Benihana Bashes Bloggers

Image by Okinawa Soba via FlickrKuwaiti blog TWOFOURTYEIGHTAM (2:48AM to you) is a lively and wide-ranging affair put together by bloggers Mark and Nat. It's respected, popular, well-written, pretty objective and, as both are designers, is clean and easy to read. The B-side to 2:48AM is 2:48PM, which is a community blog and is pretty big as blogs in Kuwait go (and Kuwait has a lively blogging scene).

In the middle of December last year, Mark posted a review on the 'A sides' of Kuwait's newly opened Japanese restaurant Benihana Kuwait. It's linked here for your delectation and delight. Mark wasn't terribly impressed by his experience at the restaurant. Although he pointed out that, "The service wasn’t too bad for a restaurant that’s just been open for a few days and the staff were really friendly." he also went on to say: "The problem with my experience last night though was with the food, it was disappointing to say the least."

Mark  then explains the reasons for his disappointment in detail, concluding, "Would I go back to Benihana? No I wouldn't.'

He also took a video of the 'show' the chefs put on while cooking. The acrobatics at Benihana are apparently something to behold, but this is a very ordinary looking display of, well, cooking.

So there we go - a bad experience at Benihana Kuwait gets a bad review from a customer. And there it ended. Or not quite. Nested in the 74 comments (I said it was a popular blog, didn't I?) are several 'happy customer' astroturf comments that came from, as Mark pointed out, the same IP address. And then there's the comment (linked here for your listening pleasure) from a geezer called Mike Servo, who claimed to be the general manager of the Benihana management of Kuwait and who threatened to sue Mark. A couple of quotes:

"...our rights and name is being used in a wrong way and broadcasting the video without a proper consent from us is really annoying specially Benihana is just opened up its doors to the public. We are seeking and consulting our legal dept. on how we can form a type of law suit against your website to be brought up to the Kuwait authorities."

He goes on to trill: "We want you to give us your information, your name, your number and your address so our lawyer will take it from there and be sure that you in Kuwait were the jury is 100 % clean and fair."

And then for some bizarre reason starts talking about elephants: "We also expect that you might be sending people to Benihana to make a play and that is why we have informed the CID about that, In the past we encountered your add in Subway and it is one of our companies franchise, we really didn’t give it any attention, and it very clear now that Subway is an elephant while other competitors are closing down, however this time we will not let it go and we will follow you legally."

Not terribly nice, in all. He ends the comment by asking Mark if he's Lebanese!

"A comedy classic" says one following commenter.

"I have a feeling that your restaurant will be closing in no time at this pace! I’m planning to try it out to see how bad it really is, and if it is bad I’m going to probably write a worse review" says another.

"I was going to visit Benihana .. but after seeing how you treat customers reviewing your restaurant, I plan on avoiding it at all costs." Is another comment.

This comment neatly sums up the considerable outpouring of anger at the management of Benihana Kuwait - for astroturfing, for its furious reaction and for threatening a lawsuit. "As a representative of such a well known brand it is shocking that you would conduct yourself in such an unprofessional manner. I am sure the franchise policy of Benihanas is not one of engaging those who are not satisfied with its product by posting baseless claims and threatening frivolous lawsuits that serve no other purpose but discredit any legitimate concern or issue you may have."

Mark posted up on Twitter yesterday that he had received the lawsuit. Benihana Kuwait actually went ahead and sued a blogger for writing a bad review of their restaurant. I have the feeling this won't end here...

UPDATE: This is the Benihana Kuwait Facebook Page. A truly stunning read.
(You'll have to click 'Just others' to see the comments)
Update to update: They deleted the comments. Grief.

When Egypt Stopped Laughing

Image via WikipediaOver the years, I have watched Egyptians laugh at themselves and the regime they live under. It's a particular type of humour I have noticed most in the Levant - a sort of gallows humour that makes a joke out of the lack of freedom and the ubiquitous mukhabarat.

Every time elections would come around, people would laugh about how he was going to lose this time. When he polled the upper 90 percentile of votes as usual, people would laugh at that. Jokes would be cracked about the lack of freedom, respect and hope for the future (or the rising price of food) because, well, what else could you do?

It struck me the other day that the Egyptians simply stopped laughing.

Colleague Marwa got out of Alexandria on Friday - her eyewitness account of the journey she and her husband took is the stuff of adventure novels - roadblocks, burning tyres and the fear of driving through teeming, excitable crowds as people bang their hands against your car roof, an awful din that makes you cringe and fear the metal will cave in. The guttersnipes burning tyres, unaware of why the world has suddenly gone mad, but capering around in great glee at the sudden anarchy.

As we can all see from Al Jazeera's stunning coverage, the situation is deteriorating and looters are roaming the streets. Communities are coming together to protect themselves, rather in the face of a strategy that appeared to be built around pulling the police out and letting law and order break down (even giving it the occasional shove in that direction, apparently) - Marwa's mother's apartment was saved at the last moment by a neighbour, the men have come together now and blocked the street so that the residents are safe. The army, she reports, have been unfailingly polite and pleasant and have refused to use force against the protesters - something that Al Jazeera's coverage has also shown.

But it would appear to me that things are inevitably going to get worse before they get better whatever the outcome - food supplies will come under pressure as travel around Egypt is rendered nigh on impossible by roadblocks and gangs of thugs (including those carrying government issue firearms). Medical supplies will be stretched and a wide range of basic services are already going to be under pressure, which will only increase the longer the protests carry on.

Everyone I know is quietly hoping they'll be able to laugh again soon - a different, more carefree laughter, perhaps.


