Blue Chi’s

I’ve doing a lot of different things online as usual, I have loads of plans for this summer and I am determined to accomplish as many of them as I can:

-We are starting a new small competition sponsored by Apple tomorrow over at Oman3D. This one is going to be exclusive to people from Oman, less than 1% of our traffic comes from Oman, so it should be pretty easy for people to win. I will make another post when we start this competition. I had plans to arrange for a set of competitions for the whole summer, but Gonu messed things up. I’ll try searching for sponsors, making proposal and calling up people up soon to start new competitions.

-I am going to try a new marketing method for Oman3D, we’re starting a proper newsletter, we tried sending some from our vBulletin admin panel, but you can’t send HTML letters that way and you can’t track. I’m going to use ConstactContact, it is a paid service that provides a great tracking services, scheduling, and easy subscription AND unsubscription features. Our first letter should be sent this week. If anybody is interested in giving us feedback then please subscribe to our newsletter as soon as possible to not miss out on the first issue. (subscription form found on the bottom of our homepage.)

-I am making a mobile phone game! I’m almost done with it, I finished coding and the game works, just need to work on the graphics and add additional features (score board, etc). It’s going to run on the Flash Lite Player available on all recent Nokia symbian phones, UQI Sony Ericsson phones, and walkman SonyEricsson phones. It is a pretty basic arcade style game, I’ll make it available for download here when it’s ready!

-I started posting for Global Voices earlier this month, it is an amazing project, I gladly accepted the offer to volunteer and will try to post more on their blog in the future.

-I am going to start two new websites/blogs this summer, one of them is not very serious, I will be just doing it because I think that I have the time and it would fill a certain gap, but the other one should be much more interesting and would be a proper website – probably bilingual. I already started the less interesting one, I am supposed to start working on the bigger project this month, I do not think that I will publicly launch it before September. I am going to work on it with a new group. I find it very helpful to work with different people each time I start a new project because it is easier to stay motivated that way somehow.

-I’m having so much fun writing for the Omani Cuisine, I will try to publish one new post a week, I already have in the pipeline reviews for Santino’s, Chilli’s, and Cinnzeo, and a recipe for a shrimp pasta dish – I have the pics and everything, just need to post them. I would like to have recipes for Omani food and I will try to persuade my mother to help me write some of these posts, the problem is that her face expression said ‘This.Is.So.Gay’, when I told her that I, a guy, had a website about cooking and restaurant reviews, ouch. I only go back home for a weekend once every two weeks, so I do not really have loads of time to do it, but I will try.

-Within the month of July, I am also planning on reading a book on contract drafting (Adam’s manual on contract style – started it, an amazing book), a novel (all families are psychotic – douglas coupland), and I will try to finish the web redesign project management book I started reading sometime ago. I am planning on purchasing the new Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock, the book got released a couple of days ago.

-I am also getting involved with the Omani community blog, I do not know how it will go, but everybody seems to be in, so why not join!

Suburban posted about her own experience with the horrible service of Emax. I’ve written about my own bad experience previously here. I have heard loads of other horrible stories from friends around here, do not really know what these idiots in Emax are thinking.

The majority of you must have already heard of Apple’s upcoming iPhone: the iPod, cell phone, and internet tablet all-in-one gadget. It is a sleek touch-screen wide-screen device that can make phone calls, play music and video purchased from the iTunes music store, and is equipped with some built-in GBs, WiFi, and a Safari Internet browser. Geeks and Apple fans are over the moon about it, the hype is getting crazier as the release date gets closer (the end of this month).

But it’s really pissing me off.

I am really irritated by how many stupid people are ready to believe everything they read or see in an advertisement. First of all, the iPhone is not going to run OS X in the way that we know it. You will not be able to run any application that you have on your OS X on the iPhone, the fact that Apple names the thing that runs on the iPhone OSX does not have any practical meaning at all.

The phone is going to be expensive as hell. With a 2-year contract it will be sold at a subsidised price of $500. This means that the price of the phone outside the US sold on its own without any phone operator could easily be 3 times that price = $1500. I would not be surprised if it costs way more than this.

The revolutionary iPhone is not a 3G phone – it won’t do video calls or video messages, I do not know if it would even do MMS.

What really got me pissed is the recent comparison chart Apple posted on their website here. It is very normal for companies to pimp their own devices in these sort of charts, but come on, not only that the comparison is irrelevant, who the hell would compare the N95 a multimedia phone to a Blackberry – a business communicator? And so, who does Apple target with this new phone? Enterprises or casual users? I think that it is really stupid for them to omit all the obvious features found on all those other devices such as 3G, Voip, 3rd party apps, changeable batteries, AND WEIGHT.

I picked this book randomly when searching on Amazon for books read by those who purchased Douglas Coupland’s books. I was disappointed. This book was a weird recitation of series of disturbing scenes of rich young American teenagers getting screwed, getting drunk, and how they lived their immoral stupid lives. The book was written in the 80s, and apparently it was a hit at that time? The book was written as a series of relatively short scenes of the narrator going through the series of events that were supposed to make up a storyline, which I unfortunately did not find interesting, it felt very fragmented, and I had to force myself to finish the book. The book was pretty short, so I did not waste a lot of time on it… I think that it is healthy to read a crappy book every now and then to appreciate a good book when you read it.

1.5/5

– Read only if you have nothing better to do.

Less Than Zero @ Amazon.co.uk
Less Than Zero @ Amazon.com

PS. Bret Easton Ellis is the author of American Psycho – the book from which the movie of the same name was adapted.

Unlike Sur and Muscat, fortunately nothing serious happened in Sohar during the Cyclone Gonu’s visit to Oman, the tide flooded a number of areas near the sea for a short while and the electricity was down for a couple of hours only, we have no water problems around here. Thieves took the opportunity to steal some houses that were evacuated during the crisis, but that’s about it.

I went to the mosque for the Friday prayer today which was followed by a funeral prayer for all the people who were killed by Gonu.

I am still at home, I do not know if I should go back to Muscat tomorrow as there is still no water at my place in Muscat. Government offices are supposed to resume work on Sunday, but I cannot imagine that happening. Hope they announce something soon.

For those that do not know, we’re having a cyclone over this weekend here in Oman, I’ve evacuated to Sohar and I will be staying at home here for these upcoming four days. I’ve been joking to others about it being nice to have known them all, but now I do not find that joke funny.

Knowledge Oasis Muscat is going to hold the second seminar in its Digital Nation series next Sunday, the title of the seminar will be “Ramping Up Internet Usage and Content”, the panels this time will include the CEOs of Omantel, ITA (Information Technology Authority), and Nawras. The invitation email I received mentions YouTube, MySpace, and Orkut – websites which I really doubt that all of the people mentioned above ever used, visited, or even heard of. However, I am still going to attend to the event, because the seminar is only about or so and I don’t really have much else to do on that evening. I hope that it does not end up like the previous PEIE seminar.

Anybody could attend by simply emailing Ibtisam@kom.om to reserve a seat. Free dinner will be served afterwards.

I’ve recently published a tutorial on On-Site SEO Tips, and I got the number one result at Google for the words SEO Tips On-Site! Check it out here.