if the car had any serious accidents or fails emission tests. 
6. ask the seller to give you the car's VIN number.
7. this is obvious, but it doesn't hurt to state it. Do not buy a car remotely from someone you don't know no matter how tempting the deal is. It is a fraud.
4. Check VIN
1. http://www.carfax.com/entry.cfx (this is a paid service. You can buy a bulk so that price per VIN lookup is cheaper). 
2. if the carfax report shows that the car had serious damage, failed several emission tests, is stolen ...etc, go to step 3.
5. Check at a mechanic
1. find a reasonably priced (less than $50) mechanic
2. ask the mechanic if the car has major mechanical or electrical problems. if yes, go to step 3.
3. if the mechanic approves of the car, and you like it, don't waste your time and money, and buy it.
4. in case of minor problems, ask the mechanic how much would it take to fix them, and use this information to negotiate the price with the seller.
6. Make necessary repairs and maintenance

--update: a friend asked me to add a warning that multiple names may be on the title. In that case, you have to get EACH of the owners to sign for you. Otherwise, the new title will have other names in addition to yours (legally, you won't own the car all by yourself).

Generous Peace

I got an invitation to attend Kareem Salama's concert in Al-Geneina Theater. I wasn't sure about his music and lyrics until I listened to this YouTube video, featuring one of his songs. The guy turned out to be quite popular in US that he was invited to dinner at The White House.



It was also my first time to see Al-Geneina Theater at Al Azhar Park (Cairo). It's a nice little open-air theater enclosed by walls of Saladin Citadel of Cairo. I'll make sure to post on Al-Azhar Park later, but let's focus on Kareem Salama for now.

I was surprised to find one-fourth of the ~250 attendees were foreigners. Kareem's performance was both amusing and strong. His songs were meaningful, purposeful and enjoyable. His songs tell unique inspirational stories. One exhibits two soldiers, each convincing his beloved person that he has to fight for justice. In the battlefield, their eyes meet and they realize they are actually brothers in humanity. Another explains that Muslims are normal people, not Nazis, not Racists. Kareem also knows how to gently treat his audience.

It was evident that Kareem has a problem with Arabic vocab, despite the strong pronunciation of Arabic words in his songs (he sings one of Imam Shafei' songs). I didn't also like the Sofeyyah dancing style in one of his songs. But don't get me wrong, I do think the guy is a rising star.

Kareem holds a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma and a graduate degree in Law from the University of Iowa. His parents immigrated to US in 1960s to attend graduate school.

P.S. Generous Peace is the literal English translation of Kareem Salama.

Changing The Stereotype of Islam

I'm a muslim. It always offends me how non-muslims associate Islam with terrorism and extremism. In fact, Islam doesn't promote any forms of uncalled-for fighting or terrorist actions. People's misconception about Islam is usually attributed to purposeful media reports. Islam should not be held responsible for some muslims acting against the true teachings of Islam; you will find good and bad people among the followers of any religion or belief. However, to tell the truth, few muslims are sincerely trying to correct this misconception.


Conveying Islamic Message Society (CIMS) is a small organization, located in Alexandria, trying to deliver accurate information about Islam and its true teachings. It does so -mainly- by sending free books about Islam in different langauges to interested people worldwide. Printing and shipping books is funded through local donations.

A few days ago, CIMS launched its official site Beta through which people from everywhere (with minor exceptions) can choose books about Islam in their mother-tongue language, and place free requests to get the books at their front doors. I strongly recommend you subscribe first because many pages require log-in. Some pages are still under-construction, don't make them distract you from the enabled services. If you have any comments, please communicate it here, they will carefully listen to your feedback; but try not to be too picky cuz the website development is completely voluntary work.

The Pharaonic Village

I really enjoy learning about and comparing different cultures. While visiting Egypt, Prof. Nelson gave to me and my wife the opportunity to learn more about Brazil, Canada and even Egypt! We only had a single day to spend with him in Cairo, so we had to be very selective regarding what to visit. Since he already visited Giza Pyramids, Egyptian Museum and The Citadel, we picked more three places to visit: The Pharaonic Village in Giza, Khan El-Khalili, and our home!

It was my first time to visit The Pharaonic Village. It's a touristic village on the banks of the Nile river, exhibiting the long history of Egypt. The tour starts with a small boat on the Nile, equipped with a cassette playing a loud recorded voice (available in different languages) through low-quality speakers. The old man driving the boat stops/slows down in front of statues representing important symbols in ancient Egypt, in sync with the recorded voice which tells the story behind each of the symbols. Then, the voice starts to explain some of the activities, industries and arts that were popular in ancient Egypt, while visitors observe actors/actresses dressed like ancient Egyptians while working on these activities. For example, we got to see how they used to water the fields, make papers from the papyrus plant ...etc. I enjoyed this part of the tour the most.

Then we left the boat and the guide walked us through a scaled down version of the Temple of Abu Simble, an ancient rich man's house, an ancient poor man's house, and the tomb of King Tut. This part of the tour was exciting, but would have been much better if we had a better human guide!

Then, another guide took us in a tour to see the several museums exhibiting clothes, objects, portraits, photos, statues, models and pieces of old news paper. Each museum focuses on a particular age or leader in the Egyptian history. This part was the most informative in the tour.

Mentioning the good things about the Pharaonic Village, their official presence on the web is decent. Also, the staff is really helpful and cheerful. On the other hand, I have to say that I found the tickets to be overpriced, found "some" human guides to be unpresentable and not fluent, and found boat speakers to be of low-quality.

