Blue Chi’s

Guys, I need your help!

The Oman Web Awards 2007 has been announced and I am sure that most of you still remember my adventure with the Oman Web Awards 2006 and the Oman Web Awards 2005.

I intend to play the Search Engine Optimization game and show up in the first page of results before them if I can. You can help me do that by making a post in your blog linking to my original posts on the topic in the following manner: (The following paragraph)

The Oman Web Awards 2007 is coming up, read what Blue_Chi has written about the Oman Web Awards 2006 and the Oman Web Awards 2005.

If you can copy and paste the paragraph above in your blog you will greatly help! Every single post really truly here matters, so please help!

RamadhanTV did not go exactly as I planned, I was let down by a number of key people that were supposed to contribute in it, I lost the Internet connection at my place in Muscat for the whole of Ramadhan so I could not make many updates myself, and I couldn’t find a tv-tuner that works on Windows Vista to have another person record some tv along with me.

Yet regardless of the fact that we did not have a the amount of updates I wanted, the traffic we received was substantial as the total amount of page views we received in September and October is more than 50,000 page views – and the funny thing is that our daily average has increased after Ramadhan ended.

The great thing about writing content on the web is that it is an investment, your content will always be there (as long as you pay for webhosting) and it can be accessed through search engines and links from other people as long as it remains online (and remains relevant). You can spend a day or two writing something that could generate traffic to your website for an entire year and that has been our plan for RamadhanTV.

We are going to wrap up the website by making some final summary posts, fix some small things, link it up to my other websites to improve our Google ranking, and then record all the things that went wrong to make sure we get them right next year.

Hopefully next year we will do better because we have an idea on how far ahead we have to plan this before Ramadhan starts, we an idea of who will actually contribute and who will not, we have statistics of who reads Ramadhan related content, we have statistics of what popular content people are searching for in Ramadhan, and we also now have working experience with the Arabic wordpress and writing Arabic content.

Thanks for all of those who visited RamadhantV, hopefully we will deliver a better coverage next year!

I have another two websites coming up in the pipelines, I will try to push them out before the end of the year! Wish me luck people!

Here in Oman we decided to be cooler (?) than everybody else and fast one extra day just for the sake of it. Eid was celebrated today Saturday the 13th of October. I’ve gone back home for the holiday, we are getting a whole week off.

We had the regular program for Eid this year, prayed Eid prayer in the mosque near my grandfathers house, went to his house, had some ’3irsiyah’ (Arabic dish made up of rice finely mashed served with butter oil and and fine shreds of meat), then went around to greet friends and relatives.

I also went along to greet the Wali of Sohar (Omani term for the mayor of town), who interestingly set up a huge tent in the Fort of Sohar to receive the locals. The habit was that that he received people in one of the rooms of his office opposite the Fort from which many people complained saying that it is as small as a little storage room that got so crowded making people queue to get in. The new temporary tent was large and luxurious, the guards of the Fort played meeters and greeters and all the staff of the Wali Office attended as well. I think that everyone liked it for the space, the view from the fort as you leave the tent, and just the fact that you entered the Fort on Eid. They will probably start having this every single Eid from now on.

I also visited several of my relatives who still lived in little old houses right in front of the beach. You literally have to walk on the sand of the beach to enter one’s house. Imagine yourself right on the beach every time you went out of your house, sounds amazing for a life, but I am sure that the people that live there do not find it special at all when they had it for their entire life.

The really sad thing is that many of these people, my grandfather included, will have to evacuate their houses and move to a new place as the Sea Road project will go over their property. It is true that they will be compensated, but the majority of those people lived by the sea in this neighbourhood for their entire life, and their parents before them lived in this same place for their entire lives as well, changing houses is a life changing event for many and money might never be a good enough compensation.

The new book of Douglas Coupland was released last week which he has been promoting by publishing some really cool videos on YouTube featuring some quotes her narrates from the book.

This book has been on my Amazon wish list for a while and it is finally out, I’m going to get this the next time I order from Amazon by the end of this month. I Can’t wait.

You can watch the other two promotional videos on this link.

Check out the Gum Thief at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

The greatest book that I’ve read in the last couple of months is Marci AlBoher’s One Person/Multiple Careers, an inspiring read on how one can achieve a more satisfying work and life success by pursuing more than a single career at the same time. The book has many stories of different approaches taken by the subjects the author met when writing this book. The book features advice on how to start a *slash* career, how to develop it, how to introduce yourself when you have one, how to write your multiple career CV, and other practical and interesting subjects.

Marci’s writing revitalized my spirit and validated the choices that I personally have taken in life. It’s not much about the tips, but the stories of success that people went through to achieve satisfaction. At many instances in my life I felt confused and thought of giving up things that I did that made me satisfied simply because they did not relate to the *main* career path I have taken. This book taught me otherwise. It taught me that it is fine to be extraordinary.

The book is surely not for everyone as some might not have the energy, drive, or courage to pursue more than one career at the same time, but it surely is a must read for those of us who cannot sit down, want to try out everything out there, and feel that they can do so much more, but are somewhat afraid or hesitant to do other things because of the engagement in a certain career.

4/5

One Person/Multiple Careers – Amazon.com
One Person/Multiple Careers – Amazon.co.uk

PS. Last month, I updated my About Me page after reading this book.

I will be attending a 10-day training programme in Jordan right after Eid. The event is organised by the investment section of the Islamic Development Bank organisation and the United Nations’ UNCTAD. The program will cover international investment agreements and dispute settlement issues related to them (mostly arbitration).

One of our duties at MOLA is to review investment agreements that government goes into, and one of my colleagues at work is part of the negotiating committee that is responsible for bilateral investment agreements with other countries, so this should be very interesting. I am required to submit a 2-3 page brief on the BIT format Oman uses, which I found, but did not manage to examine properly yet. I am supposed to submit this within five days, I will try to do it tomorrow.

The program is going to be pretty extensive, 9am to 6pm daily with one day off through-out, so I am not sure how much sightseeing I will be able to do, but it is always nice to have a break from work every now and then.

Will keep up you updated on how this goes.