I'm a Gonu, How Do You Do?

So I broke two promises. Sue me. A really quick note just to say that there wasn't a drop of rain overnight or today so far, no black clouds and certainly no thunderstorms.

Which means that all weathermen are complete fools and should be incarcerated before they do damage to someone. But then I think we all knew that anyway...

Putin 1 Bush 0

(Picture: Reuters)

It's incredible to see how much of a statesman Vladimir Putin looks like when he's standing next to that terrible, simian little man. Even the body language, Putin's hand over Georgie's, dominating him, leaning into him as Bush's wooden elbow and slight backwards tilt tell that while he's concentrating on leering at the camera to show how much he's enjoying shaking hands with his great friend Pooty-Poot, he's actually desperately uncomfortable.

He manages to come across as fake, dumb and insincere - a communications management nightmare, all braggadocio and simplistic 'Hollywood President' swaggering tough talk. And yet you get the distinct impression that the alcoholic under-achiever is never far from the surface - the driving, nagging insistence of his self-doubt and insecurity making him grab at the wrong gesture, the wrong thing to say. It's the danger of the man.

Putin is dangerous himself, but it's a different dangerous. He's self-assured, relaxed, experienced and in control of himself. The worry is that one of these men leads the world's most powerful nation - and it's not the one that any decent alien would want to be taken to if it saw this picture. Putin's gambit of offering Azerbaijan as an alternative to Eastern Europe as a place to put a missile shield against Iran was, of course, brilliance. Azerbaijan makes sense. The question is whether George ever really intended to put up a shield against Iran.

He's known as 'Boosh' in the Arab World, like his father was before him. Except people didn't laugh at mention of his father's name.

Gonu With The Wind

OK. Last crap joke, last weather post.

The bad weather is starting to creep along the West Coast of the Emirates now, with high winds starting to get up in Sharjah. We're expecting thunderstorms on the back of Cyclone Gonu: although they won't be a patch on what hit Oman and the East Coast, they'll be a welcome change of weather after a couple of unusually hot, dusty months.


Meanwhile, another storm is brewing in the UK where the new Olympic logo (above) has caused something of a stir. Having joined the Facebook group for people who don't think very much of the logo, I've been amused to note that the petition protesting it has closed with no less than 48,000 petitioners and a new petition has just opened and is already gaining major traction.

The Thrill is Gonu

By the way, in case you were interested in finding out more about Cyclone Gonu (which is named after the Maldivian word for a small palm-frond bag, for instance) then, as usual, the place to go is of course Wikipedia.

I sometimes worry about the Wikipeople. Nobody in their right minds would file that much detail about a storm.

Would they?

Here Today, Gonu Tomorrow

I suppose blogging about the weather is the lowest you can go, but Cyclone Gonu has certainly been a change from the usual round of blue sky, sun sea and sand: most of the sand right now is up in the air, suspended in a fine soupy suspension. Neat alliteration, I know.

The easiest job in Dubai must be weatherman. 363 days of the year it's a case of waking up and just hitting the 'sunny tomorrow' button. The other two days it's the 'light showers possible' button. Doddle. Given that the last major tropical cyclone to hit the peninsula was in 1890 (killing 700 in Oman, apparently), they don't get to play with weather like this very often.

But try and predict what's going to happen over the weekend and you can see just how random weathermen can be. A quick skip around the world's weather sites has weather.com predicting storms Thursday and big black nastiness Friday. Meanwhile the BBC thinks that Thursday in Dubai will be sunny and visibility will be good (not from where I'm sitting, pal: it's grey, murky and disgusting) and pressure will be 1000mb (my car says 992 and my car's smarter than you).

Typical of a Brit weatherman to get it quite so wrong.

CNN is hard to read: there are so many dolt-friendly icons and so much big friendly text around that you don't actually get any useful information, but it would appear that we can expect a sort of spiky egg yolk with some cotton wool, with more cotton wool tomorrow than today. At least you can get CNN Weather online without having to put up with that mad dwarf that keeps leaping in front of the map, gibbering and barking like a peyote-crazed shaman and then disappearing as suddenly as she materialised.

