Windows 7 Barf

Image by Esparta via Flickr

I almost managed a week without posting, thanks to Phillipa, but now I'm blowing it.

Twitter has been a-tweet with disgusted tweets linking to a very odd thing on YouTube - Microsoft's 'Host a Windows 7 Party' video.

It's linked here. Watch it before you read on, I would. Get it over with. Content warning - it's very, very, very crap - so don't say I Rickrolled you or anything.

Done? Fine, get your breath back, there's no rush.

Now it might just be that this is a really smart, post-ironic teaser that's going to lead to a really hip Madison Avenue type 'We woz just leading you on' follow-up. If it does that, Microsoft has lost my custom, because I'm really not in the mood to be messed around with by smartarses using social media to prove they're cleverer than I am. Right now, I want brands to start behaving better because I've had enough of being fed bullshit by corporations and just want honesty, integrity and straightforward communication. You jerk me around, I'll invest time punishing you. That's the new deal, guys.

Alternatively, this could just be an unbelievably turgid dollop of woeful, mind-numbingly asinine and utterly inane idiocy of appalling proportions. It could be the most ill-conceived, zeitgeist-missing 'campaign' of all time. Comments have been disabled on YouTube, which is not a good thing as Microsoft would quickly have seen that this was the daftest idea since someone decided to design a car called 'Edsel' - whether it's a 'smart' teaser or a genuine, epically misguided, attempt to get Middle America to hold spontaneous 'fun' Tupperware party style events across the nation.

Hey! Coool! Softerware! Like Tupperware! Why didn't we think of that before? Awesome! Good jooob!

End result? I truly think Microsoft has lost the plot. Marketing was the only thing it did superlatively well.

Where do you want to go today, Google? It's your world, now...

PS: I hated Vista. I wanted to believe in Win7.0...

Guest Post - Phillipa Fioretti

Today, as a treat, you can have a guest post from Australian author Phillipa Fiorretti.

My morning routine, once I have settled and have my evil espresso next to me, is to go through my overnight emails from the Northern Hemisphere and cruise around my favourite blogs reading the latest posts. I’m always pleased to see a new post from Alexander on Fake Plastic Souks, because I know that usually I’ll have a bit of a giggle.

Alexander and I are writing pals, having ‘met’ on Authonomy last year. I helped to edit the manuscript of his book, Olives, and I have to say there is nothing more soothing after a tiresome day than to pour a drink, pick up a sharp pencil and savage his work. I’m cruel, brutal even, but I’m fair. I won’t stand for any nonsense with adverbs and deal ruthlessly with any signs of lazy expression. And I don’t smile while I do it.

But when I arrive at his blog I’m off duty and care not if he uses three adjectives in a row. I read all the posts, although I tend to skim the technology ones unless there is an interesting angle – like the Etisalat patch for Blackberries, or the intricacies of using SatNav devices. The ones I really like are usually about the new train service, taxis, and commentary on daily life in Dubai.

I live in Australia and geographically the closest I’ve ever been to Dubai would be Kashmir. Most of us here, unless we know a friend or relative living in Dubai or have business connections there, think of money, expats, finance, money, sex on the beach and Emirates Airlines. As a kid, the constant references, (as in news stories), to the Middle East really bothered me. I was on the east coast of Australia and the Far East looked pretty close to where I was, so why was it Far, and what was the East in the Middle of?

Maps of the world, in Australia, show this continent in the centre of the Southern Hemisphere. Thus the Middle East is actually the North West and the Far East is the North. America is the Far East really, according to my junior map reading skills. So had someone made a mistake and the rest of the world just went a long with it? I began to ask questions and demand some answers.

But long and involved parental explanations were lost on me and it wasn’t until I started reading history books for my own pleasure, as opposed for school history teachers, did I get it. Two of my favourite writers on the region are Edward Said and Tim Mackintosh-Smith.

But while books like these humanise countries and explain the historical intricacies, they don’t give the immediate, daily minutiae that really brings it alive in one’s imagination. Posts such as Hard Times on Mr G. the taxi driver, NufNuf coping with the Abu Dhabi traffic, Sharjah’s Number 14 bus, the Etisalat saga and the strange creature called Modhesh.

