Court Reporting Fun

gavel (Photo credit: SalFalko)

Covering the UAE's law courts must be the most coveted job at all the local papers. It's not only a chance to actually see some action - rather than sit at a desk subbing reports from national news agency WAM - but it also brings a pretty constant slew of oddball cases that range from the delightful to the downright worrying.

One of the many nice things about living in the UAE is that relatively petty crime makes it to the national dailies - whereas in the UK, for instance, anything less than a particularly gruesome and bloody murder would be lucky to make it to the local rag, let alone the nationals. That's not to say crime, including rape and murder, doesn't happen here. It's just that comparatively little of it goes on.

And so in today's paper we have a man jailed for three months for biting another's finger. The act was, apparently, not consensual - the two were involved in a brawl at Dubai's fruit and vegetable market. The biter was ordered to pay Dhs 21,000 compensation and will be deported once he completes his jail sentence.

Another non-consensual act was a man accused of inserting an industrial air line into his colleague's bottom, causing his stomach and face to inflate. Reporting on the story, Gulf News quotes the judge, displaying an admirable grasp of the essentials of the case in front of him, as asking: “Didn’t you put the hosepipe in his backside when the air was puffing out from it?”

Responding, the accused claimed, “I did so but from over his clothes. I did not mean to hurt him because it was supposed to be a joke.”

I'm not sure how it would make your face inflate, but then I lack the required experience of industrial airlines and human physiognomy. The case will come to judgement on January 30th, so I'm sure we'll all find out quite what went on.

But you see my point? These stories aren't relegated to the funny bit just before the sport on the six o'clock news, they're mainstream court reporting - which sort of speaks to the very low crime rate here. It'd be nice to credit the forces of law and order for that, but it's really because we're all on the hog's back - everyone here is better off than they would be at home and so very few are willing to rock the boat. And yes, that even includes the labourers.

In related news, Gulf News managed to repeat yesterday's 'Star Gazing' astrology column in today's paper, too. You'd have thought columnist Shelley Von Strunckel would have seen that coming, wouldn't you? But then it's always been sort of hard predicting what the Gulf News subs will get up to next...

The Archive - Dubai's Best Kept Secret?

If anyone knows how to create funky art/work spaces, it's the Shabib Brothers, the brilliant eccentrics behind The Shelter, Brown Book and The Pavilion among other things. The latest Bin Shabib creation is The Archive and it's a stunner.

I met with librarian Sarah Malki last week - we're planning a series of 'How to' workshops around writing and publishing books. I really didn't know what to expect, beyond 'we're in Safa Park, just go to Gate Five and you can't miss us'. Given that 'you can't miss us' is Abu Dhabi code for 'you'll die trying to find us', I had reservations.

Sure enough, you walk in through Gate 5 (it's the one facing the Sheikh Zayed Road), paying your Dhs3 entrance fee on the way in. And The Archive is straight ahead - a short walk through the green grass and palm trees of the park, a little oasis of tranquillity, birdsong and the sound of children playing.

The Archive is a single story building, an older concrete construction that has been artfully encased in glass and then lined with bookshelves - its primary purpose as a space is to house a collection of books on architecture, art, typography and design with a focus on the Middle East. It's also a workspace and meeting place with a café serving excellent contemporary food and drinks. The tables outside could hardly be a more delightful place to meet up for a chat or just sit back for a read in the dappled winter sunlight.

Sarah's building a wide-ranging program of events that's already getting pretty manic and no wonder - The Archive is a little treasure and the perfect place to hold smaller scale events with space, at this time of year at least, to get up to bigger scale stuff outdoors.

I'll post more on the workshops when we confirm dates and stuff. In the meantime, drop in there for a coffee - you'll be glad you did.

Stormy Seas In Sharjah

Overcast, grey skies and a huge swell coming up on the beach down the road flooding the beach - invariably resulting in crowds of people wandering around, photographing each other and generally enjoying the sight of the waves crashing into the shore. No picnics today as you can see, but toddlers in bobble hats splishing around in the big puddles and general pandemonium on the corniche road as everyone slows down to have a peer at the rolling white-caps, their rising faces mottled with the brown sand they're pulling up. There are cars everywhere, slowing, stopping, parking and pulling out. It's only going to be a matter of time before there's an occlusion of some sort and then the police'll be out, blocking the u-turns and trying to stem the tide of curious humanity hankering back to the sea geneticists tell us we all came from...

I do wonder if the usual ship will run aground, which would rather complete the scene.

