Chris Saul's Blog

Thursday February 28, 2008

Dental disaster

I'm off to the dentist today.

For years I've just had the one filling. Now, after not going to the dentist for just over two years, I need three (admittedly small) fillings. Loads of plaque also had to be scraped off during a visit a couple of weeks ago, leaving a small gap which I thought had previously been filled with my gums, but clearly hadn't been for a while.

I have only myself to blame. It's easy to skip brushings when travelling all the time, but there's really no excuse for it. Bother.

AV Irritations

I'm reaching boiling point with the new TV and DVD player.

When watching DVDs, Cable TV or video through my iPod, audio is out of synch by up to half a second on the Sony LCD TV. It's infuriating - rather like watching a badly dubbed foreign language film.

The Bose guys came and stared at the TV for thirty minutes, repeatedly asking me 'is that better, sir?'. I kept saying 'no', as it clearly wasn't. Then I realised they weren't actually doing anything other than changing the channel, waiting for a few moments and calling me back in.

Eventually I asked them if they really thought anything was wrong. They said they thought it looked fine and that sometimes lips just looked strange on LCD TVs. We were clearly getting nowhere.

The Sony guy came today and told me I should only watch DVDs from Sony and that Sony can't help it if the audio is out of synch on TV broadcasts and bad DVDs. Classic buck passing really, which I don't buy - everything was fine on my old CRT, even when sitting up close and watching closely. DVDs all look fine on my high resolution laptop screen as well. Plus, the DVD we were watching to test things was a BBC DVD, not something bought from the Chinese DVD lady.

Even if other sources are out of synch, the TV should surely provide some method to help users sync the audio up?

I pretended to be a lot more cross than I really was and the Sony guy said he'd ask some more senior engineers - maybe there was a software setting he could adjust or the software could be updated to include a manual setting to help synch audio.

Looking at various forums on the web it seems that I'm far from being the only one with this issue. It seems to affect a lot of people, all using different brands of TVs. As more and more people buy these things, it's only going to get worse.

It seems to me that it's something for the TV vendors (and preferably the other device vendors) to address via a setting on the TV. The same problem affects my DVDs, Cable TV and iPod videos. Whilst they might all have badly encoded audio, the fact remains that I'm watching everything through one device - the TV. If the TV provides settings for brightness, contrast and so on, surely it should be able to do something to help with audio.

The Sony technician told me that 80% of his time is spent with customers annoyed with the picture quality on their new expensive LCD HD TVs - they'd all seen the High Def demos in the shop and expected the same thing from the TV signal at home.

I knew what I was getting into in terms of picture quality - resolution is resolution. What I didn't expect was something as basic as audio not working properly after paying 10,000 Dhs for a TV and 5,000 for a DVD and surround system.

I just want it to work!

Wednesday February 27, 2008

Mystery technical conundrum solved

Ever since we moved in, the door entry system in our ground floor lobby has appeared to be broken. If you tap in our apartment number the display simply states 'Resident not present'. This is a bit irritating - only a bit, as most visitors come up from the basement car park, where there is no entry system at all, but that's another story.

I have probably logged three calls about our lobby entry system. Each time I get an SMS a few days later saying that the issue has been solved. I then go downstairs at the next opportunity, test it, see the same error and log another call when I get around to it.

This time I specifically asked them to call me after they had tested it. The engineer duly called me on the intercom from downstairs, everything appearing to work fine. He then came up to talk to me.

Apparently it's been working perfectly from day one - but you have to put a zero in before the apartment number you're dialling.

The engineer told me this, smiling away. When I asked how anyone was supposed to know that this mysterious zero was needed, he just shrugged and said that part wasn't his job.

A certain resident has now stuck a printed sign on our entry system now telling people to dial zero before the apartment number, hopefully solving Zafaraan 2's 'faulty' system once and for all. Meanwhile residents across all the other buildings in this development are doubtless logging calls for their 'faulty' systems and the contractor is probably employing a full time engineer to go around 'fixing' them.

Tuesday February 26, 2008

Mummy Jennifer!

This obituary of 'Mummy Jennifer' is a must read.

What an extraordinary woman.