I’m sure there are other blogs about Dubai written for the visitor or armchair traveller, but Fake Plastic Souks isn’t speaking to them and that’s what makes it so fascinating to me. I see the dust and the traffic and the air conditioned towers and all of the stories a travel writer would leave out.

And there is never an overload of adverbs to jolt me out of my reverie, cause me to sigh and shake my head, or make me want to slice away the excess words.

Phillipa's most excellent blog, which mixes her respective fascinations for art and writing quite neatly, can be found here. Her first novel, The Book of Love, is to be published by Hachette Australia next year.

US Public 'No Confidence' In Media Shock Horror

Image source: Pew Research Center

A poll carried out in the USA and published this week has shown that the US public have no faith in the credibility of media. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll found that some 71% of respondents did not feel that media got the facts straight in news reports, 63% felt that information from the media was ‘often off base’. Only 26% of people surveyed believed that the press took care to avoid bias.

71% of people depended on TV as their primary news source. But, this figure really fascinated me, 42% depend on the Internet (people could pick more than one medium, so you’re not going to add up to 100). And only 33% on newspapers. That Web figure compares to the 6% that relied on the Web ten years ago, incidentally.

This all takes place in a year when Google’s Q1 revenues equated to total US print advertising spending – and where newspaper ad sales dropped by some 29% in the first half of 2009. Did the Internet drop ‘em or the recession drop ‘em? It’s academic – Internet revenues went up so, whatever you slice it, print (and, incidentally, television and radio) is being eclipsed by the Internet.

It’s been a slow erosion of confidence, not an overnight one. Back in 1985, 55% of Americans believed their media generally got things right – this year, that’s down to 29%. The report shows a general consensus emerging regardless of political belief, but also highlights an average increase of 16% in people who do not believe the press is professional.

70% of those surveyed believed that news organisations ‘try to cover up their mistakes’. 74% of people believed that the press was biased in favour of big business and powerful people.

So we have a broad and growing distrust of mainstream media that you would have to consider to be close to fundamental and a clear movement to increased reliance on online media. That’s not rocket science, but these is numbers.

It’s always nice to be able to back your beliefs with numbers.

If My Car Were Windows Vista

If my car were Windows Vista, it wouldn’t unlock without asking me if I’m really sure I want to unlock it. The door would only open once I had confirmed that yes, I do want to open the door and no, I don’t want to play with the little purple dinosaur. Once I confirmed I wanted to open the door, it would then make the sound of a door opening but not actually unlock the door until I had confirmed that opening the door is what I really, really want to do.

It would take 60 seconds to actually unlock. At least.

I would then have to go through the same routine to start it. Every time I select a gear, it would ask if I’m sure that’s the gear I wanted. If I put it into automatic, it would play calming music and its windscreen would display a lovely blue/green iridescence. It would then ask me what gear I wanted. The tiptronic gears would have a delay of between one and ten seconds, while a display would flash a moving gear symbol at me along with the text, ‘Changing gear’.

For no apparent reason and without notice, my car would not move beyond second gear for long periods of time, forcing me to crawl along the hard shoulder. Then it would announce it had finished updating itself and fixing its file system and suddenly take off at great speed.

It would occasionally switch off the engine and, when I had coasted to a halt, ask me if I wanted help to fix the problem I had with the engine. I would have to answer yes, then it would restart and tell me how much it had enjoyed helping me to find a fix. Occasionally it would break down completely and parts would fall off. It would then ask if I wanted to find a solution. When I answered in the affirmative, it would tell me which parts had fallen off. When major parts fall off, it would ask me if I wanted to tell Microsoft about the problem I had caused.

If my car were Windows Vista, it wouldn’t start on cold mornings, hot mornings or mornings when I was in a rush. It would sit in my driveway flashing ‘Not Responding’ on its windscreen. If I took out the battery and reconnected it, then it would start first time every time. Occasionally, calling someone called Task Manager would help, but by no means always and it would take a huge amount of time for him to answer the phone. It would be safer just to disconnect the battery first thing.

