Sharjah Bus Tour Fun

P London bus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sharjah's Investment and Development Authority, Shurooq, has introduced 'Big Bus' style bus tours to the Emirate, the City Sightseeing Sharjah buess.

Which is sort of cool.

Now I can see you snarky Dubai types quipping, "What, one stop, is it?" and you should be ashamed of yourselves. Three double-decker London buses will duly ply their route, stopping at such landmarks (according to Gulf News today) as Al Majaz, Buheira, Al Qasba, the aquarium, the fish market, the restoration area and, bizarrely, Mega Mall.

I first came across Big Bus tours in London, where twenty quid gave you an, all-day, all-sights experience, with plenty buses zooming around so you never really had to wait long for one to come along and whisk you to the next destination. Similarly Paris, where we did the same thing. It's a brilliant way to get around a city. I've never been quite sad enough to take the Big Bus tour of Dubai - nothing against the tour, but I can drive, thanks. Germaine Greer did and used the deep experience and insight it brought her to pen a 1200-word slagging piece in the Guardian about how horrible it all is.

Sharjah's tour buses are priced at Dhs85 for adults and 45 for kids, which is a wee bit hefty, if you don't mind me saying so. And, if Gulf News is to be believed, the buses miss some key destinations, too - what about the archaeological and science museum, book roundabout (and its cultural centre) or the classic car museum, the discovery centre and the children's museum? Let alone the stunning Sharjah desert park, which is home to the natural history museum, the botanical museum and, of course, the desert wildlife park itself, which is an absolute must visit for any tourist or expat living here. Then there's the Mahatta Museum, the site of the old Imperial Airways landing strip in central Sharjah restored to its former glory - and, like many of the restoration areas in Sharjah, beautifully done.

There's actually loads to see and do in Sharjah, folks - for those of you that have never travelled North to The Wastelands. The Sharjah museums website has some great ideas for a family day out and it's linked here.  Take a City Sightseeing bus one Friday while the weather's still nice!

I think it's a great idea.

Sharjah's Speed Radar Shooting Spree

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sharjah police have an unusual case on their hands at the moment - someone's going around shooting out the traffic radars that the UAE's traffic cops are all so inordinately fond of.

While there is much debate about the efficacy of fixed radars in other parts of the world, for instance in the UK, the UAE has festooned its roads with a remarkable number of these snappy little devices, Dubai alone aiming, apparently, at a radar every two kilometres. That's quite a lot of radar and they can be expensive for those not used to cruise control. A colleague of mine with a particularly heavy right foot has paid out fines totalling Dhs 23,000 (About $6,300 to you) in the past, although thankfully she's now got that habit down to a more manageable Dhs 2,000.

There's been a 9% drop in the year on year fatality rate on Dubai's roads, although the accident rate has actually increased by 7% - something the anti-radar lobby would doubtless seize upon like ravening wolves - or Wordpress users finding your Blogger blog has been deleted.

But one chap has come up with his own argument, and it's a compelling one. It's getting expensive for Sharjah's finest, too - so far a total of fourteen radars have been shot along the Mileiha/Madam highway according to a story in Gulf News over the weekend, the latest such incident being last Wednesday. The story carries a pithy quote from Sharjah police:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

This has been going on for some time, in fact. The first  11 of the Dhs 250,000 ($68,500) devices were shot out early in November, with Gulf News reporting on the incident on the 12th of that month. That story carried a particularly pithy quote from Sharjah police, who said:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

As if not satisfied with his very expensive shooting spree (he's knocked up quite a tab by now), the vandal struck again in December, taking out a further two radars on the same stretch of road. Sharjah police commented pithily to Gulf News at the time, saying:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

More cut and paste journalism, then - merely recycling the same old quote every time. At least it's not copied from a blog or another paper this time. But it's still reprehensible and shoddy not least because it misrepresents Sharjah police's reaction to the updated story.

Golly, but it's beginning to feel like Private Eye around here...