New Year

Tom the Cafe Owner (Photo credit: Rob Young)

This normally relatively well maintained little corner of the Internet has been a quiet sort of place for almost a month now and is, as a consequence, a little dusty - for which I can only apologise. A combination of technology disaster (the failure of my mobile and my laptop in quick succession) together with going on leave for Christmas (very nice, thank you for asking) have combined with a return to booky writing to form an almost overwhelming list of things that took precedence over updating the blog.

The laptop failure came hard on the heels of the Great Phone Disaster and the unexpected brilliance of Nokia's Lumia 920 (A phone shopping trip into Dubai to get Sarah a new Android phone turned into a Lumia 820 buy on the strength of it) led to me having a 'what the hell' moment and getting a Samsung touchscreen Windows 8 Ultrabook thingy. The other factor in buying a touchscreen was the combination of Smartphone and iPad had led to me reaching out to my Lenovo's screen to touch things, which leaves you rather feeling as if people have caught you licking windows in shopping malls.

There's little doubt touch is the future - and it's interesting to note how many applications and websites aren't optimised for touch yet. But once you get touching and swiping, you tend to rather depend on people making their stuff, well, touchable. Too much of my past three weeks has been spent getting to grips with Windows 8 and the 'Metro' interface - a typical example was the unexplained shutdown of Skype's video calling. Many, many frustrated hours later I had finally worked out that Win8 doesn't support Firefox, which causes Adobe Flash to crash. And Skype uses a Flash plugin. It's all not terribly well documented - you can tell it's early days for Win8 - and your average Joe shouldn't be expected to have to deal with issues that complex in what is, let's face it, a consumer product. Meanwhile I've had to migrate browsers to IE10 until Mozilla catches up - and that's been a painful transition.

Microsoft hedged their bets with Windows 8 - you get the distinctive tile-based 'Metro' interface as well as a desktop to play with. It doesn't take long to work out why - Metro alone is not enough if you're going to start getting serious about creating and storing stuff. It's all very exciting and new, but the very newness of Win8 is evidenced by a lack of applications, support and 'critical mass'. And the passing of Windows' dominance, together with slow uptake of Win8, is hardly helping matters.

Anyway, weeks later I'm feeling almost back on track. Technology really can screw you up, can't it?

Is This The World's Worst Call Centre?

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The amazing tale of John McAffee that has played out over the past few weeks started with him hiding from Belizeian police by digging a hole in the sand and hiding in it with a cardboard box over his head.

It's an image that played in my mind this morning as I listened to the series of mildly farty whooshes on the line. A drug-addled maniac buried up to his neck in the sand with a box over his head, cowering and gibbering softly to himself in the middle of a South American beach. I would rather have been in McAffee's sweat-darkened sandles than in my own shoes, stuck on the end of an IP line to Dumbabad or wherever it is HSBC's call centre is located.

Is HSBC Dubai's call centre the worst in the world? I find it hard to think of a contender, let alone someone who has misunderstood customer service to the degree they believe this 'service' is fit for purpose.

I spoke at the Middle East Call Centre Conference last year. Uber-geek Gerald Donovan had suggested I take to the stage, place a cassette recorder playing 'Greensleeves' on the podium then leave for twenty minutes, returning to say "Sorry to have kept you waiting, but I was busy helping another conference." I am ashamed to tell you I didn't have the bottle to do it. It would, indeed, have been a career high.

In a fit of finger trouble, Sarah had credited our Visa account instead of transferring between two of our current accounts. So I had to get them to reverse the transfer. It was not possible to do this immediately, before the transaction was posted at the close of business, apparently. I had to wait for the funds to clear and then simply reverse the transfer. Simple!

So I wait until the funds clear then call telephone banking. Wait a moment while they identify a random species of mandrake parasite. Now key in the last six digits of your bank account. This number is never recognised by the system, so you just key in any random number. Now your ten digit phone banking number, your twelve digit bank account number or your best estimate of the number of craters on the moon. And now your date of birth in DD/MM/YYYY format followed by the hash key. And now your six digit phone banking number.

By now you're exhausted. But at least you can dial one for card services then star for a human being. And - look into my eyes - you're through to Dumbabad. How can HSBC help you today? Well, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. You want to lick an axe murderer from Crawley? No, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. Ah. Please hold.

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

And we're back. I have to transfer you to internet banking for that, sir. Fine, let's do it. Is there anything else I can do to help you today? No thank you. Can I just confirm your mobile number? Yes. Your PO Box? Look, could you just transfer me, please?

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

I'm on hold for a subjective eternity. Card services. Hi, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. You want to lick an axe murderer from Crawley? No, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. Ah. Hold on.

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

Right. Umm, you can't do that. Yes I can, I've done it before. Hold on a second, I'll transfer you to the relevant team. But...

