School Holidays Clarified With 'Flexibility'.

passport stamps from the UAE. Entry via Dubai, exit via Abu Dhabi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As predicted in my previous post, we now have 'clarity' on the school holidays ruling, at least in Dubai.

Today's papers carry the news that Dubai's elegantly named educational regulator, the Knowledge and Human Develpment Authority or KHDA, has clarified its stance on the unified holiday previously announced by the Abu Dhabi based Ministry of Education. That announcement, the clarity of which was discussed here, meant international schools in the UAE would have been forced to follow the same holidays as the UAE's government schools. This was not particularly workable, not least because international schools have different exam dates, curricula and, in the case of Indian schools, even school years.

Of course, consulting the schools themselves before announcing draconian changes would have perhaps saved some time and effort (other Emirates still await clarity, let us not forget - the KHDA regulates Dubai alone), but would have far less entertainment value.

To sum up the KHDA's 'clarification'? "Ignore the previous announcement".

Right. Thanks for that. Moving on...

Five

Birthday Cake (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's the Arab Media Forum 2012 today. So what? I hear you mutter.

Well, this silly little blog was born five years ago during the Arab Media Forum 2007, with this post in fact, 'Lebanese Takeaway'. The eagle-eyed among you will spot the post was, in fact, dated the 24th April rather than May 8th, but that's a minor detail. It's the Arab Media Forum Calendar rather than the precise date we're following here.

For the benefit of anyone wot gives a hoot, this here post on how to speak Arabic in ten words is the most popular thing I've ever posted here and the post still gets a smattering of hits every day from people searching for "What does Akid in Arabic mean?" and similar queries. It means you're never going to see that shipment, mate. That's what it means.

I'm mildly amazed I've kept it going this long, to tell you the truth. I started out originally because I missed writing and was in an 'in-between' phase with the nasty book writing habit. That and I was getting increasingly interested in digital media at work and had been experimenting with Wikis and other online things. I had a mild dislike for the 'anonybloggers' of the time and felt quite strongly that if you had an opinion, then you should have the guts to express it openly.

In all this time I have never been cautioned, 'yanked' or otherwise approached or pressured by any entity, government or commercial. This has also been a source of mild, if pleasant, surprise - and a glance back at the archives tells me that I have on occasion been more intemperate on occasion than I recall today!

Anyway, there it is. Thanks for dropping by and for wiping the handbasin when you've finished for the convenience of other passengers.

Blocked

road_block.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(This here piece is wot started me off)

"I'm trying to park my car, but the parking bay's been blocked."
"Yes, that's right."
"What on earth do you mean? The parking bay came with my Shoreline Shiny!"
"Control and regulation of the Shoreline car parks is essential for the protection, security, safety and wellbeing of residents."
"What in heaven's name are you babbling about? I've got a car full of shopping and I want to get to my Shiny!"
"You can't. It's been blocked."
"Look, I know that, it's why I'm in your office talking to you! Unblock it!"
"Careful with that temper now, sir - remember last time I had to mace you."
"Unblock my parking space, for pity's sake! Whatever happened to a distinguished life of leisure and relaxation by the blue waters of the Arabian Gulf?"
"We can't. It's the regulations. We have the right to regulate car park access and will take all legal steps to do so. Owners who have paid their service charges and collected their cards have nothing to worry about. However, as we have said many times before, people who have paid their service fees cannot be expected to continue to subsidise those who have not."
"Why are you reading from that piece of paper?"
"I'm not. Look, I sympathise, really I do, but your landlord has clearly not paid his maintenance obligations, so we've had to block your space to make him pay."
"I don't get this. How does hurting me get him to pay?"
"We're obviously depending on you hurting him in turn."
"I can't, can I? He doesn't even live in Dubai. What can I do? Refuse to pay the rent? Then he'll evict me."
"Not our problem, really, is it? Anyway, car parks are not part of the sales agreement."
"You mean like the beaches? What about the roads, do I have the right to use those or are you going to withdraw them as well?"
"There's no call for sarcasm, sir. You'll have to lobby your landlord."
"What if I lobby you? Because you're here and he's not and I really don't see why your dispute with him should involve me!"
"We're only the master developer. You'll have to talk to your landlord. Now move along, sir, there's a queue of people behind you who want to complain as well - as we have said many times before, we don't see why one tenant complaining should expect to stop other tenants complaining who have not."
"Unblock my parking space!"
"Lalalalalalala."

