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.