The Web 2.0 Interview

Being a shy, retiring sort of chap I wasn't going to mention it, but Zeid and the chaps at MediaME threatened to burn down my house if I didn't link to this interview with yours truly on the spiffly MediaME website.

So, to avoid the flames and fire engines, here is the link. They used the photo from my Facebook profile, which is all very Web 2.0 of them but it's not quite the suit that serious clients want to see, is it?

Which, of course, I quite like... :)

NOT The Salik FAQ - Questions About The Dubai Road Toll Dodged Elegantly

Obviously based on a huge amount of entirely unhelpful speculation, here’s the FAQ that answers the questions that the official FAQ doesn’t answer!

What happens if I sell my car?

You have to peel the tag off your windscreen, which damages the tag, so you have to buy a new tag. It might leave some bits of plastic and gucky adhesive on the windscreen, but we can’t be sure yet because we haven’t left a tag stuck to a window in the 55C sun for three months yet. Let alone tried doing that for a couple of years. But we’re sure it’ll be OK. Anyway, why should you care? It’s not your car anymore, is it?

Yes, it’s a Dhs50 car sale tax. Well, Dhs 100 really, ‘cos the bloke that’s buying your car has to get a new tag, too.

Do Salik tags go brown and brittle after a couple of years in the sun like everything else around here (including the people)?

No. Yes. We’re not sure. But they’ll still work, so what’s your problem?

Will they? Really? Work?

Yes.

Sure?

Yyyyyes. Almost. But if they don’t we’ll sort that out.

How?

We just will, alright?

What happens to any available balance on my Salik tag when I sell my car?

Good question. You should really get it refunded, shouldn’t you? The money would logically be held against your Salik account rather than the physical tag. You should call the Salik centre to ‘deactivate the tag’ before you sell your car, according to the official FAQ, but there’s nothing about transferring the balance or anything like that. Interesting one. We’re sure it’ll be sorted out for the best. Really. Trust us.

What happens if a chance stone hits my windscreen and the tag is damanged?

You’re being for real here? Right. You buy a new windscreen and a new tag. Da. Are you asking if that tag can be added to your account or if you just add a new tag to your account? Well, that depends. We’ll basically make up the rules for that one as it happens. OK?

What happens if I don’t have a tag at all?

You mean how are we going to catch you? Not sure. Guess we’ll have to wait and see. Alexander’s money is on a photo-based system, which is going to leave someone combing through an awful lot of number plate photos.

If I drive through the Salik tollgate backwards, do I get a refund?

Nice idea, but I rather doubt it will work, don’t you?

More anon... >:)

Acer in Pointless Promo Shock Horror

I was mildly amused at the kind gift of a small, flat stone from Acer Computer attached to my Gulf News this morning. I was mildly irritated that the package was glued to the front page headline and tore the page when I tried to remove it as carefully as I could, but we'll put that down to early morning biorhythms.

There were many newsworthy things in today's papers, including the fantastic and most welcome news that Wadi Warraya (or Wurraya or Waraya or any other way you want to spell it) is to be, belatedly, declared a protected zone. This great news was not in Emirates Today which, you may remember, did launch a concerted one day campaign 'Save the Wadi Fish' that was based around an interview with a conservationist working in Waraya. A big bag of bite size Snickers Crunchers says that ET does a piece taking the credit tomorrow. For now, GN can sit back and enjoy that warm, fuzzy feeling that rewards those who get a decent scoop.

But it was Acer's stone that stayed with me. Disregarding the sage advice of French poet Alain Bosquet, I did not regard my stone so long, so long that it accepted to speak in my place. No, I looked for the invariable ad that explained the invitation attached to the stone: "Nature Shapes, Technology Creates. Individuality is yours alone to enjoy... find out more inside."

Any ad that accompanies such a slice of unremittingly daft and pointless pseudo-empowerment blather is, I thought, going to provide some mild entertainment value at least.

I finally found the ad, buried deeply in swathes of four-page spreads from real estate companies. If you take a minute to go through GN reading the headlines of the ads, you start to understand what Ken Kesey meant by recreating the acid experience without taking the drug:

Experience fine living...because attention to detail is not just a commitment, it's a way of life...; Once a year, the Cereus blooms in darkness; tycoon by day, connoisseur by night; Sea Side Living Starts Today; Your gateway to island living; Live and work in absolute grandeur; Your aspiration for a better tomorrow; Homes created around your lifestyle; Earth, sun, wind and water - the constituents of life, and the quintessence of being; not just another address in the making but a marvel with features extraordinaire...

It's a bewildering array of jumbled up words, sloganeering with no applied intelligence: declamatory, mindless blipverts of aspirational words slung at your psyche in a barrage of positivity and over-promising.