"In her later years visiting foreign journalists mused about how the wild, tribal frontier, where women are in purdah and even goatherds carry Kalashnikovs, was an unlikely place to find an elderly Irish widow serving afternoon tea. The area has lately become a stronghold for the Taliban, and is generally out of bounds to foreigners.

Jennifer died on January 12. Her funeral procession was attended by thousands of burly, turbaned Pathans (many of them allied to the Taliban) who raised cheers of "Mummy Jennifer!" in her honour as the cortège passed through a shuttered Pishin."

Ads on bbc.co.uk?

I use AdBlock on Firefox to block ads and thereby ruin the sole revenue stream of most of the funky Web 2.0 companies that I use. For ages I wondered how Facebook was supposed to make any money - then I saw a colleague accessing Facebook on their un-adblocked laptop, the otherwise clean user-interface surrounded by flashing banners.

Recently the BBC seem to have started putting ads on their front page as well. AdBlock blocks them, but the page looks ugly, with a big advert sized gap at the top of the page between the top menu bar and where the 'news bit' actually starts. Very unappealing. I presume that you only get the ads if you're accessing news.bbc.co.uk outside of the UK and therefore are not paying the licence fee? I'm tempted to switch off AdBlock just to see who and what is being advertised.

The BBC have such a great track record for well designed sites that look good, aren't cluttered and only use Flash and other tools when strictly needed. I hope their web designers redo news.bbc.co.uk so that I can continue to block their ads and still have things look good!

Monday February 25, 2008

First Dubai Metro trains arrive

Courtesy of Seabee at the UAE Community blog, a pic of the first Dubai metro trains arriving.

I can't get the picture to appear here, but if you click here it should work.

We will have a metro station within walking distance of our apartment. It should also be bearable in the summer as most of the walking would be underground. I can see myself potentially using it to get to the airport.

Sunday February 24, 2008

Tagged

I have been tagged by both Mr Aaron and Alexander.

Here we go -

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)

Todes-gruss by Zane Radcliffe. We have just had some German visitors...

2. Open the book to page 123.

Done.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

Blinde Pferden haben empfindliche Nasen. (Blind horses have sensitive noses).

4. Post the next three sentences.

>>Was wills du damit sagen?<< Callum schnueffelte demonstrativ an seinen Achseln.

Birna schuettelte den Kopf.

5. Tag five people.

That's quite enough book tagging for now, danke schoen und gute Nacht.

Wednesday February 20, 2008

Dubai Panorama

A friend of ours, Tamsin Faragher, took this great panorama shot of Dubai's main 'skyscraper strip'.

We live jut to the right of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai, which is just left of centre.

Full image is here.

Monday February 18, 2008

Gotcha

Mrs Saul was being bothered by a large mosquitoe this evening. She was divebombed several times whilst we were wathing TV, but I couldn't get it, despite my best efforts.

I've just splatted it in the spare room, after several failed attempts halfway through the middle of 'House' on MBC 4.

I think the reason I got it this time was due to the fact that the large payload of blood it was carrying made it somewhat less manoeuvrable.

This incident reminded me of a Sunday lunch at home many years ago. I remember my mother saying that she thought she had been bitten by something about the same time as my father noticing an insect-like thing sitting on the dining room wall. Needless to say, it got splatted shortly after by the Sunday Times, giving us all confirmation that my mother had indeed been bitten. Yuck.

When Mrs Saul first arrived in the UAE I told her that there were no mosquitoes, midges or any other biting insects here. A couple of weeks later I realised I was wrong. There are simply no mosquitoes, midges or any other biting insects here that like eating me.

Wednesday February 13, 2008

Transaction cancelled

Back home to Dubai from Jo'burg, ready to give my bank a rocket for blocking some simple transactions on my cards. Both my HSBC visa and my Citibank were blocked at one point or another during this trip. No call from HSBC to check where I am and only a belated call from Citibank after I'd been obliged to use another card. Irritating!

Monday February 11, 2008

Archbishop's musings

Mr Wilton has a far more erudite post on the current controversy surrounding the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent comments than the draft I had put together.

My brief thoughts on the issue -

- It's been good to see some editorials encouraging people to read what was said in its entirety before making judgements, statements and wild allegations.

- It's a shame that intellectuals on any side of the religious fence can't air their usually non-inflammatory thoughts without the press jumping to instant, tabloid friendly, flame fanning conclusions.

