“Can I please have 50 dirhams Etisalat (pre-paid phone credit to the value of 50 dirhams)?”
“Sorry sir, we’re all out. We have 25 dirhams though.”
“Can I have two of those?”
“Sure sir. 50 dirhams please.”
It was not my intention, but isn’t it interesting that the icons from my regular Microsoft products seem to suggest I’m using “OPEN” Office software – quite contrary to open office software.
The Windows 7 taskbar icons are from Outlook, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer, and One Note.
Masdar – a project by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company – have announced the winner of an energy efficiency project. And their design looks great!
It generates energy from wind, but is far more aesthetic than the usual turbines.
Resembling thin cattails, the Windstalks generate electricity when the wind sets them waving. The designers came up with the idea for the planned city Masdar, a 2.3-square-mile, automobile-free area being built outside of Abu Dhabi.
via Wind Power Without the Blades: Big Pics : Discovery News.
I love the “artist’s impression” pictures gratuitously including the Burj Khalifa in the background. Although the Burj is the tallest building in the world, unless I’m mistaken, there’s no way you can see it from Masdar. In fact I think the Burj they used in the picture looks about this size from my balcony – which is less than 15 kms away. It’s one way to make the picture look more UAE though.
I never thought a poem would appeal to me as an information architect. I thought this unknown fuzzy discipline is buried too heavily in business data and technology to enjoy something designed for pleasure purposes alone. Never in my wildest dreams did I think the information domain would be so clearly understood by someone other than an information manager, let alone a children’s author.
Michael Rosen changed this though. Myles had to watch his performance of We’re Going On A Bear hunt as part of his home work. My curiosity took me to his web site where I found a fantastic bit of prose, called
Words Are Ours:
In the beginning was the word
and the word is ours:
the names of places,
the names of flowers,
the names of names,
words are ours.
Page-turners
for early-learners
How to boil an egg
or mend a leg
Words are ours
Wall-charts
Love hearts
Sports reports
Short retorts
Jam-jar labels
Timetables
Words are ours
Following the instructions
for furniture constructions
Ancient mythologies
Online anthologies
Who she wrote for
Who to vote for
Joke collections
Results of elections
Words are ours
The tale’s got you gripped
Have you learned your script?
The method of an Experiment
Ingredients for merriment
W8n 4ur txt
Re: whts nxt
Print media
Wikipedia
Words are ours
Sub-titles on TV
Details on your cv
Book of great speeches
Guide to the best beaches
Looking for chapters
on velociraptors
Words are ours
The mystery of history
The history of mystery
The views of news
The news of views
Words to explain
the words for pain.
doing geography
Autobiography
What to do in pay-phones
Goodbyes on gravestones
Words are ours.
Source: http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/poems_wordsareours.html, accessed 20 October 2010
Just over a year ago we bought Myles a fish tank. We feel Dubai is not a climate suitable for any other types of pet, and travelling and holidays become more difficult if we have a more dependent pet. But there were lessons Myles would learn from caring after a pet that are too valuable to miss.
Myles looked after the fish tank and his fish quite well, although he’d often need reminding to feed them. He even felt that a few times they needed a hug. He’d do this by crouching down and hugging the tank. I suppose it’s better than trying to hug the individual fish.
Up until a little while ago we had quite a lot of luck with the fish we bought at the same time we bought the tank. A couple died, but there were a core of 3-4 hardy souls who survived even a week or so of neglect between our house minders going on holiday, and us returning from ours. When we returned we tried to replenish the stock of fish with a tank full of new entrants. That’s when our luck dried up. We had to replace new dead fish more regularly and replace them with more soon to be dead fish.
It was during this period that Lewis – our 2 year old learnt – about the cycle of life. He would follow Elle over to the tank to pick out the dead fish, watch her take it over to the toilet, then watch her dispatch it to its final resting place.
Well, we thought Lewis was learning about the cycle of life. He may have learnt a more simple cycle. One morning after watching the fish disappear down the bowl, he went back furiously pointing at the fish tank and saying with some excitement, “More, more, more”.
Despite his request we didn’t needlessly flush any fish. There’d always be another one requiring flushing in a day or two.
This morning I saw an extremely alarming sight on Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai’s busiest road. Although I say it was alarming, at the same time it didn’t seem totally out of the ordinary for Dubai.
I was getting a lift into work with a colleague, and we were in one of the faster overtaking lanes – on the left-hand side. In a white Small Utility Vehicle in one of the right-hand lanes, still driving at a pretty quick speed, was a driver reading the Koran whilst he was driving! He gained my attention because the car was struggling to stay in one lane, which is understandable.