Sea Blue - All Washed Up

Meet the good ship Sea Blue, a pretty little boat - or general cargo vessel to cogniscenti. Last week we had high winds and choppy seas which seems these days to lead to the inevitable beached boat. She's laid up on the beach on Ajman Corniche, beached as beached can be. Perhaps luckily, she seems to have missed the rocky groyne just up from her beaching site.

She's something of a mongrel - built in 1974 in a Danish shipyard, sailing under a Korean flag with her home port recorded as Wontan but owned by a Sharjah company - Al Sadiq Ship Management, she was originally called the Arnarfell. I think Sea Blue is perhaps a tad more poetic sounding, no?

More about her here.
 

We're Back, Baby!

delete (Photo credit: M i x y)

You can only begin to imagine the look on my face when I pootled over to the blog yesterday to put up a post for the day (I was going to whinge about the new Salik gates, for what it's worth) and found the cheery words from Google (in Arabic, of course, because they insist on showing Arabic content to someone whose account preferences specify English) that my blog had been deleted. To give Google some credit, it was thanks to Google Translate I was able to find out what the hell the note the Space On The Internet Formally Known As My Blog (SPOTIFKAMB to IT people) meant.

Deleted. Gone. All of it.

It took a while to sink in. This blog has become a part of my life in ways I would never have thought possible. I've been feeding it words like a remorseless Tamagochi since I started it (as a frustrated writer who missed journalism) in April 2007, when I posted about the Arab Media Forum (This here post, in fact) to a readership of approximately three. I've been posting more or less regularly ever since - a body of work that stretches back, I realised as I made my way to the Blogger Forum to try and get some help, six years now. In all, over a thousand posts from rants about mendacious food companies through half-baked observations on the state of our media to book plugging now populate this dusty corner of the Web and I have become quite fond of it.

Every day a few hundred or so people pop by to hang out and most of them use the ashtrays and everything. Some posts have attracted thousands and thousands of readers - the ones where I expose the crap people put in their food and drink are posts I am particularly proud have attracted such attention, because I think it's important more people are made aware that Subway bread contains gunk, Aquafina is tap water and other great truths.

Why did Google do it? They never do tell you, but an educated guess (fuelled by some panicky reading yesterday) would be some sort of spammer/hacker exploit that meant a number of blogs (the UAE Community Blog and SeaBee's 'Life In Dubai' were also affected and a number of other blogs were complaining of unfair deletion about the same time I was) got trashed.

A number of people kindly suggested on Twitter that I migrate to Wordpress. Thanks for the suggestions, but it did feel a little like when you tweet about a PC problem and all the iZombies come crawling out to intone 'Buy a Mac' in their little, dead zombie voices. I like that blogger is the Barney of the blogging world, a sort of Little Tikes easy to use thing in nice, primary colours. Wordpress is far too complicated for me and I have neither the time nor inclination to build my own templates and other stuff. I gave up playing around under the bonnet of technology years ago and have no hankering to go back.

I did come away from the experience with the definite feeling that Google's fighting a 24x7 bot-war against the hackers, spammers and other manifestations of absolute evil. Occasionally that results in a few carbon based life forms getting squished. The only thing I can say is they unsquished me pretty quickly - so thanks to Nitecruzer, the entity that seems to do most of the management of anguished bloggers at the Blogger Forum. He could perhaps be politer, but this is a man tested with a constant dialogue with pissed off bloggers, so you can see how he might be occasionally inclined to testiness.

Anyway, drama over. Back to the usual hooning around and complaining about stuff... Move on, people, there's nothing to see here. Come along, now. Let's be having yer. And take those shinies with you...

Beirut - Explosive Thrills At TwitBookClub

Dubai's Twitter Book Club - or @TwitBookClub as it's fondly known - is a regular gathering of book reading types enabled by that most real time of fun technologies, Twitter.

They normally meet at Wild Peeta (the famously social shawarma joint) at Dubai World Trade Centre, but that's temporarily out of order so this Saturday will see them meeting at Café Nero DWTC instead (at 11am, as you asked). The TwitBookClub website is linked here.