- In an era increasingly filled with pointless law suits, I like the idea of sensible, independent common-sense arbitration, providing all that's involved is simple, common-sense arbitration.

Sunday February 10, 2008

Abu Dhabi's Green City

Abu Dhabi's new green city is good news.

Up until now, quite understandably from an economic standpoint, there's been little use of green energy in the UAE (to the best of my knowledge), but things change quickly and big investments are now being made.

I was once told by someone who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew the supposedly eccentric English owner of a shop in Dubai selling solar power equipment, that the best customers were Afghans working in the more remote areas of the UAE on farms and suchlike. Needs must and decades of hard times had meant that these particular customers knew how to live off the land better than anyone else.

My father recently installed solar panels too, beating Abu Dhabi to the green punch.

Chris meets John Abraham

A couple of years ago, I was briefly touched by Bollywood magic. Whilst buying some walkie-talkies at a small electronics stand in one of Dubai's malls, Bobby Deol walked past me coming out of a tobacconist's, much to the excitement of the Indian guys manning the till. I had no idea who he was, even though the chap taking my money looked at me as if I were an idiot and told me that it was *the* Bobby Deol!

Today, whilst standing in passport control in Johannesburg, John Abraham was standing a mere six feet away from me, in the queue for South African and African state passport holders, for some reason. That queue tends to move more quickly, so maybe his superstar status wangled him some preferential treatment. I should really have asked for his autograph, but he was being mildly besieged by some of his fellow citizens, so I didn't.

The local Dubai press usually has Indian stars in their tabloid sections alongside Western stars, so I'm vaguely familiar with the more famous names and faces - I just can't get into Bollywood films though, even though I tend to watch lots of them by proxy when staring at my neighbours' TV screens on various Emirates routes. Two exceptions are Lagaan and The Ballad of Mangal Pandey. Highly recommended if you are a fan of films with evil, be-whiskered colonial types and don't mind fast-forwarding through some of the longer song and dance sequences.

I wonder if I'll ever get to bump into Aishwarya Rai?

Das ist Service!

Seven or so years ago, I got my first WAP enabled mobile phone - a Nokia 6310i. Whilst on the 371 back from Richmond station to the shared house I was living in in St Margarets, I gave the WAP browser a go, keen to live the mobile revolution, currently the focus of most of the presentations I was giving at Sun at the time.

I wasn't able to get to Amazon's UK WAP page for some reason, but Amazon's German site worked. I bought an album by Catatonia. The process was slow and fiddly, but it worked and my album duly arrived a week or so later. That was pretty much the last time I ever used a mobile phone to access the internet until getting my current Sony - seven years later.

Today, in my inbox, was a mail from Amazon.de telling me that Catatonia's former lead singer has released a new album. Now, that, dear readers, is what I call service. It is also what German speakers might possibly call 'Service'.

If I do buy it, I will still not be using my phone to do so.

Friday February 08, 2008

Audio show off

Saul Towers has had its TV and audio upgraded. Out with the small portable hifi and in with a Bose 321 surround sound system in the living room, with iTunes streaming to it over the network from the 'house' laptop. The other two rooms now have a Bose Companion 3 and 5 respectively, soon to be hooked up to streaming music. For now the spare room has my work laptop attached to to the Companion 3 playing music over the network.

I can't believe the clarity of the sound coming out of these things - I feel like I'm listening to my favourite songs for the first time. Fortunately we don't have neighbours below us for the moment, so I'm making use of the thumping bass while I can. Wonderful.

The new Sony TV is fantastic too. Playing Wii boxing on a 40" LCD is much more fun than on the relatively ancient 21" TV we used to have.

There are some niggles - I'm mildly confused at the mass of cables required to get everything hooked up. The Bose 321 is not working quite right with TV and DVD playback either - there is a slight lag between sound and video that is driving me mad. It's about a second out of sync and I can't work out how to fix it.

I still need to decide if it's worth having a dedicated PC hooked up to the TV. I can see the advantages but we'll manage fine without one for now.

Once I get the minor audio video sync irritations sorted out and make sure everything's definitely cabled up as it should be we'll have a fantastic setup. The next step will be trailing through every furniture shop in Dubai to find a TV cabinet that meets Mrs Saul's strict specifications...

That's enough showing off for now.