One minor triumph to have come out of all this has been Al Jazeera's. I have been watching their coverage of events and it has been very, very good indeed - BBC quality reporting with an authoritative voice and a wide range of viewpoints rather than constantly repeated reports and whole minutes of text snippets with a repeated sample of the same parping theme tune. It has also focused on the news - not constantly nipping off to talk about how some footballer sprained his earlobe or some manager was 'sick as a parrot' but thought it was 'the rub of the green'.

If you're interested in what's happening in Egypt, give AlJaz a spin. It is streets ahead of anyone else.

Egypt's Tweets of Rage

Image by National Media Museum via FlickrEgypt's Day of Rage unfolded yesterday afternoon, the news of gathering crowds and images of protesters heading for Tahrir square shared over Twitter by activists and people in general in a fascinating, blow-by-blow (later on, literally) account. I can't find Ramadan Al Sherbini's lead story from Gulf News online today, so here's a link to another of his stories on the protests.

As before, with events in Iran (which I wrote about extensively in relation to the role of social and mainstream media, you can get the backstory here if you like), the information flow quickly became cluttered with a mixture of retweets, Twibbons and other outside voices clogging up the #Jan25 and #Egypt hashtags.

However, as before, those of us following a number of people in Egypt had access to reliable, first-hand information and were able to watch the story unfold. As the afternoon wore on, mobile networks went down around Tahrir - the government was blamed for the outage, but operators are insisting it was their networks at fault - and vendors around the square, cafés and the like, took the password protection off their wireless networks so people could continue to get word out. There were widespread reports that the government had blocked Twitter, but this is a technically aware generation, people - access was obtained using different clients and proxies.

Mainstream media got access to events through Twitter too - sometimes even quoting the Tweets of journalists on the stweets such as this example from the Wall Street Journal. Such a huge repository of eye witness reports makes for a fascinating account of events - and, importantly, creates awareness and publicises the protest. This post, from Global Voices, shows how Tweets can be used with devastating effect in reportage. There were a lot of brave journalists among the crowds, including Al Jazeerah's cameraman, who was hospitalised with four rubber-cased bullets lodged in his arm as police tried to break up the demonstrations.

Twitter was also being used as an organising tool, with people able to share information widely - when you tweet to a popular and timely hashtag, you're effectively multicasting. And it's being used to get word out this morning, as a second day of demonstrations appears to be on the cards.

There has been a lot of debate over the role of social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, in Tunisia and, prior to that, Iran, both in terms of quite how fundamental both were to events and how reliable reports were. Without a doubt, the closer you are to an event, the more reliable Twitter becomes - by closer, I mean that you have established relationships with people of reputation on the ground or, at the most, at a second remove. Once you get past the third degree of separation, you're losing eyewitness credibility and getting bogged down under the hashtag traffic. But you're also seeing a world that has had its attention brought to the Jan 25 protests and reacting overwhelmingly in support of the protestors, something that Tunisia hacked Facebook to stop and that Egypt appears to have blocked Twitter to stop.

Blocking Twitter won't stop word getting out. You're as well to try and stop grains of sand falling through marbles. Here, for your amusement, is the official word from the Egyptian State Information Service. Compare it to #Jan25 and enjoy.

Fatal

Image via WikipediaNice story in today's jolly The National claims the Gulf's road safety record is 'appalling'. They're right, too. According to the piece, which quotes figures from the 2009 Global Status Report on Road Safety, you're seven times more likely to be killed on the UAE's roads than the UKs.

If you don't like it, you know what you can do, people...

Speakers at the Road Safety Middle East conference, speakers appeared slightly baffled that the Middle East bucked global trends in that the wealthier the country gets in the region, the worse the fatality record. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for the 15 to 29 age group, apparently. And the UAE averages 37.1 road fatalities per 100,000 people compared to a global average of 18.8.

The story's linked here. It's statistically sobering stuff.

Torches

Image via WikipediaDon't forget young Jan Palach
He  burnt a torch against the Warsaw Pact

Modern history has been changed by men who chose to demonstrate against repression by taking their own lives in the most painful way I can imagine. The one I remember from history at school, and an abiding image of the '60s, was the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức, who burned himself to death to protest the oppression of Buddhist monks. In 1969, Czech student Jan Palach (the couplet above is from Stranglers' bassist JJ Burnel's 'Euroman' solo album just in case you wondered) set fire to himself in front of the Russian tanks as they rolled into Prague, bringing winter back to the Prague Spring. I visited his memorial and it did make me terribly sad.

Palach died in January - the same month as Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose act of final desperation was to lead to the overthrow of the government. You're reading this because I was listening to the radio yesterday and heard the presenters mispronouncing his name, 'That Tunisian chap, you know, Booazzi or something.' It seemed odd to me that anyone living in the Middle East should be unaware of this man and why he was driven to do this to himself - particularly given the consequences of his action.

I find it hard to even think about what would drive a man to contemplate the act - the acrid stink of petrol, vapour shimmering, a scratch and whiff of phosphorous. The lazy whoomp of the flame. How could anyone with a shred of imagination even contemplate doing that to themselves? And yet Bouazizi was not to be alone - like Palach, his act has inspired others to follow the same course. There has been a spate of copycat immolations around the Middle East, five in Algeria, one each in Mauritania and Saudi Arabia and four in Egypt. In all, four of these people have died.

None of these men is likely to be remembered beyond a family's grief and a listing in the obsessive Wikipedia list of political self immolations (it's here - an odd list of lost causes and forgotten martyrs). But Mohammed Bouazizi, like Jan Palach and Thích Quảng Đức, changed history. Uniquely, he is the only man to have directly caused a government to fall by taking his life in this way.

The GeekiFesto

This updates the earlier version I posted last year - the Geekifesto is the document that we share with anyone who wants to do their own Geekfeest and, as much as anything, defines the event. This should help with the discussion that will be taking place tonight:: where are we going?

