intodimensions.com

Seems things aren’t good in the Middle East when it comes to internet:

Dubai, renowned for its high-technology facilities, has seen many of its services paralyzed by an extensive Internet failure which affected much of Asia and the Middle East on Thursday.
A major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major cable failure.
Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE’s public and private sectors.
There were contradicting reports on the real cause behind the disruption, but Du, a state-owned Dubai telecom provider, attributed it to an undersea cable cut in the Mediterranean Sea between Alexandria, Egypt and Palermo, Italy.
India’s Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half by the outage, The Associated Press reported Thursday, and its lucrative outsourcing industry was seeking to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.
A Du internal memo, obtained by CNN, called the situation in Dubai “critical.”
“This will have a major impact on our voice and Internet service for all the customers,” the memo stated. “The network operation team are working with our suppliers overseas to resolve this as soon as possible.”
In a notice sent to customers, Du said the cable’s operators assured the company it was working to fix the problems quickly, but it did not know when services would be restored.
The outage led to a rapid collapse of a wide range of public services in a country which proudly promotes itself as technological pioneer.
Sources from Emirates Airlines confirmed to CNN Arabic that the outage did not affect its flight schedules — a statement which assured hundreds of travelers worried after rumors about the possibility of rescheduled flights due to the faults.
“Our flights were not affected by the current situation, and the schedules remain unchanged,” said Hatim Omar, an Emirates spokesman.
However, Dnata, a government group in charge of providing air travel services in the Middle East and ground handling services at Dubai International Airport, acknowledged facing problems because of the outage, sources from its technical department confirmed to CNN Arabic.
The outage heavily crippled Dubai’s business section, which is heavily reliant on electronic means for billions of dollars’ worth of transactions daily.
Wadah Tahah, the business strategies and development manager for state-owned construction company EMAAR, told CNN Arabic that it was fortunate the outage started Wednesday, when there had been only moderate activity in the UAE markets. He said that softened the blow to business interests.
But Tahah warned that if the outage continued, “such a situation could create problems between brokers, companies, and investors due to loss of control.”

It’s funny how you get used to having internet connection, isn’t it? During our first day or so here we were lucky enough that some neighbor had wide-open wifi available with broadband internet. That network has now disappeared. We have our Blackberries so we can do basic email and browsing through them which is great but you know they are just not any substitute for a computer for many things. So we have been to Starbucks a few times but their wifi is run by TMobile and it’s expensive: $40 per month if you want to pay month by month, $30 per month if you sign up for a year, $10 per 24 hours, or $6 for an hour.

Anyway, tomorrow they should be here to install broadband and we’ve already bought the wireless base station so we’re ready. That gives us at least two days of fast internet access here where we’re staying.

We visited SAM’s Club today. For people in the US they know what it is. It is a “warehouse club”. People pay an annual membership fee and then they can shop at discounted prices. So you can only get in and shop if you’re a member. Mostly the things you can buy are bulk items, so you can’t just buy one small tube of toothpaste, you buy ten large tubes instead. If you can manage to stock and use that at home you can shop at considerable savings.

Yeah to people who don’t secure their home wifi networks! Where were staying for a week they don’t have broadband or wifi so we were obviously concerned how we were going to survive the week. But here’s to people who don’t secure their home networks. Two neighbors have unsecured wifi with broadband

Well, not really stuck, but we’ll get to that… We arrived at Frankfurt Airport okay, and went straight to our gate for the flight on to Charlotte, to check our seats. We had asked an attendant as soon as we got off the plane what we should do and that’s what they told us - go to the gate. Now our gate was - of course - on the other side of the airport. Anyway, we go through security checks and everything and get to the gate and there is no sign of US Airways or anything. So we ask some Lufthansa people and they say there is no way to get in touch with US Airways unless we go all the way back out, meaning outside security in the main area, and then go back in. Needless to say we didn’t want to do that.

So that was problem number one.

Number two was our need for sustenance - some coffee and something to eat. I walked back quite far to the first little restaurant I came across and picked out everything I wanted. Then when it came time to paying the problems started: they don’t accept credit card. Okay, then “do you take US dollars?” Sure, so I hand her a $100 bill. “No, I can’t accept that, it’s too large”, which is funny because my order came to a whopping $54. You can check over in tax free, she says.

Okay, so off to tax free, and of course they can’t help me either. So they send me to the currency exchange. The guy there politely explains that no, he cannot break a $100 bill into smaller denominations but he’ll be happy to exchange it into Euros, for a fee of course. So I end up exchanging dollars into Euros and then I can finally pay my outrageous bill.

So I’ve paid, and I want to take my two coffees, four bottles of water, bottle of apple juice, two sandwiches, two cookies, with me, I ask if she has a big bag I can put it in. Why bother asking, I know now, because of course she doesn’t.

So we’re now waiting for our flight, better luck at the next airport. I don’t like Frankfurt much.

Finally, on our way to the US for a brief stint around Crystal’s old neighborhood

Way cool.

Saw this the other day. It’s not clear from the picture but it says “Al Boom Gas Distribution”. It’s one of those small trucks carrying gas cylinders. What an appropriate (or not) name

Funny