We spent around three hours in the Pharaonic Village, so we decided to get back to home and have some lunch. Amany made such a good job cooking molokheyya, mesakka'a, rice with shereyya, babaghannoog, chicken panet, pasta, fries, in addition to the ennab and sahlab drinks! Prof. Nelson also surprised us with a royal Belgium chocolate as a gift. That was very nice from him.

At night, we went to Khan El-Khalili. If interested, please read my earlier post about this exciting bazars area.

The El-Refa'i Experience

El-Refa'i is the name of an infamous grills "restaurant" in Cairo. It's located in a narrow allyway, against Masjid Sayeda Zeinam, a very old district in Islamic Cairo.

El-Refa'i keeps its doors open to 5 AM. It's very popular to the extent that you'll find it busy at 2 AM! The vast majority of El-Refa'i's tables are in the street. Hence, clients are severely exposed to the life in this old spot in Cairo. The old, dirty tables and the wandering cats also contribute to the hard-core experience. And it's not cheap, 1 kilo of mixed grills costs you 150 LE. Drinks are served by an old woman with a refrigerator right in the street, not through the restaurant itself. Generally speaking, service there is way below the average.

Clients tolerate all what I mentioned because El-Refa'i cooks tasty grills; really tasty grills. We are not quite sure about the quality, though. They offer what can be best described as "salade juice" in bottles, and they name it Wisky; I have to admit I'm fell in love with their spicy Wisky.

I do recommend experiencing El-Refa'i once, for Egyptians as well as for non-Egyptians.

Drive Ahead

If you know that a car accident will probably happen after 60 seconds, and you will be part of it, maybe you can exercise caution to avoid it. I'm not talking about science fiction, the idea is very simple; regardless of its applicability.

Consider the following setup:

• EACH drivers wears a helmet.
• Helmets are equipped with an embedded system in-sync with all other helmets.
• The vehicle itself is in-sync with the driver's helmet.
• Through the helmet, a driver observes (and lives in) the virtual world, not the physical world around him. The virtual world is initialized once, then it reflect the immediate commands drivers give to their vehicles; such that, if Khaled's car and Waleed's car (in the virtual world) are running side by side at the same speed and Waleed -stupidly- gives a command to his steering wheel to run into Khaled's car, this will happen immediately in the virtual world, and both Waleed and Khaled will see (through their helmets) an accident.
• Vehicles respond to a driver's command (e.g. starting the engine, moving forward, pressing on brakes, turning left) 60 seconds after the driver issues the command. So, when Waleed turns his steering wheel running into Khaled's car, this happens immediately in the virtual world, but the car will respond physically to Waleed's command after 60 seconds, giving both Khaled and Waleed enough time to switch to another mode, cancelling Waleed's command which would have resulted in a physical accident.

Problems:

• We need the virtual world to accurately renders what will happen in 60 minutes. It needs to be aware of so many aspects in order to predict accurately what will happen in the physical world (e.g. conditions of electrical and mechanical systems in the vehicle, road conditions, pedestrians movement-the most impossible)
• We need all vehicles on the road to be equipped with the system, and all drivers on the road to use their helmets. The idea cannot be applied partially (by a subset of the vehicles).
• All vehicles on the road should be initialized at the same time while parking (not moving). This needs to happen only once.

Applicability:
Obviously, the idea is inapplicable on the road, as it stands now at least. However, the idea is applicable in any sceario where human operation of machines could result in catastrophic events, and physical interaction is done through machines only, not involving living things.

I had a business trip in Ein El Sokhna, 100 KM to the east of Cairo. I shared the room with my friend Mahmoud. The resort was excellent with friendly and helpful staff, golf areas, golf cars for moving within the resort, singers with perfect performance, GYM with good equipments, tidy and well-equipped rooms. However, nothing is perfect. The beach is quite far from the rooms and the lobby. There is no water activities/sports to do on the beach. Swimming in their beach is not very enjoyable to many since the depth saturates at ~120 cm. The resort is very empty. We could hardly find two/three other rooms busy. Also, it's far from any other place in Ein Sokhna, making it kind of boring as soon as you get used to the places and activities in the resort.

We spent most of the first day in meetings. Then we had lunch in the excellent restaurant of the resort. We enjoyed the variety, presentation and deliciousness of the buffet so much. Enough to say that selection of the resort was due to recommendation for the restaurant's cheif. After that, we had a number of in-doors team building activities. Then we moved to the beach and practiced more team building activities. In one of the activities, my manager and I were inter-connected by two ropes, and the goal was to get our freedom. I'm not sure which skill is developed by this game, but at least it was fun.

I can't remember the last time I played soccer; it must be a very long-time ago. After dinner, the younger generation of employees got a ball, put the rocks marking the goal boundaries, and let fun begin. As you may guess, I'm not a good (not even a medium) soccer player. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the time so much. It had such a great impact on my morale. It made me feel younger. It made me feel free. I have to find some time for practicing on a regular basis. It wasn't long after playing soccer that I fell asleep.

The next day, I woke up late. My legs muscles were begging me to stay on the bed, but I had to catch the meetings. Fortunately, this time meetings lasted till 2:30 PM only, leaving a couple of free hours before our bus leaves. In a matter of ten minutes, nine of us were already in the swimming pool. It took us more ten minutes to have 18 colleagues fighting to score the ball in the opponent's goal. Water polo is such a cool sport, although it's easy to turn into a fight.

It took us an hour from the resort gates to Carreffour-El-Maadi. And more than an hour from Carreffour-El-Maadi to Cournish-El-Maadi, the destination of our bus. Go Cairo go!