(Shiny posts passim)

Poppadom Man

We're very fond of the Kerala poppadoms, the little four-inch diameter numbers made from garam flour and coconut oil. They're probably the one thing with coconut oil in that I'd eat.

The little cold store around the corner from us has been christened Poppadom Man because of the fuss he and his massive extended family of helpers like to make when I buy them.

"Pappadum? You want eat pappadum? This Indian food!"

Yes, yes, I know. Just hand out the poppadoms before I kill you.

They're kept in the little fridge behind the Kit-Kats, little plastic packs with a paper insert proudly proclaiming them as Kerala Poppadum. Toss 'em in a small, hot pan and dry fry 'em and they puff up and crisp - ideal for a crispy side on a curry night, just right for a slather of hot chutney - as evidenced by my ancient post over on The Fat Expat.

Of course, we quickly reached the point where my entry into the shop was greeted with much grinning and  "Wanting pappadum?" But that hasn't detracted by any means from the fun game of feigning surprise at the feringhi who eats pappad.

I have my revenge occasionally, usually when I drop in for something else (their herbs are good, certainly better than the droopy specimens so often found decorating Spinneys' Ajman branch) and the usual question isn't forthcoming, signifying they don't have any poppadums in.

This is when I ask for them on purpose, only to be told 'Poppadum not having, sir' therefore providing my queue to cause an almighty fuss about how any self-respecting Keralite cold store would never run out of poppadum. I mean, what kind of supply chain management do they have around here?

We all must take our amusement as we find it...

New Yea Cee Having

Air conditioning (Photo credit: niallkennedy)

We are fortunate in having a very good landlord. So good, in fact, when I suggested our AC units were - at some 20 years old - a maintenance (and environmental) nightmare for all concerned and could well bear replacing his response was to have them replaced.

This is a good thing, I would submit.

However, replacing ACs has, as so many things in life, consequences. The first of these is the necessity for a crane to visit and heft all the new compressor units up onto the roof and bring the old units down. They're quite big, one of the units is a 6-tonne, two more are 4-tonnes. And then we have a namby pamby 2-tonne as well. But the roof thing has meant no AC in the house until the new units are installed. The first of these came online yesterday.

The second consequence is every false ceiling behind which a fan unit lurks has had to be taken down - as have the old (and quite large) fan units. New holes have to be drilled in the concrete to take the threaded bars from which to hang the new units. This whole process is dirty (20 year-old watery residues abound), dusty and noisy and involves several workmen. The contractors have been scrupulously polite, as clean as humanly possible and generally the antithesis of the usual bunch of venial bashi-bozouks. But the week has still dragged with constant disruption, noise and mess all over the place.

But tomorrow will bring a new era - new yea cees!

Narratives in Action

United Arab Emirates University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As one or two of you might have found out, I have a nasty book writing habit and it's a combination of that and my day job as a crafter of Well Enunciated Great Truths for my clients that are responsible for me giving a talk tomorrow at Al Ain University's 'Narratives in Action - How Stories Shape Our Minds'.

The two day 'interdiscipinary workshop' is the brainchild of Massimiliano Cappucio and comes through the offices of The Department of Philosophy, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Deanship of Libraries of the United Arab Emirates University, in collaboration with Université Paris Sorbonne Abou Dhabi. How'd yer like them apples, Pip?

The workshop aims to explore how stories affect our cognitive functions, cultural heritage and social development and will explore narrative in its various forms and their role in our lives. It features a gathering of rare intelligences from academia and the wider world beyond - and, of course, sitting in a corner keening and eating razor blades will be none other than yours truly.

I'll be telling the usual room of stunned, wide-eyed people how to write a book. I'll let you know how it goes...

Make Business Hub Dubai

The brainchild of one Leith Matthews, Make is a painfully funky space located in the Al Fattan building, itself an incongruity nestled in the tottering beige multi-towered awfulness of Jumeirah Beach Residence. It's a 'business hub', providing workspaces with meeting areas, workstations, 8am-10pm hot and cold food and drink. And free wi-fi.