GeekFest is intended to be an offline social for online people and should be interesting to anyone who's involved in the online world and in using technology to create, educate, entertain, inform, drive change or just play around.

It’s a purely social event (not a networking event – it may serve that purpose but does not aim to) and is purposefully kept organic, free and easy.

GeekFest must never actually matter to anyone. If you’re holding a GeekFest and five people turn up, you should be able to shrug your shoulders and have a chat with the five people rather than die a million deaths that your attendance was low. If people don’t come, they don’t want it and we’ll simply stop doing it.

There have, to date (and to our surprise), been GeekFests in Dubai, Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus and  Amman. Each one has been different in style and content, reflecting the diversity of our region but also reflecting how the very loosely defined template of GeekFest allows people to do their own thing the way they want to. Only Dubai has kept to a (very rough) two-monthly calendar, but that’s part of the beauty of it. It gets done when people feel like it.

GeekFest Ramallah is happening on the 16th February 2011 and there are plans and intentions for GeekFest Abu Dhabi, Doha and Khartoum. Each regional GeekFest has happened because someone liked the idea and wanted to give it a try in their community. Nobody owns it, nobody sets rules – the only guiding principals have been shared in iterations of this very Geekifesto.

We are very proud of the fact that GeekFest is, as far as is practical, UNorganised. There are no officials, gatekeepers or people telling attendees what to do. There are no rules beyond the ‘no corporate behaviour, selling and stuff’ one. The only reason there is a start and finish time is that people insisted. There’s no registration or entry requirement. There are no badges, tags or wristbands, but we do put stickers and marker pens by the front door so that people can label themselves if they so desire.

However, there are some guiding principles that we’ve established, mostly by trial and error.

GEEKFEST ELEMENTS

Guiding principles
No corporate stuff, no bossing people around, no gatekeepers, no hassle, no drama. In general, a major guiding principle is no commercially motivated activity.

GeekFest consists of four elements – GeekTalks, TechnoCases, GameFest and ArtStuff. Other than that, it’s just a room full of smart people who have stuff that is interesting, engaging and even possibly visionary to discuss. We have added Beanbag Workshops to the mix, but they haven’t been terribly successful in the environment we use in Dubai (The Shelter). We might revive these in the new venue.


GeekTalks
These have evolved as a series of four 15-minute talks/presentations on areas/issues of interest to the audience. They take place in an area separate to the main area (in The Shelter we use the private screening room, a 40-seat cinema) and can be wide-ranging, with no real theme laid down for them other than that they should be interesting and engaging and user-generated content (ie: we’re interested in an iPad user, not in hearing from Apple).

GeekTalks in Dubai have covered contemporary mosque design, trekking in Nepal, HDR photography, the future of publishing, Arabic rap, small children with cancer, wearing niqab and gigapan imaging. It doesn’t have to be (although it tends to be) technology driven or related.

The speakers are responsible for sorting out their own technology requirements between them (we provide an LCD projector and screen and a slightly rocky Internet connection) and for their own time-keeping. Nobody tells them when to start and stop talking. They are also responsible for bringing their own audience – there’s nobody to tell people they have to attend a talk.

A year and more in, we’ve learned some lessons here. We’re introducing an (analogue) alarm clock to help with timekeeping!

We started out with the idea that talkers nominate their successors, but that has actually required so much organising that we’ve dropped the idea. But talkers are more than welcome to suggest successors for the next GeekFest. We try not to be gatekeepers.

Holding a TechoCase at GeekFest absolutely DOES NOT include, ever, a talking slot. Talks are user views and never, ever, ever sales pitches. Beirut and Jordan gleefully broke this rule.

GeekTalks typically take place from 8pm-9pm at GeekFest Dubai.

TechnoCases
The Technology Showcases give companies a chance to interact with the attendees at GeekFest. It’s a dialogue – they’re not an invitation to scream slogans or brand the event, let alone run competitions -  they’re a chance to show funky stuff and engage with an audience of highly influential online thought-leaders.

Companies can bring a bunch of laptops, a gadget or 15, a display case or free-standing display. Whatever is sensible, really – and doesn’t dominate the event, get in the way or otherwise be an irritant or eyesore.

Within those sensible constraints, companies mounting TechnoCases can use areas within GeekFest as they see fit – but do sign a contract agreeing, literally, not to hassle the Geeks.

Mounting a Technology Showcase at GeekFest does NOT confer the rights of sponsorship. We’ll include companies generally in promotional stuff and take care of them when we remember to, but there are no branding elements, logos or other promises made. They’re coming to the party to talk to people interested in engaging with them and that’s the deal.

GeekFest Dubai has been charging companies $1,500 for a TechnoCase. The venue partner raises invoices and manages settlements and maintains a separate GeekFest account. The proceeds are mainly spent on food and drink, although last year we ended up with a surplus, which was donated to the fund for Ola Abu Jarmous. GeekFest paid for my FlyDubai air fare to attend GeekFest Beirut last year, and I’ll be expensing my trip to GeekFest Ramallah. We also use the GeekFest fund to pay for stuff like our Vimeo account.

GameFest
This sprung out of nowhere but is basically a network set up at the event where gamers can bring their ‘rigs’ (or just notebooks) and hook up to play multiplayer games. In Dubai, which is the only GeekFest to have a GameFest so far, it’s usually put together by the chaps behind websites LochalArchade.com or MEGamers.com. The gamers like to ‘frag’ each other, but otherwise tend to behave quite well for gamers and we’ve had no bitings or other attacks.

