Blue Chi’s

Have you ever had a shaving screw up when by mistake you shave too much hair from one side and it is just unfixable?! Well, it just happened to me right now and I have a meeting at the Ministry of Environment tomorrow, an ITA workshop on Monday, dinner on the same day, and a meeting with PWP the day after. I think that I look like a freakshow, but somehow I think that I’ll be able to hide it by the mussar – or that’s what I’m hoping. (it’s on the side of the head hair, don’t know what they call that place). I am also trying to convince myself that my hair grows really quick and it won’t be visible within two days. Regardless, it is NOT COOL AT ALL AND I MIGHT AS WELL COMMIT SUICIDE. (it is not that bad, but you guys get the idea)

Anyway, talking about random things, the weather is getting really hotter and hotter by the day and it is unbearable. I went back to Sohar for the weekend and when I got back my room here felt like an oven. Makes you wonder how people in the past used to live without ACs.

I would like to take sometime off from Ministry work and just go back home for a month or so. I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to sit at home, watch tv, read some books, have proper lunch, and just do nothing. I can’t remember the last time I did that, but I badly need some of it now.

Just came from the Digital Nation seminar that was held at the intercon. I did not think that it was the most amazing, I actually personally do not think that Second Life will necessarily work for tourism because:

1. The fact that you have a place in second life does not mean that anybody will visit it. Just like the fact that if have a website on the internet that does not mean that people will visit it. You still need to promote your content. How are we going to promote (not build) Oman in second life?
2. The demographic of the second life users are not the same as those Oman targets to come to it as tourists.

Investing in second life can also be a real risk because building places on it can be expensive, I do not know how much it would actually cost to build something in SL, but I imagine a full proper building would be in the tens of thousands of dollars and a city will surely be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Add to this the fact that you probably cannot reuse these assets (3D models and objects) for other purposes because of SL’s proprietary environment.

Second Life has major accessibility and usability issues such as:

1. It requires the user to install the game on their machine to actually get into Second Life. Second life cannot be accessed from internet tables, mobile phones, or anything other than a proper PC with a proper graphics card and a highspeed internet connection. Not all people have this.
2. Second Life is not as easy to use as people make it sound, just customizing your avatar takes time and can be a hard thing to do. Even just moving the player and flying around is not something that you can expect the average Omani Internet user to do. Young people who grew up playing games will get it, but don’t expect a 30 something Omani person to learn it now. Building content for Second Life is, in plain words, difficult to do and requires high technical skills.
3. Second Life requires a high speed internet connection and the internet connection in Oman, including the latest upgrades by Omantel, suffers from connection quality issues (such as those affecting latency) that make online games lag.

I am too tired to write a lot about what I think of this topic, but I generally think that social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are better places to easily promote products and services – FOR FREE. In Facebook, anybody can create a page or a group, and then just use the viral nature of these social networks to spread the word. Instead of trying to recreate the Muscat Festival in second life a group can be easily created to which Facebook users can subscribe and receive the latest news about.

Anyway, the Chocolate Fudge was so good it compensated for my disapproval of the use of Second Life to promote tourism. But then again I did not network well at all, I didn’t talk to a single new person – and that was not cool. Hopefully the next one will be better!

I’m back in town, got back from Egypt last night, had to go directly to Sohar, came to Muscat a couple of hours ago. I hated Egypt, I don’t think that I’ll ever go again. The conference was the worst ever I’ve been in terms of organization, the seating was so messed up I don’t even know where to start, we didn’t have water to drink, I asked for some and I was turned down, the food was the closest thing I would imagine they would be giving in prisons – it was so horrible, you guys have no idea.

Half the audience also had no idea what the event was about, they thought it was about investment promotion in the Arab region or something like that, when it was about the risks of international investment treaties – something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. The UNCTAD speakers were the best as usual, an excellent non-UNCTAD Egyptian lawyer also discussed the first case ever to involve a Omani investor. It was very interesting.

However, that is not to say that I had fun in Egypt or anything like that, every single person on the street seemed like he would do anything to rob money off a foreigner. It was really horrible. I also had the very unfortunate incident of using a faulty ATM machine in the airport that claimed it gave me the money I attempted to withdrew and gave me a statement confirming that it did when nothing came out! It was the airport right when I came, and through the mess and noise of the airport, I just decided to take my freaking statement and just use another machine. I checked my bank account today and the amount was deducted. I do not know if I can get my money back, but will try to contact Bank Muscat even though I doubt they can do anything.

I hate Egypt and I’m never going back to it again.

Blogging this on the go, just thought I.ll say that I love the Bank
Muscat in City Center because they are open through out the day, I
don't know how we can live with regular strange bank working hours.
The people in city center branch are alright (except maybe for Basma
with her weird attitude, but luckily I've not dealt with her lately),
so yeah, extra brownie points for BM!

–
Riyadh Al-Balushi

I’ll be attending a conference on international investment dispute settlement in Cairo later this week (Wednesday and Thursday). The event is organised by the secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) jointly with the Cairo Regional Centre for International Commercial Arbitration. The conference will discuss the challenges faced by Arab countries in the area of bilateral investment treaties. This is relevant to our work at MOLA because we are responsible for reviewing all international agreements prior to their signed by our country.

I’ll be traveling on Tuesday and I’ll d be back on Friday.

I discovered this new blog today and it’s so awesome I had to share it with all of you guys, it’s written by a Canadian English teacher working at Ibri’s College of Applied Sciences. Ibri is one of the bigger deserted Omani towns near the UAE boarders, and it basically has nothing other than this college… but yeah, anyway, there is this blogger called Andy who has been writing about his experience of Omani culture, his activities with various Christian societies in Oman, and the way he spends his time with staff colleagues going to Al Ain or Muscat every weekend to watch a movie and have a decent meal. The blog is awesome, here are my favourite posts:

• Arablish – Quotes from Omani students’ first day English essay. Unbelievably hilarious!
• Omani Hospitaliy – pictures of a visit to the house of an Omani family.
• Baptisim in Oman – I had never known people get baptised in Oman. (Yes, I’m ignorant.)

And many many more, check out Andy in Oman via this link.

PEIE is organising a very interesting campaign for promoting local Omani products in the format of a dinner event to be held at the Oman Tourism College where all the food served will not have any ingredients that have traveled more than 150 kilometers from their direct source to get to the college.

‘Food-Miles’ is such a cool concept, I have never though about how much distance a meal I’m eating has traveled to come to my dish. If you think about it, the shorter the distance an ingredient travels, the fresher it is. I have no idea how the Oman Tourism College will manage to do it, 150KM will mean that even ingredients from Sohar will not qualify, I assume that the dinner will mostly be sea food as the sea is probably less than 2KM away from the college.

I did try their food at the eGames Conference and it was not bad at all. This event is free of charge, so I might as well just go for the sake of the free meal! (And to support local products of course! )

The Origin Oman 150KM will be held on the evenings of the 25th and 26th of May. You can get your invitation by emailing hamida.albalushi@peie.om (we are NOT related).

I think that as Oman opens up to foreign investment and as our country concludes more and more free trade agreements, local business will have a hard time surviving the fierce competition, so we do need to support and promote local products. The Origin Oman campaign aims to do that by organising various events, some for the public to make them aware of good local products and service, some of Omani business to help them raise their standards.

PS. PEIE is also holding an RO 500 competition for students to design the Origin Oman logo, make sure you check it out if you are interested.