This'll be the first book club outing for Beirut, and should be interesting. It was certainly an eye opener talking to book clubs about Olives last year, readers' perspectives are a wonderful thing indeed to encounter. You find people question motives, examine reactions and generally go about prodding and tweaking your work in ways you simply wouldn't have thought possible. Beirut, being quite a badly behaved book, will probably respond to a tweak with a hefty kick in the groin, but let's see...

I have generally gone much easier on promoting Beirut than I did with Olives (if you're a regular, you will no doubt have noticed and possibly even been appreciative), which has had the direct  impact of a lower uptake - noise begets noise, so a softly softly approach has really meant little conversation around the book, fewer reviews and so on. This, one suspects, might be about to change.

In the meantime, do feel free to buy and speedread Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in time for this Saturday's meeting (it's in all good UAE bookshops as well as available from Amazon, iBooks et al) or, if you've read the book and you'd like to complain or apply for a refund, I'll be at Café Nero on Saturday facing a branch loaded with Tweeters!!!

Gulf News: Cut And Paste Journalism

English: Close-up image of TN panel display, Dell Mini 9, Magnification - 300 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in October last year, I asked if journalism had perhaps jumped the shark, with a post that compared a Gulf News story on Google's Nexus 7 announcement with some well-known online sources, showing clearly that key elements of the GN story, under a local byline, were cut and paste from web-based sources.

This is not a good thing. The P word, plagiarism, is whispered in decent news rooms because it is considered, quite rightly, to be one of the most egregious forms of deceit in journalism. It's lazy, it misleads readers and it speaks to a lack of professionalism that would, anywhere else in the world, be profoundly unacceptable.

Gulf News' response to the charge was to quietly rewrite the online version of the story to remove the more obvious cut and paste segments and give credit for the quotes the story filched from the New York Times.

This time around, in an article carrying the same byline, they have an even more elegant solution. Don't post the piece ("TVs for every room and budget" - a collection of 'buyer's guide' hints and tips for TV buyers that appears on page E4 of the newspaper's technology supplement) online at all.

It's a compelling lesson on how to write a product buyer's guide feature in the Internet age. Google the topic, pick a few sites that already post buyers' guides, summarise and/or just rephrase what they have to say and there you have it, Robert's your father's brother, one buyers' guide.

Just for good measure, barely even bother rewording some of the more technical stuff. Just slap it into the CMS, bish bash bosh. It's not going online anyway and nobody's going to bother checking to see if you just blagged the copy, are they?


Gulf News
"Since plasma pixels can be almost completely turned off on screen, they are capable of producing really dark blacks which helps improve picture quality."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Since plasma pixels can be almost completely turned off during dark scenes or portions of the image, they are capable of deeper black levels compared to LCD TVs."

Gulf News
"In passive screens, two images are displayed simultaneously; like in a movie theatre, while polarised glasses filter the correct image to each eye to produce a 3D effect."

Digital Trends TV Buyers' Guide
"...passive 3D is very similar to what you would experience in a movie theater: Two images are displayed simultaneously on the screen, while polarized glasses properly filter the correct image to each eye, producing a 3D effect. "

Gulf News
"In active displays, the glasses use battery-powered LCD lenses to alternately block each eye in sync with the television, alternately showing right- and left-eye images, to create the 3D effect."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Active 3D glasses use battery-powered LCD lenses to alternately block each eye in sync with a TV alternately showing right- and left-eye images, creating a 3D effect."

Gulf News
"Plasmas use an emissive display technology (self lighting pixels) which means there's no motion lag or lighting inconsistencies and this results in smoother, more accurate motion and better picture detail."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Plasmas use an emissive display technology (i.e. self-lighting pixels) and color phosphors, which means there’s no motion lag or lighting inconsistencies, unlike their LCD counterparts. The results are smoother, more accurate motion; deeper, more consistent black levels; and better picture detail.

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?