Beanbag Workshops
This is a neat idea which we’ll try again in the new Shelter venue, but hasn’t really worked in the open area of the ‘old’ Shelter in Al Quoz. The idea is to gather a bunch of people around a subject expert who can share knowledge – we’ve had them on how to do HDR, how to build your SEO and stuff like that. The content and interaction have been great once they got going, but the problem has been starting them in the noisy room environment and getting people to sit down for them without organising them. In the new venue we can set up a sideroom  for them, so we’ll try restarting the idea.

Art Stuff
The art stuff at GeekFest has happened spontaneously but we’re now careful to try and include an element of art ‘happening’ at each event – wherever possible of a digital variety. This would be a graffiti artist, a digital artist, a photographic display, an installation or some such, filming video – the more the merrier – and accessible to everyone, too!

GeekFest Dubai has a back-beat, a funky soundtrack selected by Shelter DJ Simone Sebastien. We’re fine if other people want to contribute a playlist.

Branding
GeekFest’s strong and dazzling iconography is down to the work of Lebanese graphic artist Naeema Zarif, whose guiding hand has provided GeekFest with a unique ‘feel’ that somehow was part of a whole brand strategy of mad glasses, green and blue artwork and geekinees. That’s changing in 2011 as she redesigns those elements, moving in line with her own artwork, a juxtaposition of calligraphy, images and visual design elements.

Yes, I know. It does rather sound like bullshit. Naeema does great art for us. Howzat?

Food and Drink
We use the TechnoCase revenue to subsidise/fund the food and drink (pass-around food like quiche, kebabs, pastries, sandwiches, cakes and fresh juices) at the event.

When GeekFest started in Dubai, The Shelter had a mOre cafe, but that’s gone now. In the meantime we’ve been using The Lime Tree Cafe’s excellent outside catering service – they have been marvellously flexible given our refusal to take organising anything seriously.

We don’t have alcohol at GeekFest Dubai in deference to Muslim attendees. Each GeekFest will have its own cultural environment, however. Beirut has a bar (the last one there was IN a bar!), which is fun.

Social Media Accounts
We do set up accounts centrally and generally try to help promote them, but the volume’s too high to do it well, so effective ownership by each GeekFest has been critical. Beirut put together a nice site based on a Wordpress blog. At some stage we might need to consider something serious like a website, but that’s getting scarily organised! Right now, each event has a Facebook page, Twitter account and some have blogs. Alexander’s blog is generally abused for GeekFest stuff. Insider Emirates and Mideastposts.com have been very supportive, as have others around the region.

Promo
We promote GeekFest Dubai using FaceBook, Twitter (an important platform, actually) and blogs – Alexander’s in particular, but also the UAE Community Blog, Insider Emirates and Mideastposts.com. Some blog partners with solid ‘geek reach’ or even an ongoing blog (if you can maintain it!) is a great scheme. GeekFest isn’t about any one group (Bloggers, Gamers, Twitterers – it’s NOT a Tweetup!, FaceBook) but about integrating everyone regardless of the platforms they use.

There has been quite a bit of media interest in GeekFest Dubai but we haven’t ‘pushed it’ or made formal announcements or anything – word of mouth has been very strong. We have done a number of interviews ‘on demand’ with media but don’t actively pursue any media outreach.

We’ve found that making announcements closer to the event is best – although we set the date early. GeekFest Dubai is now running on a steady-ish two-month cycle, typically the last Thursday of the month or so – 2011 will be Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sept etc – Ramadan and Christmas etc obviously require some judgement calls.

Last minute excitement runs quite high, particularly on Twitter. We tend to stoke this a bit by holding back speaker announcements and other stuff. Being tarts, basically.

UNorganising
GeekFest Dubai was originally a two-wo/man team – Alexander and Saadia. Alexander looked after promo and the geeks, Saadia owned and looked after the venue (including F&B etc). Saadia’s moved on now and is living in New York, so it’s just Alexander and the guys over at The Shelter, who have continued to be fantastically supportive. Perversely, GeekFest has become one of the biggest events held at The Shelter!

There’s no pre-registration or anything like that. This makes placing the food orders interesting, but we’ll live. We try not to talk about the great over-ordering pies disaster for GeekFest 3.14.

A quaint trend of wearing especially geeky t-shirts has started, BTW.

The best way to UNorganise a GeekFest, we think, is that two wo/man team – someone to take care of the geekiness and someone to take care of the realities. UNorganising the venue isn’t hard – book the date, book F&B for a broad estimate of attendees. Arrange a speaker area and projector. Err. That’s it. We think the geek/blogger and venue owner combination is tops, but a geek/blogger and event organiser would do job just as well. It really helps if the venue cost doesn’t eat all the  budget – a venue partner is ideal. Beirut’s Art Lounge, for instance, was a fantastic venue, but charged an amazing $650 for the use of the venue (and it had a busy pay bar for the events! Cheek!) and so we’ve had to strike out in search of venues new.

Regional expansion has been interesting – events have happened all over the place, but they haven’t turned into regular calendar entries. Without a central organising intelligence, GeekFest tends to happen in fits and starts, but that’s just fine. One of the decisions awaiting us in 2011 is whether to actually take this all seriously in some way, or whether to let it carry on being an utterly UNorganised phenomenon.

Either way, GeekFest is there purely for enjoyment and for its community. Whatever and wherever that is!

GeekFest - The Lineup

Image by KayVee.INC via FlickrHere’s the final GeekFest Dubai 2011 lineup for this Thursday. It’s looking like a whole heap of fun!

Please do note that Dubai Television wants to come along and film this GeekFest for their Out and About programme, so don't be surprised at strange people poking big cameras in your direction! The fashion bloggers will be the ones dancing around in front of the TV cameras shouting 'Me! Me! Me!', by the way...