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

Sorry to keep you holding for so long. The agent you need to talk to isn't picking up, I'll just transfer you to the relevant team. HANG ON before you transfer me, who is 'the relevant team'? Card services. But they transferred me to you. They're the ones you need. Fine.

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

Card services, hello.  I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. I have been on the phone for thrirty minutes now for this one simple thing. You want to lick an axe murderer from Crawley? No, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. Sure, no problem. There, done.

Done?

Yes, done. Anything else I can help you with today?

Technology, Dubai and the Nokia Lumia 920

Nokia 638 (19,06cm de alto), Nokia 2160 EFR (16,42 cm), Nokia 5160 (14,84 cm), Nokia 6070 (10,5 cm) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been a funny week for technology in general. The Great Phone Meltdown led to Nokia Middle East lending me a Lumia 920 and The Great PC Meltdown resulted in me taking to my iPad while I tried to sort out my notebook. And even tried to sort out what I use a notebook for!

The result has been, for me at least, fascinating. I've moved a lot more of what I do to 'the cloud' but find the single tasking nature of the iPad precludes much of what I want to use a system for - sure, it's great for doing email and consuming content, but it's not great for producing content. And in my day job as well as my hobbies, I'm a relatively constant producer of content.

But the iPad is now my 'out and about' device of choice. The notebook, ironically, stays rooted to the desk. It's stopped tottering around before hurling itself at walls but after this week's performance, it's definitely EOL.

The great surprise for me out of all this technofailure has been the Remarkable Triumph Of Lumia. They say brands ascend when low expectation is met by high performance and that great truth means Nokia better slow things down before it gives itself the bends. The Lumia is a stunner.

Let's start with the basics. As I mentioned before, it's solid - some would say weighty. As time has gone on I have come to find that weight reassuring. Seriously. It's built out of polycarbonate, which means scratches don't show. There's no user access, no back cover to prise off to get at the battery and SIM, instead the SIM is inserted in a sprung carrier at the top of the handset (it's a MicroSIM holder, so I had to get my Vintge Mubashir chip SIMcumcised at local phone shop. A clip and a wince and dirty deed done.

The screen is raised out of the unit's body and seemed to be significantly more fingerprint resistant than the HTC and, it has to be said, the iPad. The display is clear, bright and the resolution is stunning - retina display eat yer heart out. The back of the handset has a Carl Zeiss lens (WooOOOoo), a flash unit and a black strip that looks decorative but is actually the location of the inductive charging coil. The base has two speakers and a conventional charging socket. That's it, minimalist and sleek.

But you'd expect Nokia to make a great handset, wouldn't you? Until I gave up on them (about 6 months after the Symbian Blog posted a last, despairing post saying 'We give up') and flung my N86 at the wall, I'd been a Nokia punter for nigh on two decades. My first Nokia was an Etisalat 'HudHud', a grey/green brick with a pingy antenna. My favourite Nokia ever was the 6800. Seriously. When they didn't upgrade that to colour and 3G, I fled to Sony Ericsson only to flee back to the N series a few frustrating months later. But then, post 2007, I started to hear about people doing things with their handsets I couldn't. By about 2009 it was starting to get embarrassing. Great build quality doesnt make a dumb smartphone any smarter.

But now there's something new behind the screen - Windows Phone 8. I can't begin to tell you how set up I was to loathe this. Microsoft has always sucked at mobile - from Windows CE right through to those awful handsets OEMmed from HTC by that Scottish bloke who went bust, Microsoft just hasn't managed to compete on mobile. Ballmer's laughter at the iPhone rings hollow down the years - he was laughing at the halo product in a segment where Microsoft had not only always sucked, but had ignored until dangerously late. Today MS and Nokia have much in common beyond their partnership. They're both comeback kids. And I have long stopped considerinng Windows a 'cool' product - Vista killed off the final vestiges of respect I had for the interface (and in case you're interested, I have used every iteration of Windows ever built. Windows 1.0 was pretty gnarly, I can tell you!). After the plane crash of Vista, Windows 7 was usable - that's all I cared about by then.

They shouldn't have called it Windows at all, IMHO. It has nothing in common with the WIMPs interface on your desktop. Those squares of colour quickly worm their way into your sensibility, the interface is highly intuitive, fast as hell and an absolute joy to use. You almost forget it's there, which is the highest praise I can think of for technology. The screen is very bright indeed, bright enough to withstand the UAE's sunlight - no more hunching over the screen to try and read it in your own shadow. Taps do what they're supposed to do, menus flip into place with a flash and everything's pretty much where you'd expect to find it. I was shocked at how quickly I found myself navigating around with ease and, yes, enjoyment.