When I tried to sound the horn, it would go online to find the right Codec for my horn and then fail to find it. Three hours later, it would go 'parp' for no apparent reason. Refilling it with petrol would be a challenge because there isn't a petrol cap release lever. I would have to sit at the petrol pump until, finally, it would ask me if I wanted to open the petrol cap. It would then play me a 30-minute video in Malay of why petrol is dangerous and only open the cap if I had clicked YES to agree that I understood the risks of using petrol. The fuel meter and reality would be completely disassociated.

Every time I took it for a service, the service manager would tut a lot and talk about critical updates, then keep it in the shop for two weeks for what he calls a ‘service pack’. When it came back, random bits would stop working. I would get messages telling me that the indicator wasn’t working, would I like to have the window opened so I could put my hand out to indicate my direction? If I said no, it would report me to the police for unsafe driving. If I said yes, it would tell me that it had fixed my Optimum Advanced Traffic Directional Warning System and ask if I would like to fix it again next time automatically? If I said yes, next time I tried to use the indicator, it would ask if I wanted to have the window opened so I could put my hand out to indicate my direction.

If my car were Windows Vista, it would have SatNav. Every time I programmed a route, the system would tell Microsoft where I was going and why. It would only work in Xhosa and a little known dialect of deepest Mongolia unless I agreed to have a Windows Live account, in which case it would work in the language of my choice for precisely fifteen minutes or four roundabouts, after which it would default to Xhosa until I accessed my Hotmail account and agreed to play with the purple dinosaur and accept MS into my life.

If my car were Windows Vista, I’d be highly likely to upgrade to Car 7.0 out of sheer desperation. But I sure as hell am thoroughly road testing the new car this time around. Because if I’d truly appreciated how bad this car was going to be, I’d have stayed with Car XP at any cost...

A glass to Keith Floyd

Image by Katiya Rhode-Singh via Flickr

I'm raising a glass (A Fat Expat Martini as you ask) as we speak, in memory of Keith Floyd. His cookery programs inspired many a would-be cook to give it a go, making light of disaster (courting it, in fact, with his ever-present glass in hand) and bringing a casual, light-hearted and generally devil-may-care approach to cookery that was in delightful counterpoint to the stuffy and rule-bound types that preceded him.

Floyd was an early influence for me as a cooker of things - and I loved him all the more for having provided space for a young Hugh Cornwell to play guitar at his restaurant, the reason why Floyd's programs intro'd to The Stranglers' music: he was a fan.

Floyd made food fun, made it an adventure and was eccentric, slapdash and earnest in equal measure. He cared about food, but in a way that made cookery fun to try, accessible and an adventure. I suppose he must be part of the reason why we have Jamie Olivers and Nigel Slaters, presenters and writers who are free to let people just have a go rather than get all Cordon Bleu about food. And I always think of him as being a little bit similar to Rick Stein, a man for whom I have enormous regard as a cookery writer and presenter.

But Floyd was there before them all, apparently making all the wrong business decisions and creating financial disaster around him. But inspiring me and tens of thousands of others to have a go at stuff, try stuff out and not be afraid to make an awful mess of it.

I'm sad he's gone, but raising a glass seemed the right way to say 'bye...

Border Rats

Image via Wikipedia

I am fascinated by the emergence of a new border crossing between Dubai and Sharjah. As you likely know, a 20Dhs surcharge has been levied between Dubai and Sharjah and vice-versa in an attempt to cut down on the problem of cabbies refusing to take inter-Emirates fares. This is mainly because of the fact they have to return empty: Sharjah cabs can’t pick up in Dubai and vice-versa. There’s a certain wisdom in that because if you didn’t have that rule in place, and enforce it with extreme severity, every single cab in Sharjah would be spending all day in Dubai, where the pickings are far richer.