GEEKTALKS

Held in The Shelter’s ‘cosy’ private screening room, GeekTalks are perennially popular and this time around there are three really cool talks to look forward to – and one guaranteed duffer. Starting at 8.00pm sharp, we’re covering charity, animation, blogging and the future – you could hardly want for more than that!

Steve Sosebee
Palestine and Social Activism
Steve Sosebee is the founder and CEO of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Steve is a highly respected man doing important work to alleviate suffering among the innocents sidelined by a conflict we all know too well. This is going to be about how social media can help work such as Steve’s, about social activism online and perhaps even a little bit about what we can all do to help. Many will recall how we cleared the GeekFest coffers last time around to help little Ola Abu Jarmous, as well as the amazing generosity of those who bid for Gerald Donovan’s stunning GigaPan poster of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi and the many others who gave online. Her appeal closed in record time and she was treated successfully by surgeons in Florence.

Mohammad Fikree 
Animation - The Girl & It
Steve will be followed by Emirati animator and composer Mohammad Fikree, who’s going to be giving an exclusive preview of his new (and literally, just finished) animated short ‘The Girl & It’. Mohammad’s animation work is as delightful as the soundtracks he creates are innovative – what’s more, the tunes are catchy as hell! The Girl & It is a painstakingly created work, a demonstration of the love of imagery and sound combined to create emotional reactions.

Maha Mahdy
The Rise and Rise of the Fashion Blogger
Prominent UAE-based fashion blogger Maha Mahdy will be taking a hard look at the incredible rise of fashion blogging, possibly the bleeding edge of vertically based, professional blogging – where a multi-billion dollar global industry has reacted to blogs by embracing them and literally treating them like royalty. That trend is being mirrored in the Middle East as major brands scramble to cuddle up to bloggers who make the cut – but what does it take to make the grade and get taken seriously? Geeks note, this is the time to shuffle out of the cinema and make way for the well-dressed babes in heels who’ve turned up to this GeekFest!

Me
The Future of GeekFest
I seem to spend my life talking at things, but I've managed to stay silent at GeekFest Dubai until now. To tell you the truth, I’ll have little enough to say for myself, except to ask the audience this one question: what is the future of GeekFest? It’s been a mad little journey given that we started out to walk around the block for tea – there have been GeekFest events around the Middle East, though few have been as regular as Dubai. We look like we're going to welcome GeekFest Ramallah, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Khartoum to the fold soon – and yet what IS GeekFest? Does it deserve to be formalized and how? What do we want to make of this event that seems to have happened around the pure desire for innovators, commentators and social talkers to meet? I really don’t know, so I thought this would be a good chance to ask you!

FLEA MARKETS
GeekFest regulars will remember the GeekTalk from Mita Ray and her co-conspirator aiming to trek across Nepal for charity. They’re holding a flea market in Fujeirah to raise funds and there’ll be a collection box at GeekFest Dubai for anyone who wants to bring in any unwanted clothes, books, gadgets, toys or other stuff for the guys to sell at their fundraiser. More details here.

GAMEFEST
MEGamers.com is the fell force behind GameFest this time around and they’re going to be gathering the usual group of murderous, twisted lunatics in the specially constructed and highly secure caged-off gamers’ area at GeekFest…

VIDEO
We're going to be wandering around videoing people's messages to take to GeekFest Ramallah.

TECHNOCASES
We’re going to be welcoming Eros Group, the uber-retailers of electrical trickery and gadgetry, who will be holding a TechnoCase of superlative things that go tinkle, blip and boink. You can follow them on Twitter at @erosgroup or find them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/erosgroup. They’re going to be going big on funky Flip cameras as well as other things with LED lights on them…

And in a rush of last minute dramatic news-type stuff, Lenovo has decided to launch its U260 ultra-light notebook at GeekFest Dubai. The little 12.5" screen minx will be on show in a sneaky previewy kind of way. You can follow Lenovo on @lenovomeep for updates.


EATS
As before, back by popular demand in fact, posh nosh will be provided by The Lime Tree Café.

DEETS
GeekFest2011 takes place at The Shelter in Al Quoz from 7.30pm on Thursday the 20th January 2011. There is no registration, no formality, no requirement of you other than to turn up and even that's optional.You can follow @GeekFestDubai on Twitter or find us on Facebook. If you've never been to The Shelter before, there's a map (as well as a funky GeekFest video) on The Shelter website here.

Life is Good

Sarah Walton over at SandPitDiaries was kind enough to give me a 'Life is Good' award, whatever one of those is. It comes with some questions, which I usually avoid like the plague, but seeeing as it's Sarah, here goes:


1. If you blog anonymously, are you happy doing this? If you aren't anonymous, do you wish you started out anonymously, so that you could be anonymous now?
Nope. I think we should be accountable for our views.

2. Describe an incident that shows your inner stubborn side
 I wear my stubbornness on my shirtsleeve. I sat down to write Space, my first book, in 2003. I’m currently shopping my third book, Beirut, around. That’s 300,000 words of stubborn.

3. What do you see when you really look at yourself in the mirror?
 I’m not getting any younger, but it could be worse.

4. What is your favourite summer cold drink?
Beer

5. When you take time for yourself, what do you do?
Write and edit

6. Is there something that you still want to accomplish in your life?
Yes, get published.

7. When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person, or always ditching?
I was extremely mixed up and many things, including three of the above but never, ever overachieving. I resolutely underachieved and resolutely performed to a fraction of my potential. I loathed school and didn’t mind letting them know it. Given that I was handed a very expensive government-funded scholarship to attend a very expensive public school, I should feel more guilty about that than I do.

8. If you close your eyes and want to visualize a very poignant moment in your life, what would you see?
My wife looking across a green and white tablecloth at the President hotel in Dubai asking me “What have we done?” on our first night in the UAE as residents.

9. Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog, or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people and events?
 It’s not about me so much as things that amuse or engage me.

10. If you had the choice to sit down and read a book or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?
The book. I’m scared of my new phone, it’s smarter than I am. Yeah, I know that’s not hard.


And now, as is the way with these things, I have to pass it on to three bloggers:


Sara Refai, whose Ussa Nabulsiyeh blog is a brilliantly well written delight and has arguably saved a life.

Roba Al-Assi, whose And Far Away always fun to read and furnished me with the soundtrack to the casino scene in Beirut.

Seabee, whose Life In Dubai is almost an institution.

The Medium and the Word

Cover via AmazonI decided to follow up re-reading John Le Carré's Little Drummer Girl (I wonder if he regrets it in hindsight) with a re-read of John Fowles' stunning The Magus, which I started yesterday. Fowles has updated the book, tidying up some of what he perceives to be its biggest flaws; the book was actually his first, although it was The Collector that brought him into print.

No bookshop in the UAE sells The Little Drummer Girl, which details a complex Mossad operation against a Palestinian bomber - and I looked for it in bookshops in the UK without success. I read it, of course, on the Kindle. My decision to re-read The Magus was taken ten minutes before I bought the book, which was delivered to me in seconds flat over Amazon's Whispernet.

Amazon has done a couple of things to help the Kindle seem a tad more analogue - the optional leather case is a tactile experience, although it packs a very handy LED reading light. And when the Kindle's switched off, the screen displays sketches of famous authors or woodcuts from frontispieces. It's incredibly readable, the text display is very stable indeed - although everyone, myself included, picks it up and initially tries to swipe the screen to turn a page. No touch screen on offer, though.

Many people I have spoken to have said how they couldn't stand reading on a tablet, how nothing beats the experience of curling up with a good book. I had some mild misgivings along these lines myself. But the argument actually misses the most fundamental point of all - reading fiction is all about the words, not the medium. It's not paper that transports you to other worlds or into other people's lives, it's the words that the author has written. Those words still have the same power to astonish, amaze, inspire, shock, delight and disgust they ever had on paper. Once you've started a book, the Kindle is secondary - it's just the medium.

The Kindle is good enough not to get in the way of the experience - its battery life is incredible and it has options for archiving your books and so on. Those little 'analogue' touches actually make a difference. I may never buy another 'book'... I'd certainly think twice before buying one rather than downloading it. I honestly had my doubts about the whole thing before I took the plunge - and now I'd recommend it to anyone.

GeekFest Ramallah

The incomparable Naeema Zarif, whose designs have lent so much to GeekFest's quirky identity, has done it again. This is the poster art for GeekFest Ramallah, neatly juxtaposing traditional Palestinian dress and an antiqued background with the nerdy glasses we all know and love...

GeekFest Ramallah is being UNorganised by blogger and volunteer worker Sara Refai, Bazinga!'s Mohammad Khatib and the man behind TEDx Ramallah, Ramzi Jaber.

You can connect with GeekFest Ramallah on Facebook here .

GeekFest 2011 - The Geek Rides Out

The first GeekFest Dubai of the new year will tantalise your tastebuds and satisfy your senses on the 20th January 2011 – as usual, taking place at The Shelter in Al Quoz.

We’ve got some pretty special GeekTalks lined up as well as some other bits and bobs. One thing we’ll be getting up to is the source of considerable excitement and was born out of our efforts last time around to help little Ola Abu Jarmous.

I’m delighted to be able to tell you that the first GeekFest Ramallah is to take place at startup nurturing space place Bazinga! on the 16th February. I’m hoping (passport renewal notwithstanding) to be there, which is another adventure entirely. One thing we’ll be doing on the 20th is recording your messages from GeekFest Dubai to Ramallah.

Following on from the Palestine theme, the first GeekFest Dubai Geektalk on the 20th will be given by Steve Sosebee, the founder and CEO of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and we’re hoping to have a really useful debate about social activism and social media, especially following the success of Ola’s life-saving appeal.

He’ll be followed by Emirati animator and composer Mohammad Fikree, who’s going to be giving a sneak preview of his new (and literally, just finished) animated short ‘The Girl & It’. Mohammad’s animation work is as delightful as the soundtracks he creates are innovative – what’s more, they’re catchy as hell!

We’re going to be welcoming Eros Group, the uber-retailers of electrical trickery and gadgetry, who will be holding a TechnoCase of superlative things that go tinkle, blip and boink. You can follow them on Twitter at @erosgroup or find them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/erosgroup.

As before, back by popular demand in fact, nosh will be provided by The Lime Tree Café.

GeekFest2011 takes place at The Shelter in Al Quoz from 7.30pm on Thursday the 20th January 2011. There is no registration, no formality, no requirement of you other than to turn up and even that's optional. Other GeekFests have taken place in Cairo, Alexandria, Amman, Beirut and Damascus and there's talk of GeekFests to come in Doha and Abu Dhabi.

More details will undoubtedly emerge next week!

Dropping the WWW

Image by Max Braun via FlickrI heard a radio ad this morning that rather stopped me in my tracks, for no particularly good reason other than the fact it was promoting a website and went to the trouble of saying it out loud including the dubbleyewdubbleyewdubbleyew.

I found myself wondering whether we don't all just take that for granted these days? I'd just say 'go to alexandermcnabb dot com' rather than give the WWW. I mean, why not go the whole hog and say 'Aitch tee tee pee colon  forwardslash forwardslash dubbleyewdubbleyewdubbleyew'?

