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Today was a strange day, after trying the iPhone for the first time I spent money on a non-iPhone phone. We were taking some photos with an iPhone, generously provided to us for an hour or so by Jimmy, and I got to play with the iPhone for the first time. It’s smaller than I had imagined, feels very solid and is just plain gorgeous. About a week ago another friend of ours, Omran, had bought a Nokia E61i and I tried it and really liked it (remember I dropped my Blackberry and cracked its screen just a couple of weeks ago). Then yesterday, MJ showed us his E61i. He had also been overcome by the device and gone out and bought one. So then driving back from Dubai Crystal told me to just go and buy one so we wouldn’t have to deal with crappy phones on Souq.com (long story, tell you later). So we did and now I too have a E61i. After using it for a few hours I must say I’m terribly impressed. I downloaded some applications, put the iPhone’s ringtone on it, and more. So far so good. Now I need to find a good case for it.

And the later question becomes what will I do when the iPhone gets here. Of course I don’t know. Perhaps I can sell the E61i and buy an iPhone. We will see. The E61i has 3G and physical QWERTY keyboard, which are huge pluses in its favor, but the iPhone is, afterall, the iPhone

Update: I forgot to mentioned I installed and set up Blackberry software on the E61i and it works wonderfully well. And for a long time I hesitated buying a Nokia phone because their track record of making their phones Mac compatible hasn’t exactly been great. But things seem to be changing. There’s a large selection of iSync plugins for Nokia phones. Just recently they also made available Nokia Media Transfer for Mac, which makes it possible to transfer music from iTunes to a Nokia phone, and send photos back and forth between the phone and iPhoto. Great stuff, and keep it up Nokia.

Update2: There’s a Symbian client of Jaiku. Pretty cool. And if you want to connect to your server with SSH, there’s Putty for Symbian. Great stuff.

Update3: I bought a pair of old (but cheap) Nokia HDS-3 stereo earphones in the local coop for AED30. Music and podcasts from iTunes sounds great.

It’s even reached Sweden, that the under-construction tower in Dubai, the Burj Dubai, is now the tallest building in the world. It’s 512 meters and they’re still building. In fact they’ve not revealed how tall it will exactly be because of competition learning about it. It is indeed an impressive building, we drive by it several times per week. But I would not want to live up there. I wouldn’t even want to go up there for the view.

Why is it so hard for some people to be quiet at the movies? We don’t go to the movies to hear others talk, to hear them taking and making calls with their mobiles, to hear them chat with friends, etc. We go to see a movie and listen to the movie. Isn’t that what others want too? I wonder. We just saw the latest Harry Potter movie (Crystal is a fan and there was two guys who kept talking, occasionally on their mobiles. I asked politely if they could be quiet but that didn’t really help. These people should stay at home and watch movies. And if talking on the phone is so important, why bother going to the movies? I don’t get it…

A new mall called Al Wadha Mall has opened in Abu Dhabi, like anyone really cares, I thought. But according to the Gulf News it’s a really big deal. Shireena Al Nowais writes that “human traffic” at Marina Mall - one of the main malls in Abu Dhabi in addition to Abu Dhabi Mall - “can be suffocating”. I can honestly say I have not noticed that myself when I’ve been there, which is quite often. She adds that the new mall is a “much needed addition to the shopping scene in Abu Dhabi”. Really? “Much needed”? Why? I guess it may be because it has “a wide selection of shiny new stores”, like Shireena writes. It’s good that the stores are “shiny”
I’ve been in Al Wadha Mall and it was nice, perhaps because it was brand new, but nothing special. Especially for me as a guy there was nothing in there that would bring me back. But I’m sure I’ll be back there sooner or later. Let’s see how things progress.

As of yesterday Dubai has the tallest building in the world, with the Burj Dubai. We do not know just how tall the build will be in when it finishes, but it will be taller than it is now. Read more at CNN.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Developers of a 1,680-foot (512 meters) skyscraper still under construction in oil-rich Dubai has claimed that it has become the world’s tallest building, surpassing Taiwan’s Taipei 101 which has dominated the global skyline at 1,667 feet (508 meters) since 2004.

The Burj Dubai is expected to be finished by the end of 2008 and its planned final height has been kept secret. The state-owned development company Emaar Properties, one of the main builders in rapidly developing Dubai, said only that the tower would stop somewhere above 2,275 feet.

When completed, the skyscraper will feature more than 160 floors, 56 elevators, luxury apartments, boutiques, swimming pools, spas, exclusive corporate suites, Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani’s first hotel, and a 124th floor observation platform.

After North American and Asian cities marked their 20th century economic booms with skyscrapers, the Gulf grew eager to show off its success with ever taller buildings. In Dubai, long an oil-rich Gulf symbol of rapid economic growth, the building reflects the city’s hunger for global prestige.

“It’s a symbol of Dubai as a city of the world,” said Greg Sang, the project director for Emaar Properties.

Mohammed Ali Alabbar, chairman of Emaar, said it will be an architectural and engineering masterpiece of concrete, steel and glass. Dubai has “resisted the usual and has inspired to build a global icon,” he said.

“It’s a human achievement without equal.”