Of that Dhs20, in Sharjah at least, Dhs15 goes to the company and Dhs5 to the driver to compensate him for the inconvenience. The idea goes back to the days when the traffic in Dubai was horrendous and a return to Sharjah would easily take an hour or more. Now the traffic’s flowing, it’s almost irrelevant – but it remains in place. Alongside any small carrot offered to the drives by this surcharge comes a big stick – drivers are fined by the company for refusing fares (as well as a whole rake of other misdemeanours).

Now cost-conscious passengers are taking cabs to the Sahara Centre shopping mall, which sits on the Sharjah/Dubai border and then walking across the short sandy piece of wasteland that dips down to Dubai. There, Dubai taxis are now queuing up to take ‘em to their destination. Problem solved – no Dhs20 surcharge. And, to many people in the Emirates, saving Dhs40 on a shopping or sight-seeing trip is a big deal. The taxis don’t really mind, either – they never made much, if anything, out of the damn surcharge in the first place.

It’s like a sort of dusty Checkpoint Charlie, an exchange of prisoners across the border wastelands – at the weekends and rush-hours, a shuffling horde of surcharge escapees meet waiting cabs, like sand flowing between the marbles of the system.

Now the informal border-crossing arrangement has sprung up, we can perhaps look forward to the growth of a ‘speed bump community’ – some enterprising souls will start flogging candy floss and newspaper twists of roasted peanuts, then they’ll become semi-permanent and before you know it, we’ll have the new border township of TwentyChips.

The Inevitable Metro Post

Image copyright Hit Entertainment

The Metro has so far eluded me. I don’t mean that I haven’t managed to get a ride yet - I have been staying away precisely because I don’t want to get stranded in a crowd of 2,000 shoving, jostling punters while all the inevitable teething problems are ironed out. (Isn’t it funny that teething problems are always declared ‘inevitable’ only after they have occurred?)

Mind you, I would love to know quite who was so utterly asinine as to put a big red DO NOT TOUCH THIS button within reach of any Dubai audience.

I have pointed out before, on blog and radio alike, that I am amazed that anyone could think we needed an ‘awareness raising’ advertising campaign that poured millions down the plughole in telling us that there’s a metro there. We can see the blasted thing – we’ve spent two years queuing up to drive around the holes and pilings, watching the roller-coaster swoops and loops of track being slotted together and admiring the (beautiful, incidentally) ‘armadillo’ stations.

The lack of informational campaigns on the other hand, the absence of any concerted attempt to build awareness and understanding, has arguably contributed to the many problems experienced over the first few days of operations. Quite apart from the lack of 'traditional' media such as leaflets, Z-cards and the like, there's no dedicated website and the FAQs and so on available on the 'Rail Agency' section of the RTA website site are useless - and it doesn't look as if the rail site has been updated since early August!

Perhaps explaining the seeming lack of useful information, Gulf News today (not, for instance, six months ago) tells us the RTA is to 'launch a campaign to educate the public on how to use the Metro and the culture of train travel'. Duh.

But no, the reason it's eluded me is none of the above. It's that it doesn’t appear to start from anywhere near me or end up anywhere I’d want to go. For instance, I could see myself parking up at Deira City Centre, doing a wander around the shops and then taking the Metro up to, say, Mall of the Emirates. But then I’d likely fall foul of the time-limited parking.

My office is in Satwa, a significant distance from the nearest Metro Station – as is pretty much anyone on the coastal side of Sheikh Zayed Road. I can’t realistically get a taxi to the station as Dubai has a minimum fare of Dhs10 for a cab. So If I want to go to Dubai Internet City for a meeting, I’m taking a cab to the station, taking the train and then taking a cab to my meeting. That’s Dhs24 for the one-way journey. If I want to play feeder buses, I can. But I don't know where they operate from and to. And I'm not really into waiting around for buses when I work for a business that bills my time by the hour. Even if I can get the bus in a timely fashion and connect to a waiting train, ("Hold the train for Mr McNabb"), I'm in for at least a 40 minute journey - one that otherwise would take me 20 minutes by car.