It's really too good to be true. The space is incredibly well thought out and 'works', artfully designed and flawlessly executed, soundtracked and freewheeling. The food and drink are, to judge from my breakfast today, simply stunning (avocado toast with a spicy organic virgin Mary and excellent coffee, my colleague had lemon souffle hotcakes with strawberry and loved that, too) and the staff are beyond friendly and incredibly helpful. On my last visit I pitched carrying my habitual perma-bottle of Masafi and an unprompted barman wandered over with a glass containing ice and lemon for me.

It's free, at least for now. I'm told on good authority that Make make their money from the F&B and renting the space for events, so there are no fees or other encumbrances such as membership. If you're into hot desking, have a day away from the office with meetings in DIC/DMC or simply want to do meets, eats and drinks offsite, Make is the perfect place for it.

Long Live The E-Gate Card! Oh...

passport. (Photo credit: kappuru)

The E-Gate card is dead. Honest, it's in Gulf News and everything so it must be true! Immigration has installed a nifty new scanner at Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport that'll scan data from machine-readable passports and combine this with biometrics to give an instant 'no touch' entry system.

Up until now, if you didn't want to join the long, shuffling queues at immigration and have your passport filled with inky stampy things, the E-Card was the way to go. Although not for me, sadly, as the system decided to start refusing to read my thumbs a couple of years back, even after I'd gone up to the E-Gate centre and had 'em rescanned.

It's actually been ten years since the introduction of the 'old' E-Gate card system.

I've used these new scanners at Heathrow and they're fast - certainly within the 15 seconds GN mentions. The scheme is to roll them out to all of Dubai's entry points after a two month trial at Terminal 3. They use facial recognition technology to compare a snapshot of your mug with the one stored in the chip in your machine readable passport.

It's a pretty advanced move for the UAE - while over 170 countries now issue machine readable passports, fewer issue chip-enabled 'e-passports' and only six countries are using 'heightened biometrics' such as facial scans, fingerprints or retinal scans in their border scanners. It's soon to be seven!

Where Did Nokia Go Wrong?

Steve Jobs shows off the white iPhone 4 at the 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ratings agency Fitch has just this minute cut Nokia's stock to junk bond status, reports Reuters. Five years ago Nokia was the undisputed world market leader in mobile handsets. Today it's routinely referred to as a 'struggling Finnish handset maker'.

Where did it all go wrong? How on earth can you take global market dominance, a near-faultless track record of innovation and product excellence and a loyal base of customers around the world and simply blow it?

The answer is Steve Jobs and a small issue of perspective.

Jobs saw the mobile as a computer. Nokia saw it as a telephone. Nokia was working on making your phone smarter, Jobs was putting a content access device in your hands. Even Nokia's early N series phones tacked a keyboard onto a phone, a bit like a mobile One Per Desk rather than using the powerful combination of smart access device, applications and content wrapped up into a flawless user experience.

For me, the rot truly set in when Nokia first started shipping 'smart phones' that could link to its Ovi store and download apps and stuff. The store was pretty much empty for a very long time indeed. Nokia seemed to miss the whole idea that the mobile was to a handset manufacturer what a SIM is to a mobile operator - a cash cow. Ovi could have been an open platform for application developers and content owners. It should have been.

On June 29th 2007, Jobs took to the stage in his turtleneck sweater and launched the iPhone. Nokia's executives must still have been laughing when, in September, Apple sold its millionth iPhone. They must still have been laughing when Time named it Invention of the Year in 2007.

Apple's iTunes and Jobs' app-centric approach created a revolution. Nokia, in common with mobile operators around the world, persisted in a circuit-switched mentality. When Google joined in with Android, the writing was on the wall. They started fitting the brass handles when Elop announced Nokia was ditching Symbian a year before it was ready to replace the operating system with the Great White Hope - Microsoft's Windows, the operating system that never 'got' mobile. Remember Windows CE anyone?

Today, Apple and Samsung between them account for something like 50% of the global smartphone market. And Nokia is a junk bond. Its first Windows based 'phone, the Lumia, has a name that means prostitute in Spanish.