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The $1 billion skyscraper is in the heart of downtown Dubai, a 500-acre development area worth $20 billion. Construction, which began just 1,276 days ago, has been frenzied — at times, one storey rises every three days.

The tip of the Burj’s spire will be seen for 60 miles, developers say. But Sang knows it will not dominate the world’s skyline forever.

“It’s a fact of life that, at some point, someone else will build a taller building,” he said. “There’s a lot of talk of other tall buildings, but five years into Burj Dubai’s construction, no one’s started building them yet,” he said.

Previous skyscraper record-holders include New York’s Empire State Building at 1,250 feet; Shanghai’s Jin Mao Building at 1,381 feet; Chicago’s Sears Tower at 1,451 feet; and Malaysia’s Petronas Towers at 1,483 feet.

The Burj will let the Middle East reclaim the world’s tallest structure. Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, built around 2500 B.C., held the title with its 481 feet (147 meters) until the Eiffel Tower in Paris was built in 1889 at a height of 985 feet (300 meters), or 1,023 feet (312 meters) including the flag pole.

The company says the Burj will fulfill the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s four criteria for the tallest building: the height of the structural top, the highest occupied floor, the roof’s top, and the spire’s tip, pinnacle, antenna, mast or flag pole.

For now, the unattractive brownish concrete skeleton jutting into Dubai’s humid skies lacks any aura of a masterpiece. Rising 141 floors with a mass of surrounding cranes and girders, it has no windows, glass or steel yet.

The architects and engineers are American and the main building contractor is South Korean.

Most of the 4,000 laborers are Indian. They toil around the clock in Dubai’s sizzling summer with no set minimum wage. Human rights groups regularly protest against labor abuse in Dubai, but local media rarely report such complaints.

I really like this:
1 Less is more
2 Treat everything like a piece of art
3 Form follows function
4 Redefine luxury
5 Never stop learning

Oh, and it’s a nice car too!

What a feeling - I managed to get down to zero emails in my inbox. We all work differently but I usually feel stressed out about having emails in my inbox, just sitting there. Sure there are things that I have to do that are not urgent but still have to be done. What I usually do is add a star to them (I use GMail) and then I have a to-do list in Starred Items. But everyday I try to clear out my inbox because I know the longer I leave something in there, the more it’s just going to add up. There are five messages left today, another three tomorrow, and soon I have hundreds. And taking care of those old messages takes time to go through. So what I try to do is get them out of the inbox as soon as possible just by attaching a label to them and archiving them, adding a star, or just deleting them. I like that I can keep all my emails forever in GMail - I currently use close to 2GB of my space - but I also have to get the emails out of the inbox as soon as I can.

You would think it would have been enough with the car crash, the Blackberry, and having the stomach bug, but no, of course not. Now I’ve had a sinus infection for going on the fourth day, with soar throat, throbbing head ache, and all that good stuff. Will it ever end?
Update: you know it’s bad when you turn off AC and still have to wear a thick sweater and be under blankets not to freeze.

I’ve been receiving a newsletter from ArabianBusiness. I can’t remember subscribing to it, but I guess I did somewhere along the line. Probably by forgetting to check, or uncheck, a box when filling in a form for something.

In the newsletter it says:

Should you wish to remove your email address from the mailing list please click here.

So I click on “here”. It takes me to Arabianbusiness’ web site, displays a message saying:

Thank you for selecting ArabianBusiness.com newsletters.

Your unsubscription request has been accepted and you have been sent a confirmation email.

You have been sent an confirmation email to this address : ________.
One step left, Please check your inbox shortly and click on the confirmation link provided in the email.

An email arrives, which has another link in it, which I click. On ArabianBusiness.com it then says:

We have received your request to remove your email address from ArabianBusiness.com newsletter list. To confirm your request for (_____), you must complete one of the following steps:

With another link to click on, so I do. On their web site it says:

Your email appears to have already been unsubscribed and the link is no longer valid. If you continue to receive this newsletter please contact the webmaster. (webmaster@arabianbusiness.com)

But I keep getting the newsletter, so I email “webmaster@arabianbusiness.com”, asking them to remove me. A little bit later I get this email:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

webmaster@arabianbusiness.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 550 , Recipient unknown

Should it be this hard to just get away from an email newsletter subscription?

And to make matters worse, take a look around the site and see if there’s a “Contact us” page? I’ve been looking long and hard and can’t find it. You have to click on “ITP Digital” at the bottom, then “Contact Us”, and finally decide who you should send your issue to. Now tell me, for example, how do you know, as an average visitor to the site, if you should send your message to the Director, the Creative Director, the Internet Development Manager, the Internet Applications Manager, the Internet Design Manager, the Web Designer, or the Content Manager?

Volvo is the object of intense national pride in Sweden, I think it’s safe to say. Even though it was sold to Ford in 1999, it’s still Swedish, at least in the minds of Swedes. As far as I know most design, development and production is still done in Sweden, so even if profit-dollars go to the US, that would make Volvo Swedish. at least in some ways.

Now it seems Ford wants to sell Volvo, I guess to get their hands on some badly needed cash. Could it be that someone in Sweden could gather up enough capital to bring the ownership back to “Mother Svea”?

Disclaimer: we own a Volvo