Right after “About Us” session, things went bad and I think that it was the last “well-organized” event CAT has ever managed and launched. Many people left and we wanted to run more activities to let CAT survive.

I think that’s when I suggested to change the coordinator and I didn’t want to lead as previously because I was too busy for it but we found that if I and Abdalla collaborated to be “A&A” coordinator that would be much better as I may have some management skills and I may have some creative ideas, and he has the time and spirit/patience to follow up.

That idea turned out to be awful for many reasons. Let me tell you how….

I was completetly busy managing the current tasks and my business life and of course my education and it turned out that doing something in CAT takes enormous time, because people are not well organized and they have responsibilities as well. That what made things go terribly wrong and it ended up like this http://www.ahmedsoliman.com/2006/08/03/im-sorry-cat/ wanna know why? Wait me tomorrow

One thing I have to mention separately, meeting “Yara”…

It was on the first meeting for me with the CAT guys, she was there and it’s unusual to find girls interested in that field and real astonishing is to find them active and brilliant. But “yara” was and she grabbed my attention directly because of her well organization and she is extraordinarily smart. I got to know her more by the time and she was the best work companion for me ever, she was effective in every idea or cooperation she does. I even thought that she was the best girl I’ve ever “worked” with or will work with.

If I made my own business, I’ll love to have her working for me because she is really an added-value for any company, may Allah bless her and show her the way to success ever after isA.

So, After having some courses plans to be launched in the college I got a rising demand for Linux courses at “Origin” and that was great because it helped me develop excellent relationships and helped me deliver my “freedom” message through an enormous number of courses. By this time I got busier and busier because I was managing too many things at the same time (as usual).

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We have launched CAT Scope 3 and it was pretty successful, we had many presentations and I can’t remember all the presentations’ titles but I can remember a few.

1. About CAT Reloaded.
2. Ahmed Soliman: The Open Source Approach - It was a sponsored presentation by Origin IBM.
3. Hesham ElSawi: IT Training, it was a very nice presentation about IT training in generally - It was a sponsored presentation by Origin IBM.
4. Abdel Rahman Za’za: USB Technology.
5. Hatem Mohammed: FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) Technology.
6. Hassanien Mohammed: What does graphics mean?

My presentation “The Opensource approach” had the award of the best and the most popular presentation (it’s not award but it’s a nomination after surveying the attendees). And things went perfect and we started to organize things to become more smooth and smooth.

The problem was that all the guys were beginners and they knew nothing about meetings and discussions and Allah knows, it was a mess!. I could manage to cope and manage to run the meetings as good as it’s possible while many people couldn’t cope and “Ahmed Abdalla” (as I remember) spent all his efforts trying to educate people how to talk in a meeting or how to brainstorm (while I believe that he himself didn’t know a solution, but he couldn’t cope with the situation because he barely can speak - that’s why he was trying to educate). He later discovered that my advices about leaving people and trying to guide their conversations into useful ones is more efficient than leaving the whole topic and talking about how to talk in a meeting.

Anyhow, those days were nice and binGo and psycho specially were growing up fast as they are really talented but they needed some guidance, I think they had a good opportunity really and they used it very well.

Ahmed Abdalla was then elected as the CAT coordinator and I didn’t apply for being coordinator because I was too busy at Origin with the IBM scholarship I was teaching and I had a very important project to manage along with my educational studies.

Let me say this, abdalla was a great guy but he was very lousy and he was losing control and things went sleepy, so CAT had a sleeping period they we have suggested opening chances for CAT-driven courses to be launched in the faculty for free for a selected number of qualified students. I was about to start a Linux course and we had many interviews with students applying for that opportunity and we were criticized hardly because people thought that it’s not fair to choose the qualified only. However we thought that it was the best idea at then because we didn’t want people to rush into the courses and being unqualified will definitely ruin the course quality.

However, we canceled the idea and the only one who have started a course was me and it was never completed…

Let me resume tomorrow…I’m at work now

It’s a very long story to tell, if you have time only start reading now because it might take a few minutes reading the whole story.
CAT is Computer Assistance Team, a network of talented students in the college of computers and systems engineering - Mansoura University started to form a family under the name “CAT” to provide intensive information and to open up students’ eyes to the computers world earlier on 1996. At ths time computer knowledge merely existed and a few people who could really say that they have ever used a computer. The team contained many people whom I don’t know all of them but I hear names and I met a few of them. People like “Hesham ElSawi”, “Ashraf ElRefaey”, “Mohammed Ezzat” and etc.

That family achieved alot and they launched 2 conferences under the name “CAT Scope” and that was from 1996 to 1999, then things died and no one had more power to revive that dream.

After a few years, some students in the same college had the same dream once and they started to communicate with Eng.Mahy (Research Engineer in Communications Department). She was contacted by “Abdel Rahman Zaa’za” who was very ambitious and excited to create a team excellent in IT (Information Technology) and they started to contact Hesham ElSawi again and they’ve held many meetings to organize how things are going to work.

At this time I was working as a part-time instructor at Origin-IBM (Authorized IBM Training Center) which was managed and partially owned by Hesham ElSawi. And then he told me that he wants me to help them and join the team. Firstly they started with the name “Smart” and that was the suggested name, then hesham proposed “CAT” to be named after the old CAT family as a continuation to the idea, then finally we decided that it’ll be “CAT Reloaded” - I think it was Ahmed Abdalla’s suggestion as he is a fan of “The Matrix” series”-

At this time I was superior to the team, I had such a great computer history and had achieved many success stories while I was near to their age. I was afraid because I had such bad days meeting people who had hated me for being better or smarter rather than trying to compete me. But luckily things went perfect and they guys respected me very much and I started to help arranging everything. The first event for this IT addicted family was to arrange for CAT Scope 3 and try to face the college routine to achieve this goal.

I started to know everybody more “BinGo, Psycho, Biko, Ahmed Abdalla, Hassanien, Ahmed Nassar, Samer and etc.”, some of them I knew earlier like “Hassanien and Ahmed Nassar” but CAT helped me to know them deeper and deeper.

Generally, we have achieved much and CAT started to take much out of my time and I could barely manage the college/education, work and CAT…starting from here the story I’m telling is beginning…

This is the story you didn’t expect to hear, the impact of CAT to me and how did it affect my career life and my choices.

Let me tell you…in the next post