So far I’m struggling to see quite why, ahem, it’s ‘my metro’. I’m sure with time I’ll find out a way to use it. But for now it remains a complete irrelevance to me. Except for the amusing anecdotes being shared by intrepid friends who have chosen to ride early - from two-hour waits on static trains to British security guards who've never lived here before treating locals like you'd treat a queue-jumper back in Blighty (the results were apparently quite comic), through to delayed trains, massive queues and general cluelessness.

Nobody has so far used the word debacle, incidentally. I claim the first.

PS: This week's got a sort of transport theme. Unintentional, I can assure you!

PPS: If you're interested in some good consumer feedback from the horse's mouth, take a look here on the UAE Community Blog! Fascinating stuff!

Hard Times

Image by jtyerse via Flickr

Mr G., our taxi driver, was more than usually lugubrious when he took us into Dubai this weekend. Times are hard.

I call him ‘our’ because we have his mobile and can call him to a pickup – he’s reliable and we both trust him – he’s lived here since the 1970s and was a ‘proper’ taxi driver before he was forced to sign up to drive for The Man.

He’s become something of a habit for us – given that Sharjah taxis have no call center and no ‘control’, you can’t actually book one and have to take your chances on the street. That’s not a great idea if you’re decked out in your glad rags on your way to a dinner, for instance, probably the only reason we have, apart from airport trips, to take a taxi.

The downside is that he has absolutely no road sense whatsoever. How he is still alive constantly amazes me given how many miles he must cover. Easily distracted, impossibly cautious at times that call for decisive movement and hasty when caution should prevail, his performance finding, unravelling and fitting his mobile’s hands-free when the phone rings is a comedic masterpiece that he can, on a good day, extend for aching, reaper-baiting minutes. But we like Mr G.

Business is bad right now. He has to make something like Dhs270 in fares to be in the money and finding that cash is hard work – the new Sharjah bus system, chaotic though it may seem to the occidental eye, is depriving him of customers. The Express Bus from the airport to Rolla and the Fish Market costs just Dhs5 and has cut down on airport runs, while the bus from the Fish Market into Dubai is a mere Dhs10. And for Dhs25, you can get to Abu Dhabi – apparently it’s Dhs20 on the way back, because the Sharjah government takes Dhs5 and Abu Dhabi doesn’t. That’s fair enough – Abu Dhabi’s got the money for grand gestures, after all.

You can start to see how cabbies are hurting. Making it worse, waiting for a regular bus (such as the infamous no-timetable No.14) is just as good or bad as waiting for a taxi and so many casual passengers are voting with their pockets too. Without a call centre, the more expensive cabs of today’s national taxi companies are finding it hard to compete. But the company doesn’t really have an imperative to make urgent changes because the cabbies are absorbing the pain.

How long they will continue to do so quietly and compliantly remains to be seen.

A Load of Twits

On the eve of Dubai Twestival, Dubai 92 Radio DJ and top celebrity Twitterer Catboy decided to announce on air that we would compile a list of Dubai's 100 Most Compelling Tweeters, so that newbies to the world of Twitter here in the UAE can kickstart their tweeting with some new and informative friends.

Given the grief caused by our last joint venture, the infamous list of Dubai's top bloggers, I've moved to a secret location for the next few days. This list is posted on Catboy and GeordieBird's Facebook fan page, which I do commend you join up to (It's linked here), but I've reproduced it here purely because people seem to have been having problems linking through to the Facebook page that the list is on.

If you're not already on Twitter but fancy giving it a whirl, sign up today at http://twitter.com, then click on each link below, start following and get lost in the world of Twits.

First of all, here are our Twitter 'handles'...

http://www.twitter.com/catboy_dubai
http://www.twitter.com/geordiebird_dxb
http://www.twitter.com/alexandermcnabb

This list is in no particular order. Here we go...