How, you may be starting to think, are our stone-wielding friends ever going to cut through? Answer: they're not. It took me three runs through the paper to find it. And I was looking for the daft thing. The ad was buried on the left hand page 20 and was made of the same old language as all the rest of it. 'Emotion, individuality and temptation at a glance' it starts. Hang on, this is a PC, isn't it? Just checking, thought it might be an apartment in Full Moon Bay. And then, for some strange reason, the next headline is 'Dolby surround sound speakers'! It's like being jerked from a page of Paulo Coelho to a supermarket flyer.

The other words in the ad are irrelevant, you can put them together in any order you like and they'll mean just as much. Print them, cut them out and try it.

Unrivalled | Empowered | Wonder | Style | Concept | Technological | Natural | Performance | Prestige

However, I now have a stone that I didn't have before and for this, like so many other small mercies, I am truly grateful.

Salik Debate Rages as 4WD Shortcut Blocked

Shock horror! Gulf News today reports widespread negative public voice regarding Dubai's proposed Salik road toll system. Salik (see earlier post) aims to charge users of two of Dubai's busiest roads a little over a dollar each time they pass the RFID scanner. Residents, expatriate and local alike, are more than a little concerned about how the scheme will affect traffic flows as people try and avoid the toll, according to GN's unusually critical report.

Reader polls carried out by GN reflect an overwhelming 'no' vote to the whole scheme. While you'd expect this from people who are about to have to pay money they don't want to pay, over 70% don't think the toll will reduce congestion on the tolled roads although over 70% also said they wouldn't use the tolled roads. And 49% said they won't buy the Salik tags.

Woopsie!

The scheme goes live on the 1st July, so that'll be all very interesting.

Meanwhile my journey to work today was enlivened by the fact that some blockhead has decided to dump a load of huge concrete blocks across the desert tracks that an increasing number of 4WD owners have been using as a short cut to work between Sharjah and Dubai. Why anyone would think that there was any harm or damage being caused by a few intrepid souls slipping over the short stretch of deeply rural sand dunes that separate the Sharjah back road from the Dubai back road is a mystery. Another mystery is why anyone thought that you could block the desert by dumping concrete blocks across a few tracks.

But the consequences this morning were remarkable, to say the least. There must have been at least fifty 4WD vehicles in various states of bogged down out there, ranging from just starting to bog through stuck in a ditch that they hadn't noticed to utterly bogged down and hopelessly stuck. There were people running around, digging and towing other cars out, bouncing trucks flying over sandy humps, their grinding wheels throwing up clouds of sand over everyone on foot and all manner of offroaders trying to circumnavigate the blocked tracks. A massive, fantastic fairground of Hollywood road movie style vehicular insanity. Think Smoky and the Bandit mixed with the Cannonball Run and Lawrence of Arabia and you're starting to get the picture.

I picked my way through it all, as well as past the silly, redundant blocks, hardly able to focus on my path through as I watched the madness all around me, open mouthed and in a state of blissful wonderment.

What you need, chaps, is a Salik station in the desert. That'll sort 'em out...

The Septic Tank Wallah

He's the 'dunnyman' in Australia but we don't have any fancy names for the bloke that comes in the big lorry to empty the septic tank.

There was some problem at the Dubai Sewage Treatment Plant today: whatever it was, the distinctive orange tankers were backed up all the way to the main road and up along it as I drove home from the daily toil. That's a lot of big lorries full of noxious sludge: I'd have said there were a hundred and more of them.

It's a job that's worth reflecting on when things are looking down during your working day. Just giving the Septic Tank Wallah's lot a second's thought should brighten up your view of your own place in life's great periodic table. He drives around answering phone calls from desperate people (because we usually don't know the damn thing needs emptied until the downstairs toilet backs up or something equally revolting) and then he spends a good 20 minutes sucking out months-worth of our bathwater and variegated bodily secretions through a fat pipe into his lorry, dragging the pipe out, shaking it off (yes, 'yeww') and hanging it back on the lorry before driving the whole sloshing, odiferous load to the stinking treatment plant (woe betide him if he dumped it in the desert) and emptying it out. And you thought having a stupid boss or the ninth cubicle from the sun was bad? Think again!

I spared a grimace for them all, stuck there and waiting in the humid, heavy and pungent air by the Sewage Plant as I drove by. Most of us bitch about the shitty traffic, but they were stuck in a literally shitty traffic jam.

A last thought and a tip for you, dear friends. Always have the right money ready for the Septic Tank Wallah. You don't want the change he offers you...

Modhesh Delivers Dubai Summer Surprises

"Registrations for the exclusive DSS summer event, the Modhesh Friends' Club, take a hectic pace as a number of parents accompanied by their holidaying children are rushing to the DSS Office to grab the last few remaining seats available for the Club all set to start on June 24."