Perhaps interestingly, Tim Berners-Lee (the man that put the hole in the toilet seat that was the Internet by inventing the world wide web) recently apologised for the forwardslash forwardslash, which was a programming convention at the time but by no means necessary - if you can only imagine the tonnes of paper, the zillions of wasted electrons, the megagallons of printer ink that this little quirk has caused...

In fact, the reason it gave me pause was that it sounded somehow charmingly naive. Here they are struggling to breathlessley get all of their 'dare to dream' and 'an apostolic momentum of carborundum epistles for you!' in, and they're wasting a precious slice of their 30 seconds giving me a redundant dubbleyewdubbleyewdubbleyew.

(Another ad I heard the other day gave the name of the thing they were promoting and exhorted the listener to 'Google us!'. When you do, the website name is simple and based on the name of the thing. It would have been easier all round if they'd just said 'go to nameofthething dot com'.)

It's time to drop the WWW, methinks. We all know it's on the web, surely?

Sloganeers

Image by Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL) via FlickrI have always been fascinated by the Situationists, the revolutionary crypto-anarchic collective that sloganeered their way through the Paris student revolution of the late 1960s. My personal favourite is "Art is dead: do not consume its corpse." Now that's a slogan!

The Situationists were to have a seminal influence on the punk movement around which a deal of my adolescence was constructed. They were, as eny fule no, just dead cool.

There's a tremendous power to slogans, a way of condensing and simplifying thoughts that can become catchy, even thought-provoking. The wonderful world of advertising obviously became a very early adopter, two that I'll probably never shake (because they've been drummed into me through massive repetition), 'A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play' and, more recently, 'Al Futtaim Motors, we care and it shows'.

Do they? Does it? Doubt it, but the slogan's etched on what passes for my brain, for what it's worth...


BMW's advertisement on Dubai's Sheikh Zayed Road has a slogan. Oh yes. "Joy leads; others prosper" the advertisement thunders - like Situationist slogans, often deliberately provocative and wilfully obtuse, the advertisement attracts attention by its seeming simple meaning. Unlike the Situationists, it's actually not very clever.

It actually means absolutely nothing whatsoever. It's just mindless drivel constructed by mediocre intellects, an unwelcome flashback to the constant blare of 'Dare to Dream' dross that characterised the Dubai Property Boom (see yesterday's post). Does it intend to characterise Joy as the ownership of a BMW? I'd rather prosper, thanks. Or perhaps it's saying that other cars are Joy and BMW owners are prosperous. Perhaps someone called Joy has bought a BMW? But then who's prospering? The guy that sold it to her made commission, I suppose...

Yeah, I know I should drive past and ignore it. But it's like a grocer's apostrophe. It niggles...

Shiny Maintenance

Image via Wikipedia
"I've met some other people with Shinies and they're not happy either."
"Take no notice. They're just trouble makers and whingers. Stand for your individuality, that's what we say. In fact, it was one of our advertising slogans."
"You mean along with 'Dare to Dream', 'Live Life Lavishly' and 'Sequestrate Your Passions'?"
"Yeah, all that too."
"Well, fact of the matter is we want to form an association. What's so funny?"
"Ohh, wow, forgive me. Sorry, hang on a second. Just. Need. To. Regain. Control."
"I'm not joking, you know, so you can stop that laughing right now."
"Sorry, sorry. Just something caught in my throat. An association? You've got no right."
"Yes we do, under the Strata Law."
"Oh, that old hokum. Forget it, it'll never happen. Why do you want an association anyway? Far better to deal with us direct. I could do you a special discount, you know. As long as you don't tell the others."
"Discount? You've just put up the maintenance charges by over 100%! I never even knew when I bought my Shiny that I'd have to pay you through the nose - and whatever you arbitrarily decide to charge me, at that. Now the recession's cut down on revenue from new buildings, you're just gouging us to make up for it!"
"Hold it right there, hot-shot. You bought a Shiny from us fair and square and signed a contract to boot, so don't go saying we didn't tell you this or we didn't tell you that."
"You didn't tell us that when you said freehold it really meant youarefruct."
"Usufruct."
"Whatever. You didn't tell us that you were going to set what colour we had to paint our flats, what TV channels we could watch or what phone provider we had to have. And you didn't tell us you were going to charge us so much for maintentance, either. There's plenty more you didn't tell us, too. How about-"
":Look, is this going anywhere? You're constantly complaining about your Shiny, but there it is, good as new. And Shiny, too!"
"It's not Shiny anymore. Not since you painted it that Dubai Beige colour."
"Alright, alright. You can have your association, okay? Now can you just leave my office?"
"When?"
"As soon as possible. We'll start working on the paperwork right away."
"Really?"
"Really. Trust us. We won't let you down. Just leave your passport and we'll take care of things."
"Wow! Thanks!"
"Don't mention it."

(More info on today's GN story here!)

Groundhog Day

It's like groundhog day around here. The film, not the event.

The Central Bank has extended the deadline indefinitely for the implementation of the new Image Cheque Clearing System (ICCS), following problems implementing the system on January 1st 2011.

Meanwhile in unrelated news, the collective fat-headed nincompoopery that is my bank, HSBC, has once again seen fit to dishonour my rent cheque to my landlord. Which is precisely what they did in January last year.

On January 6th last year, I posted about both of these events. It's linked here. I pointed out the many problems people would face trying to present old cheques that lacked the security features mandated by the UAE Central Bank's implementation of the new automated cheque clearing system. I also pointed out what a communications disaster the whole thing had been. Of course there was little attempt to communicate the whole thing clearly and effectively and so, precisely a year later, the system has been once again delayed, withdrawn temporarily as everyone tries to work out how to go about honouring old cheques past the deadline set for them to be honoured.