I’m not sure whether he was reading the holy book on account of being supremely religious. Perhaps he regularly catches up on the good book whenever there’s a quiet moment – such as this instance, driving 100kms per hour on a reasonably straight free-flowing passage of highway. Or is this person just a realist, and knows that we all need some extra help on Dubai’s road to make it through the day without accident. For sure, everybody around him needed some divine protection – insh’allah.
I’m still learning about this very interesting airline industry, clearly.
Australasian Low Cost Carrier (LCC) Tiger Airlines is now seeking a subscription fee for its followers of special offers and campaigns (Tiger Rips Stripes off its customers, http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2010/10/18/tiger-rips-stripes-off-its-customers/, 18 October 2010).
I have heard about scrimping, but this is ridiculous. In the era of information sharing is power, I really don’t know why anyone would want to prevent prospective customers from getting on board – so to speak. Or is this their attempt to position the marketing material as a luxury good whereby the sheer fact that it has a monetary value raises its perceived value over other free communications. Even if this is the fact, it’s a strange pitch from an LCC.
Now that the temperatures are becoming more reasonable, it’s sparked me to reflect and share some thoughts on Dubai’s infamous Summer.
When you first arrive here everybody warns you about what Summer will bring. Some times when you meet someone it’s their opening sentence. I received so many warnings last year I was really quite concerned. Thankfully we had one of the mildest Summers on record. In fact, during the week I arrived it snowed in Ras Al Khaimah. Ordinarily it’s much hotter though.
During Dubai’s Summer months there is always a massive outflux of expats. Even many of the locals tend to holiday outside of the UAE during this time. Each year the summer period more or less lines up with Ramadan, so if people aren’t celebrating the holy month with Hajj, it’s safe to say they’re searching out more friendly climates than Dubai.
I should quantify this, the average minimum temperature during the hottest month of August is more than 30 degrees. All in all, it means that work is always terribly quiet. Although some people do strategically stay to get a lot of quiet work done through with fewer distractions around.
Despite the heat of the day reaching maybe 40-45 degrees, you still see people playing cricket on the weekends. Cricket must be an Indian’s most popular activity next to breathing. They generally don’t play during the hottest part of the day. However the timing doesn’t make much of a difference. Some nights the temperature does not fall below 38 degrees. I trained for the Berlin Marathon during our Summer period where I’d leave my run as late into the night as possible, but it was still tough.
The parks around the city are totally abandoned. In fact, I think it’s free entry during these months as there is no one to pay fees anyway. Water parks are popular places, but to be honest the Dubai summer is often too hot even for this – as you find yourself more often out of the water than in it. It’s certainly too hot to enjoy the beach – unless you’re like me and enjoy a really, really warm bath and don’t mind the salt. The doctors at our clinic warned us to avoid the beach in summer anyway. Apparently the bacteria love the warmer waters, and in the heat there’s nothing really to stop them. The place that is most busy from July through to September are the very air conditioned malls. We did go there a few times, however it’s one activity none of us really enjoy. Especially when there’s no real purpose except avoiding the heat.
We made the mistake of taking our kids to Modhesh World. It’s a temporary amusement park focused around Modhesh – a kid’s character who is based on the Sun whose names translates into amazing in Arabic. While my kids, and a friend of theirs, all had fun, it was terribly expensive considering it was just a few amusement rides, games and some pretty depressed farm animals. Much like any other exhibition I guess. In fact we likened the place to our own Ekka in Brisbane, except the all the “carnies” have Blackberrys! It’s a true sign of the wealth of the region. Another distinction with our Ekka is here is probably be 3-4 times more expensive. I was one of the people in Australia who’d complain about the rising costs of going to such places. Not any more.
I will always have a soft spot for Microsoft’s Notepad. It comes from my persistence with it to manually web site code for the web. In the mid 1990s I became totally obsessive/compulsive with web site design and especially updating HTML source code. At one stage I may have used Notepad more than I used my legs. It was around this time that I suffered a continual and uncontrollable right click whenver I surfed the web.
Sadly (or maybe fortunately), my web design days are behind me. I continued to use Notepad in the years since for note taking, task controls, and communication logs. That was until recently. Lately I’ve begun moving to more sophisticated and integrated tools like Microsoft’s OneNote, Evernote, and so on. I find these tools a lot better to manage these work tasks as they offer more comprehensive features (like global search) and the ability for numerous people to asynchronously read and update from other locations.
I often fall into my old habits and take initial meeting notes in Notepad before moving into proper document formats, but I think my usage of it for just about everything else has expired.
Before I forget how to do it, thought I’d record a tip I found quite helpful. Some times I found it useful in recording notes which were maintained along with a timestamp of the entry, as a chronological log. I found it invaluable to learn that Notepad can automatically add that timestamp for you. The way to do this is to type .LOG in the first line of the file, then add a line break and save the file. Then each time you open the file, Notepad will record a timestamp on a new line, where you can add your respective notes.