So, in tones of overwrought hysteria, goes the press release announcing that uptake has been a little slower than anticipated for the Modhesh Friends' Club summer kids' event. It's quite possible, of course, that demand has been reduced because parents simply don't believe they'd have a chance of getting their kid in because the demand would be so great. After all, as the press release (posted here on arabianbusiness.com) tells us, application forms are "fast flying off the shelves" so it must be popular.

If you'd like to learn more about Modhesh, you can go here. There's more information there than anybody in their right minds can take, all presented in a comforting palette of colours designed to trigger scary roller-coaster flashbacks from that time you dropped an experimental tab or two back at Uni. In fact, uncontrollable brain-skitter is a constant danger in Modhesh's online world, but I do recommend you pop in to enjoy, if nothing else, the relentless tone of the prose offered up to you.

Here's a sample:

"His popularity is truly inspiring, growing constantly over the years. As summer time approaches children anxiously wait for their favourite character to return and become a part of their lives. His yearly visits to Dubai win him friends and fans in huge numbers indicating to his popularity among children of all ages. Even grown-ups can’t help but join in the celebrations when Modhesh invites them to shop at the malls or be a part of the weekly themed events."

Quite.

Ten Word Arabic

Please note I've updated this post and made it easier to read here. Cheers!

Some people think I’ve wasted 20 years in the Arab World, but I can prove ‘em all wrong. The following is the synthesis of everything insightful and useful I have learned about the Arabic language. Well, almost everything.

Arabic is not an easy language for speakers of the Romance languages. It’s not impossible, but it’s not easy. Worse, pretty much everyone speaks English and people are often more keen to use their English than listen to you mangling their language.

The following ten words will allow you to get by, have meaningful sounding conversations and serve you well in any number of situations and scrapes. The investment required to get from this to speaking proper Arabic is so great, and the commensurate rewards so small, that you’ll probably never progress beyond Ten Word Arabic.

The definitions below link to the Wiki because that’s where I originally put ‘em and I can’t be bothered to move ‘em.

1) Ugh

2) Shou

3) Yani

4) Khalas

5) Naam

6) Akid

7) Salaam

8) Fie

9) Mushkila

10) Inshallah

Amaze your friends! Stun business contacts! Speak Ten Word Arabic!

Father Angelo's Last First Communion

One of the strangest buildings on earth is St Mary's Church in Sharjah. It's a marvellous, miraculous little place, even for those of us that don't really buy into the whole miracle thing. Built by donations from its (mostly unmoneyed) congregation, St Mary's has long been dominated by the figure of its priest, Father Angelo: a huge figure of a man who makes Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo look like a rank amateur.

We went today for friends' daughter Lily's First Communion, an event that would, coincidentally and ironically, be Father Angelo's Last Communion. And, to be honest, that's why I went. I've seen him in action before and it's wonderful. Now he's in his 80s, although you'd be hard put to guess that, he's about to slip away to a home for retired gentlepriests somewhere in Italy.

St Mary's is unique. A Catholic church with a touch of the Eastern tarbrush, it plays host to a strange, globalised religious eclecticism. It feels somehow a little Orthodox, its got a tiny touch of Eastern, Greek lasciviousness. And yet the choir's gospel-tinged American bible-belt singing praise-the-lord Philippino and many of the regulars are pre-Vatican Indian Christians who dress the statues, kiss the hems of their robes and stand touching the picture of Padre Pio or the robed Child of Prague, festooned in Hawaiian style flower garlands, in silent supplication. The Lebanese St. Charbel rubs shoulders with St. George, the dragon-slaying Syrian adopted by the Levant-unfriendly Brits. It's like the United Nations of Christianity in there and, just like they did when they were wearing blue helmets in Lebanon, the Irish stand around looking at the way the other fools are carrying on in wide-eyed wonderment.

And then there's Angelo himself. He's huge, bigger than his physical presence. His accent is impenetrably Italian. The last time we were in this church together was the wedding of our friends Terry and Orla. Fr. Angelo managed to marry 'Elvis' and 'Olga' in an accent so thick that I've been dining off the impersonation ever since. "Jaysuus," Father Angelo would tell us, "Jaysuus he lovva you. Jaysuus he lovva you all. He lovva me anna he lovva you. He looka downatus from heffin and he sayaa I lovva everone!"

This is the stuff.

And yet, at the same time, there's something marvellous about the man; something that makes even the most agnostic of us admire the sheer weight of belief that has shaped this church of two millenia. He believes it; the miracles, the wonder, the eucharist and the sacrament. He lives it, breathes it and is it. His passing will, somehow, make this little church in the heart of Arabia a smaller place: another last note in a sad, small threnody.

I'm a Gonu, How Do You Do?

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

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

Putin 1 Bush 0

(Picture: Reuters)

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

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

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

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