The ICCS was first started as  project in 2005. Now, five years later, it still hasn't been implemented. Last year's confusion led to more delays and a new deadline (the original 'new cheques only' deadline was 1/1/2010) which has now been extended once again purely because nobody invested in effective communications.

Meanwhile, HSBC is saying, as it did last year, that my cheque has been dishonoured because of my signature. Last year I went to see the morons and we sat together and agreed that their scanner had squashed my signature, which is naturally some 5cm high. We rescanned my signature (I had, first, to try and copy the squashed signature, my 'old' signature before they'd scan my 'new' signature. Honest.) and then their scanner squashed my signature to look like the 'old' signature. In order to do this, of course, they required my passport copy - and wouldn't accept my National ID Card as proof of ID.

My signature is,  believe me, highly distinctive. I have been paying rent to my landlord for some ten years now. I write only two cheques every year - one to him, one to the post office. You'd have thought my bank could check the history or even telephone me before deciding to dishonour my cheque for tens of thousands of dirhams (obviously it would be an important transaction to me), but you'd think wrong. You'd assume some level of applied intelligence, care or (gasp!) initiative. And they are all sorely lacking. My bank has managed to make a mess of absolutely every aspect of banking, from issuing cards to making transfers, from providing a reliable, sensible and usable telephone and Internet banking service to honouring cheques. I am left dumbfounded as to how the hell they make money, but can only assume that totally ignoring the needs of your customers is the key to success.

You may want to suggest I find another bank. I am open to suggestions.

Karama Karma

Image via WikipediaHaving visitors over for the festive season meant an inevitable trip to Dubai's Karama district which, together with Satwa, remains one of the few wholly 'organic' communities in this city of zones and gated developments. It's a fantastic place to wander around, two long buildings either side of the road packed with shops selling, in the main, clothes, bags and watches. You'll never see so many shifty looking geezers in your life, a constant wash of voices jabbering:

"Here! Here! Genuine fakes!"

"Come and see! We have a secret room!"

"Gucci bags! Gucci bags!"

"Watches? You want watches? Rolex?"

"This way, please, this way. We have Dolce and Gabbana, Versace, all good price."

Karama has long been the home of the fake trade, the place to go if you want to wear big name brands for knock-down prices. I was amazed that, clampdown after crackdown, it's still not only there, but thriving in the open. There are phases to IP protection campaigns that recognise the trade starts in the open, reverts to being 'under the counter' and then, as the crackdowns really bite, in a third place. Karama's out there in the open, under the counter AND in a third place, which is pretty comprehensive!

My other surprise was that the goods on sale represented knockoffs of brands that are very much available in the malls - big players in Karama right now include Ed Hardy, Mulberry, Louboutin and Bulgari. I had always thought that Karama post-crackdown only dealt in brands that had no recourse to local authority because they're not represented in the region. Think again, then...

My third surprise was the quality of the fakes. I 'm not even sure they are 'fakes' in the true sense of the word, because the factories making these things across China are, these days, likely the self-same factories making the real thing.

Cloudbusting

Image by ♥Melu♥Rogi♥ via FlickrFor some reason this reminded me of this!

Etisalat Plans - Mickey Mouse?

Image via WikipediaThe HTC Desire is a cool device, I have to tell you. It does many things brilliantly, some very well and even manages to be a mildly functional telephone. Based on Google's Android operating system, it's almost scarily integrated into Google services, but it does a lot of cool stuff and is pretty intuitive.

I've spent a week or so now getting used to it - after over 20 years of loyalty to Nokia, I finally snapped and followed Symbian Guru by throwing my N86 against the wall. There have been inevitable frustrations in the transition process, but they're mostly harmless. Google's habit of defaulting everything to Arabic for anyone located in the Arab World can be a bit of a shock - and I really do not need an uninstallable azan reminder. But all in all, I'm glad I made the change. Well, I was until Etisalat sent me a message telling me they have blocked my mobile Internet access as I had exceeded the upper limit on my plan.

My plan? What plan? I just have mobile Internet. It was called 'Mubashir' because nobody knew what 3G was ("I don't understand what 3G is!" "No problem, take this! It's called Mubashir!" "What is it?" "3G"). Nobody ever told me they'd introduced things called plans.

Mine apparently gives me 10 Meg of downloads for a fixed monthly fee. And then it charges me. A wicked amount. Enough for me to have racked up Dhs1,200 worth of phone bill in 2-3 days of using an Android phone. Because if you're using your wireless network to download apps and you walk out of the wireless zone, it defaults to Etisalat and their Mickey Mouse packages. And, unlike my creaky old Symbian handset,  this mobile is always online, checking, updating and RSSing like a little Googledemon.

You'd have thought Etisalat would send you a text when you got to the 10Mb mark, wouldn't you? But that would be far too sensible. They'd rather bill their unsuspecting, arguably duped, customers for the lesson.

So don't do what I did, people. When you throw that Symbian mobile against the wall and storm off to get a funky Android phone, change your mobile data plan. You can get a 1Gb package for Dhs145 per month or 5GB for 295 per month. They also offer "unlimited" data for a whopping Dhs395 per month. Unlimited is sort of like freehold, by the way: by unlimited, Etisalat actually means a 'fair usage' 10Gb maximum. Out of plan extras cost 50 fils per meg, which is a bit less than the Dhs15 per meg they charge on the default 10Mb package. Yes, you heard right. Dhs15 (a tad over $4) per megabit.

Plans from 10Mb - 1Gb are categorised as 'mobile Internet' by Etisalat, while 1GB-10GB are 'mobile broadband' and come with a USB modem. Because nobody would want to use a mobile for downloading lots of data, would they? Positively archaic thinking from the telco that likes to say 'ugh'...

Hmm. I wonder what the view from Du is like these days?


PS: Happy New Year, folks!