So it's back to Dubai, then, and an apology for those masters of the millibar, the Dubai Met Office. I take it back. They're the best of the whole bad lot. Here is how our weekend's going to look according to the home team:

RATHER HOT IN GENERAL & HAZY/DUSTY WITH FRESH WINDS MAY REACH GALE AT TIMES, & LOW/ TOWERING CLOUDS OVER EASTERN & NORTHERN AREAS MAY BE THUNDERY/RAINY. MODERATE - FRESH NE - SE_LY WIND WITH MODERATE - ROUGH SEA IN ARABIAN GULF 3 - 5/6 FT OFFSHORE, AND ROUGH - VERY ROUGH IN OMAN GULF 8 - 10 FT OFFSHORE.

Lovely!

Emirates Issues Press Release

OK. In my humble view, this is a little slice of Press Release Brilliance. Emirates is now flying daily to Venice. So they've put out a press release announcing that the business and first class limo service they provide will now extend, in Venice, to the world's first airline water limo service. And you get this nice piccie of a smarmy suit, an Emirates Girl and... a water taxi in Venice!


I love it - good old fashioned PR stuff. You saw it here first!

Bye bye to the Gitmo boys

There is a new air of tranquillity and calm in the area around McNabb Mansions this week: the massive hole in the sand road has disappeared and the pumps are no longer beating their low, heady, thumping jungle rhythm day and night. The municipality workers have moved on, their distinctive orange boiler-suited figures no longer decorate the street; lounging around, leaning on their straight-handled shovels or fishing in the bins for useful rubbish.

The road doesn’t look like a scene from Guantanamo any more, but you do wonder sometimes if these guys, Pathans and Pashtuns all, wouldn’t be happy to claim they were Taliban in order to get the better treatment they undoubtedly hand out at Gitmo. Sure, there’s probably the odd spell of sensory deprivation or the occasional beasting meted out over at the Bush Hotel, but I’m sure that’s preferable to concurrent three year stretches hefting shovel-loads of gravel in the bottom of unshored 20-foot holes in ambient temperatures of 45C and more for nine hours a day.

Don’t for a second think I’m being sympathetic. Two weeks of those migraine-inducing thumping pumps, running the gamut of their silent, leering faces every morning and finding rubbish strewn all around your house every night (let alone holes and piles of sand everywhere the eye can see) and you’d sling ‘em back to Spin Boldak yourself.

At least they didn’t cut through our telephone cables, unlike the bunch that descended on our Molouk – who got cut off in her prime this week!

White Paper Wiki

By the way, we put quite a lot of research work into into preparation for the session at the Arab Advisors Media and Convergence Conference, which resulted in us producing a White Paper document on what we found. It should make reasonably interesting reading for anyone involved in the Middle East regional ICT industry: please do feel free to download/distribute/extract from and/or link to it.

It’s posted here on a Wiki which should, if anybody gives a damn about increasing broadband penetration in the Middle East, attract more contributions, documentation, research and other useful stuff – anyone’s welcome to a password. I somehow suspect this won’t happen, but then perhaps I’m just far too cynical. Perhaps.

King Calls for ICT Growth

In a meeting that pulled several speakers (including the next session's speaker, Marwan Juma) out of the Arab Advisors' Media and Convergence conference, King Abdullah brought together a number of ICT big chiefs and gave 'em two weeks to put together a master plan for putting the Kingdom's ICT strategy back on track and 'revitalising' the ICT sector.

It's going to be an interesting two weeks if the session I moderated at the Forum yesterday was anything to go by. Golly, but when I set out to (as usual) 'cause trouble' I didn't realise quite how much trouble it was possible to cause by not doing anything at all. The heady combination of ISP, incumbent telco and regulator, along with a couple of other industry players from elsewhere in the region was quite something and we overran, with the consensus of the audience, by a good 30 minutes. Fur, almost literally, flew.

The conference has been great and shows that, finally, there are green shoots in the Kingdom's ICT market. Last year's ICT Forum was a huge disappointment, not for the quality of organisation but for the quality of innovation. Now we're starting to see a sense of purpose in the sector again and it's a blessed relief, to be honest.

HM's timing is, once again, impeccable. I'll be fascinated to see what's in that plan. Two weeks is a bit mean of him, but there's so much experience and dialogue garnered over the past seven years they should be able to get their heads together and come up with something sensible. The kick will be whether, this time around, the plans can be turned into action...

Amman

I'd just like to say how very lovely it is in Amman this time of the year.