http://www.twitter.com/Dubai92
http://www.twitter.com/danindxb
http://www.twitter.com/dxbbushell
http://www.twitter.com/timeoutdubai
http://www.twitter.com/WildPeeta
http://www.twitter.com/DubaiSunshine
http://www.twitter.com/MissGoogle
http://www.twitter.com/zooberry
http://www.twitter.com/mnystedt
http://www.twitter.com/laradunston

http://www.twitter.com/derrickpereira
http://www.twitter.com/tomgara
http://www.twitter.com/PKGulati
http://www.twitter.com/gerald_d
http://www.twitter.com/TMHDubai
http://www.twitter.com/SamanthaDancy
http://www.twitter.com/dxbluey
http://www.twitter.com/Bakerlicious
http://www.twitter.com/Shufflegazine
http://www.twitter.com/Nagham

http://www.twitter.com/Masarat
http://www.twitter.com/LaraABCNews
http://www.twitter.com/Njashanmal
http://www.twitter.com/adnationme
http://www.twitter.com/Esperanca
http://www.twitter.com/drbaher
http://www.twitter.com/Rupertbu
http://www.twitter.com/Hindmezaina
http://www.twitter.com/Ammouni
http://www.twitter.com/AkankshaGoel

http://www.twitter.com/mita56
http://www.twitter.com/dubaiweddings
http://www.twitter.com/dubaiwriter
http://www.twitter.com/binmugahid
http://www.twitter.com/automiddleast
http://www.twitter.com/jengerson
http://www.twitter.com/itsdgc
http://www.twitter.com/adamflinter
http://www.twitter.com/mmm
http://www.twitter.com/Daddybird

http://www.twitter.com/darkrangerN
http://www.twitter.com/Naseemfaqihi
http://www.twitter.com/Disruptiveplay
http://www.twitter.com/Dubailife
http://www.twitter.com/Sandman84
http://www.twitter.com/scdxb
http://www.twitter.com/Lhjunkie
http://www.twitter.com/Dobror
http://www.twitter.com/Mspwetty
http://www.twitter.com/Seodubai

http://www.twitter.com/Bahdobian
http://www.twitter.com/giorgiotedx
http://www.twitter.com/bhavishya
http://www.twitter.com/Ttoukan
http://www.twitter.com/acp_dxb
http://www.twitter.com/i_am_roo
http://www.twitter.com/nadvethosp
http://www.twitter.com//nikkington
http://www.twitter.com/cathe2ine
http://www.twitter.com/BilliBoysClub

http://www.twitter.com/Hellwafashion
http://www.twitter.com/absoluteleela/
http://www.twitter.com/nejomo/
http://www.twitter.com/zeashanashraf/
http://www.twitter.com/MariamUAE/
http://www.twitter.com/disruptiveplay/
http://www.twitter.com/T_in_DXB/
http://www.twitter.com/InterConDFC
http://www.twitter.com/mikepriest

http://www.twitter.com/Modhesh
http://www.twitter.com/SpotOnPR
http://www.twitter.com/fanofamd
http://www.twitter.com/Mich1Mich/
http://www.twitter.com/SabaFaghihi/
http://www.twitter.com/johndeykin/
http://www.twitter.com/felixsim/
http://www.twitter.com/CampaignME/
http://www.twitter.com/PeteDubai

http://www.twitter.com/maxindubai
http://www.twitter.com/fastidiousbabe
http://www.twitter.com/natapak
http://www.twitter.com/dorksterdave/
http://www.twitter.com/dubaiexplorer
http://www.twitter.com/cyberfruit/
http://www.twitter.com/samarowais
http://www.twitter.com/fouadm
http://www.twitter.com/hotelemarketer
http://www.twitter.com/CarringtonMalin

http://www.twitter.com/WooKim
http://www.twitter.com/jamesEd_me
http://www.twitter.com/nightlinedxb
http://www.twitter.com/ahlanlive
http://www.twitter.com/jane_roberts
http://www.twitter.com/meredithcarson/
http://www.twitter.com/youseftuqan/
http://www.twitter.com/PrincessKlara
http://www.twitter.com/Clive_Temple
http://www.twitter.com/Kshaheen

Numerologist

Image by 27147 via Flickr

This post is scheduled to publish at 09.09.09 09.09.09.

On the evening of the 20th, you could get away with 20.09 20.09 2009.

Next year, all the fun happens in October. After 2012, we can calm down.

Well, it beats posting about the damn Metro.