Nokia's mapping software is cool and works, Nokia Drive in particular gives you  fully functional and capable GPS (I had occasion to use it yesterday and I can tell you it truly did save the day), including voice guidance. The augmented reality city app turns curious onlookers into gurgling idiots and the information layer works in Ajman. If you know what I mean. The camera is simply superb, particularly in low light conditions. There are loads of nice little touches going on - haptic feedback gives you a little 'bump' sensation when you use the three 'big' navigation controls ('back', 'home' and 'search'), you can save profiles to your Google contacts (not just Hotmail) and Gmail integration is a dream.

I tried a couple of games out, slick, fast and colourful. Pretty much what you'd expect. There's a lot more on the app store and I haven't really had time for a 'play' yet.

Rowi was the first Twitter client I tried out and I instantly loved it. There's no TweetDeck yet, the WP8 'ecosystem' is yet young - and no Instagram, although that has now become irrelevant to me as I typically load photos to Tweet rather than share on Instagram.

The million dollar question, then. Am I a 'win back'? One of those millions of customers Nokia is looking to woo away from the iPhone and, crucially, Android? I'm going to play with a Galaxy S3 at the weekend to make sure it's 'Apples to apples', but I'm broadly headed Lumiawards. It's a truly smashing mobile and no wonder it's selling, according to Jacky's COO Ashish Panjabi, like hot cakes.

The Great Meltdown

I'm not sure what it is with me and technology right now, but following on from the recent Great HTC Self Destruct, my PC has now decided to pine for the fjords.

It all started yesterday with some strange behaviour over a hotel's WiFi network. Whether it was triggered by malicious software, a failed AVG update install or the Will Of The Gods will forever be a mystery, but the machine descended with great rapidity into a constant cycle of great meltdowns, gibbbering fits of tearing around the room pulling its hair out and screaming obscenities followed by curling up in the corner and wailing silently to the heavens before lapsing into long periods of insensibility. It is not, to boil the situation down to its essence, well.

I have long been a fan of IBM laptops, a product choice originally made because of the inevitable sound of indrawn breath through teeth that would accompany every presentation at my lovely client's premises. It got wearing eventually and I succumbed to the black keyboard with the little red button. The move was propitious - these babies are reliable, take a pounding without complaint and just, well, deliver. I have no reason to think that Lenovo has let quality go, but there's little doubt that my current machine, a T61, has for some time been End Of Life. Its hard disk is almost full, the keyboard's worn shiny and MacBook Air users titter when I pull the great slablike wodge of scratched matte black plastic with shiny edges from my enormous laptop bag.

It's a bit like breaking up with a girl you've come to dislike but can't quite muster the energy to go through with the scene. It's a huge relief when she takes the plunge before you. So it is with my PC - it actually feels good to be letting go. The pain has been considerably lessened by the agency's move to Google mail and Docs, although I hadn't quite managed to wean myself away from Office. Now I'm going to see how far I get using the iPad, although I know it's not going to deal with the heavy lifting terribly well - and especially not the video editing or book stuff.

The PC, in the meantime, is sitting curled up in the bathroom, occasionally spitting at passers-by but mostly just staring at the tiles with a lunatic fixaty. I've got the data off it, so I don't care any more.

Anyway, it never really understood me...

Olives - A Violent Romance On Sale In Jordan

Now! Buy the book Jordan's bookstores didn't want you to see!

Thanks to the embargo busting online superheroes at Jordanian bookseller Jamalon, the shameful year-long block of Olives - A Violent Romance in Jordan, the country the book is set in, is over. Olives is now on sale and available for anyone in the country to buy with FREE shipping.

Buy Olives - A Violent Romance from Jamalon here!

The first ten copies are signed and numbered, too. Jamalon will be putting these on promo. On sale alongside them, at the same time as it launches in the UAE, Jamalon will also be selling Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

You can find out more about Olives at the book's website, linked here for your link-following pleasure. It's about a British guy going to work and live in Jordan who is blackmailed by British intelligence into spying on the family of the Jordanian girl he's falling in love with. A lot of people have said kind things about it, which is nice.

Olives was originally prevented from going on sale in Jordan because distributors wouldn't handle the book - it never got as far as the government's censor. The one distributor who gave a straight reason cited the book's use of the Dajani family name in a fictional context:

"...it would not go through censorship as it mentions, although in fiction, the family name Dajani which is an existing family and all over the Middle East. they are of Jeruslamite origin, and quite influential. I therefore have to decline..." 

