Blue Chi’s

I spend about an hour on daily basis responding to member questions on the Oman3D Flash Forum. It is usually a fun activity where I guide people on how to fix their projects and help them accomplish what they want to do using ActionScript… But then there are times when some members can get really ony my nerves.

I hate it when impatient people make stupid posts. If you are not blind you would have seen that the last message I posted is on the second page of the thread list and I have obviously not logged in since, I did not forget your stupid thread and I will get to answer it eventually.

I follow a standard procedure whereby I answer threads from the oldest to the newest (bottom to top), so if someone is impatient and makes a post to remind me to answer his questions that will only push it up the post list and down my to answer list.

So if you want to have a quick response from yours truly then make a single post and wait. Do not ever make a reminder post. Dont EVER do that. EVER.

All of my web projects are offline because of an service outage from our host. We are using a dedicated server package from 1and1, which is supposed to be one of the best hosting providers in the UK, but I guess than having a 100% uptime is impossible. The horrible thing about this is that I can’t see anything about outage on the control panel and I have no idea for how long this has been going or when it will end. All I know is that Wednesday is usually one of our busier days of the week and we’re losing traffic I type this. Urgh!!!

Update: It’s 2pm and we’re back online. I’m checking some of our stats and it looks like the outage lasted only for two and a lahf hours. (10.30am to 1pm Oman Time).

I was getting pretty depressed with Oman3D earlier in February and thought that I was wasting my time and that I am not going anywhere. It is very hard to stay motivated in this thing when I am working all by myself, it can easily get very lonely when there is no human to talk to.

There is nobody really to look up to. There is nobody to guide me through what I should do. I do not know anybody around me doing anything similar. It is true that I have my team, but I almost always have to push everyone forward, plan ahead and tell everyone what to do. At many times, I make loads of plans and just nothing happens. That sucks. It really does.

But then I really thought about it, and I thought that god only gave me all those gifts in order for me to do something special. I do not want to blend with the rest of the crowd, get a job at a stupid oil company and just forget about it.

I think that I have what it takes to do this, and I know that all I need to do is focus.

Today was a good day. Just checked our stats and two days ago we broke our record of daily visits and pageviews, we received more than 8,000 visitors and 17,000 page views in one day.

Our accumulative traffic for Feb was good, we are almost at 400,000 page views a month. I can’t wait reach my target of half a million page views, I’m sick of this paper banner in my room.

Just a little bit more…

Just published our latest feature at O3D, an interview with Ron Hollet, Creative Director of Business Development at TBWA\ZEENAH, Oman’s leading advertising agency. Check it out here.

(try not to look at the hand)

We had the big idea for making a podcast for more than a year, we bought some equipment and planned the thing, but never actually did it. Two days ago I woke up and decided to just go and do it, it was now or never. My Oman3D colleague Conceptoo and I got together at my place, wrote down what we wanted to say, and recorded it.

At the end, I realise that I probably made the world’s most boring podcast, I sound so dead I hate it. Conceptoo recorded an Arabic version which I think sounds so much better. Each of these podcasts is less than 5 minutes in length, we simply recited the latest headlines and articles we had published on Oman3D during the last month. We think that having a podcast is a great way for promoting our content in a new medium, we hope that it will attract visitors to our website through new ways.

We realised that nobody ever realises how he or she sounds to other people and that people might not even recognise their own voice when they hear it played unless they were told it was them. The voice inside our heads is never the same as what other people hear.

I’m sorry about the quality of my podcast, it took us 3 hours to get those 5 minutes recorded, it is so easy to start pronouncing words in the strangest ways in front of the microphone, and lets not even start with the weird accent peaks.

We’ll try not to sound more like speaking instead of reading next month!

Anyway, hope you enjoy the first ever Omani podcast, in English and Arabic.

We recently interviewed Anna Mair, an American photographer based in Oman. Her first exhibition is named I:Woman:Flower and it will be held from the 7th to the 21st of February at Bait Al Baranda museum. Check out some samples of her awesome work through our interview link above. I plan on attending the opening. Make sure you check out her exhibition if you’re around.

We participated at SQU’s Design Forum exhibition yesterday. Check out some more images here.

Oman3D will have a stall at SQU’s Design Forum conference/exhibition to be held tomorrow in SQU’s Conference and Exhibition Halls. Entry is open to the public, should start at 9 and the exhibition will be open until 5. Feel free to drop by if you are going to be around that area.

We are in the progress of doing a major website update for Oman3d and we’re trying to improve as many things as we can this time. We have never carried out a members survey and we do not really know what OUR MEMBERS would like to us to do (regarding many things, tutorials, competitions, features, etc). We are going to give a DVD movie for one winner to be selected at random (the list of DVDs is on the last page of the survey).

If you visit Oman3D on regular OR irregular basis I hope that you help us by filling out the survey. (IT IS VERY SHORT).

CLICK HERE TO FILL THE SURVEY.