Am I writing Nokia's obituary too early?

What's In Coffee Mate?

There’s a series of ads running on Dubai Eye at the moment in which chemical company BASF extols the wonders of chemistry. And what better way to celebrate the achievements of chemistry than to look at how the marvel of modern food chemistry can be used to create a non-dairy creamer. A conversation with Jordanian blogger and coffee mate fan Roba Al Assi yesterday prompted me to pop the lid on that yummy tasting powder and see just what it is you’re putting in your mouth with your morning coffee. What I found was similar in many ways to Tim Horton’s recipe for happiness, a recipe many people found fascinating.

The first thing we should note about Coffee Mate is that each 3mg serving contains 1 mg of saturated fat and 2mg of carbohydrate as sugar. In other words you’d be as well off dipping a sugar lump in some ghee. The second noteworthy thing is that nobody ever uses a 3mg serving.

A Spoonfull of Coffee Mate Contains:
 
Glucose syrup
Arguably the precursor to controversial cheap sweetener high fructose corn syryup, glucose syrup is a concentrated commercial sweetener made by treating the starch in vegetable crops such as corn and maize (Sourced from the US, read this as genetically modified corn). Corn syrup is sweeter and cheaper than cane sugar.

Hydrogenated vegetable oil (may contain coconut, palm kernel and/or soybean oil)
This is where that saturated fat comes in – and don’t forget that 3mg (or a level teaspoon) of coffee mate contains 5% of your recommended daily intake of saturated fat. As a guideline, you could drink half a cup of whole milk to get the same saturated fat hit as three milligrammes of coffee mate. I do love the ‘may contain’, too. Oh, and the soybean oil is probably from genetically modified beans.

Palm oil is a nasty little ingredient I have written about extensively before. It’s a crop responsible for major deforestation of the Indonsian rain forests because it provides a cheap, stable at room temperature, fat much beloved of food processors. Expect to find it lurking in biscuits, ice creams and all sorts of processed packet sauces, mixes and other foods.

Added to that, this (already very high in saturates) oil is ‘hydrogenated’, which means it’s been heat-treated with hydrogen to change its composition – basically turning the unsaturated fats in the palm oil into saturated fats, known as trans-fats. Trans-fats are controversial and many manufacturers and retailers (including the UK’s Marks and Spencer) are acting to remove trans-fat content from the foods they sell after a number of studies linked trans-fat consumption to significant increases in the risk of heart disease.

Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative)
This is an odd ingredient, as it is permitted by the US FDA to be an ingredient in 'non dairy' creamers, and yet is, as it says on the tin, a 'milk derivative'. Casein is a protein found in milk and this ingredient, which is a thickener and adds a 'dairy taste' to products, is obtained from fresh and/or pasteurized skimmed milk by acid coagulation of the casein. The mix is then neutralised using sodium hydroxide and powdered. Yummee!

Dipotassium Phosphate
A stabiliser, tagged by the US FDA as ‘generally regarded as safe’ which never quite sounds as good as ‘safe as houses’, does it? It’s used to keep the powder powdery. Other uses of dipotassium phosphate include as a fungicide and pesticide. Interestingly, its use as a pesticide on food crops in the US has not been approved. But it’s safe, right?

Sodium Aluminium Silicate
Apart from finding its way into your daily cuppa as an anti-caking agent, this ingredient has been approved by the EU as a game repellent. Which is nice, no? A lovely cup of deer repellent to start the day!

Monoglycerides, Acetylated tartaric acid esters of mono- and dyglycerides
Also known as E472e. Mono and diglycerides are fats, used to extend shelf life, add a creamy flavour and help to bind other ingredients together. There's a lot of debate about them as they have appeared on food labels in place of hydrogenated oils, although they're a sort of new name for an old friend as they are, themselves, hydrogenated in the production process. The latter ingredient is sometimes referred to by the more friendly acronym DATEM.

Artificial Flavour, Colour
Nothing natural here, then...

So there we have it, the full skinny. Now you can nip off and slide a spoon of processed sugars, saturated fat, pesticide and deer scarer into your cup of instant coffee and know it's doing you good!