This here post over on the Olives blog explains all. After some silly talk about honour killings and a rather vibrant shitstormette on Facebook, the whole affair struck me as so ludicrous as to warrant no further effort on my part. And so things lay until Jamalon's CEO Ala' Alsallal and I got chatting a few weeks back and he basically waved his arms around and exclaimed, 'Tish and fiddle! They're fools. Of course we'll sell it!"

I knew of Jamalon from my involvement in ArabNet, where Ala' and his team presented two years back. I found their plans for taking the region's publishing industry to the 'e-age' exciting - and I still do. Jamalon's online bookstore is just the first step - the company now lists over nine million titles in Arabic and English and has tied up with Aramex to support regional shipping of books at competitive rates. There's a whole load more in the pipeline.

In the meantime, though, anyone in Jordan can now just point and click and, Hey Presto!, freely buy a copy of the book Jordan's traditional booksellers didn't want you to see.

So what are you waiting for? Click away! :)

Jordan! Buy Olives - A Violent Romance from Jamalon here!

Free Space

Ben Jonson is a doctor in Richmond, London. Life is peachy, perhaps the only cloud on his horizon being the problem of communicating with his incomprehensible housemaid. And then a roast chicken appears out of nowhere.

Ben Jonson never wanted to save the world. But with no warning, no final demand and certainly no invitations issued, Ben finds himself racing against time, the Russian Mafia and spooks aplenty. Driven to near-insanity by auto-manifesting incongruities, Ben is launched into a journey across Europe in search of the source of his problems by the charismatic Lysander Cullinane, the head of a shadowy government agency that specialises in telling awful lies.

Enter a catsuited blonde bombshell with a death fetish, a life insurance salesman on the run and some wickedly nasty Russians with very big guns. Add the world’s most effective computer virus, an imperious old lady with a gimlet eye, England’s most evil-tempered policeman and a dead man with a number of highly developed personality disorders. And then pop in a splash of sex worker with legs all the way up to the bottom of her basque.

The body count rises hourly and Ben’s on the run. But you can’t escape space… 

My first attempt at writing a book resulted in a silly spoof caper called Space. It was quite badly done, but enormous fun - and has since had a bit of a spruce up to make it at least semi-presentable: possibly even readable. It's FREE on amazon through to Friday this week, so do feel highly pressured to not only download it to your own Kindle or Kindle for Android or iPad but also to tell friends, family, passers-by, whoever. Share the link, tweet it - stick it on yer facebook. This is, after all is said and done, a total freebie! And we all likes a bit of it free, doesn't we?

GET YOUR COPY OF 'SPACE' HERE

It still makes me laugh, but its first amazon review says it's totally unfunny. The second one says it IS funny! You be the judge - and do feel free to leave your own amazon review too!

The ITU In Dubai And All That

Téléphone ancien (Photo credit: zigazou76)

The Twelfth ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications is currently taking place in Dubai, with much international fanfare. The ITU is proposing to debate the re-writing of its 1988 regulatory framework for international telecommunications (ITR), allowing its members to contribute towards creating a new framework for 'the Internet age'.

Oh dear.

Cue spirited PR campaigns from Google (which has gone as far as to use the hallowed homepage to drum up support for it's 'Take Action' campaign for a 'free and open Internet') and others, pointing out that we shouldn't be letting governments decide on the future of the Internet. This is interesting, as that's precisely what governments think they not only have the right to do but, working on behalf of their respective peoples, should be doing.

Dubai, meanwhile, gets a win for hosting the event and racks up some nifty international publicity.

Of the many aspects of the 'Internet age' being discussed (in many cases, I fear, by people whose understanding of telecommunications is rooted firmly in yoghurt pots and string) is how telcos can share in the enormous revenues being derived from companies using the Internet to provide services to users. These people, argue the telcos, should be paying to use our networks.

It's not only absolute tosh as a proposal, it would be laughable if it weren't being actually listened to at the ITU. Telcos built the rods for their own backs long ago - they built roads and then insisted in charging tolls for the use of those roads which were calculated by the minute. Now they're trying to charge by the value of freight or the transaction you're travelling to close. With precious little innovation on offer, they're now challenged by the fact they have simply become bulk data providers, irrelevant to us in the main and certainly no active part of the thriving, active and profitable ecosystem of the Internet.

So what they want the ITU to do is grant them a charter to continue doing what they have done so well in the past - sit back and tax network users for using their networks, charging unfairly high rates for minimum quality service and contributing not one jot of value to the communities they are meant to serve.

For me the debate regarding regulation is of little interest - governments already regulate effectively enough at the state level and if they all decide to do more regulatin' I suspect there's little we can do.

But the telcos and their bid to pass a cash cow's charter? That's the one that'll affect you and me the most, I suspect...