CheetahhhhhhhBlog Mark III

This swine flu is scary, another one of those “end of days” kind of things. But then again I thought the same of bird flu, and nothing much really happened with that.

Since we will be in the UAE this summer, we will be indoors most of the time, and because of Van giving birth and being relatively immobile, we won’t have lots of exposure to viruses for the next 3 months, by which time the swine flu might be kind enough to burn itself out. Also much of the expat population of the UAE, which is 90% of the population, leaves for the summer. So I would say statistically our chances of contracting it are low for the next 3 months. This could change in September, when expats return.

In terms of the economy, a real pandemic would be the straw that broke the camel’s back at the moment. The economy is in enough trouble already. the International Monetary Fund’s forecast for 2009 predicts a 1.3% contraction for this year and continued weakness into 2010. The WSJ writes,

n a 2006 report, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that that a severe influenza pandemic (similar to the one that began in 1918) might cause a decline in U.S. GDP of about 4.25% and that a milder pandemic (similar to those that occurred in 1957 and 1968) might reduce GDP by about 1%.

Other studies, notably “The Economic Impact of an Influenza Pandemic” by Steven James and Tim Sargent who looked at Canada specifically but said results would be similar in the U.S., saw a less severe scenario. “Our analysis suggests that a severe pandemic like that of 1918 would reduce annual GDP by about 1% a result of higher worker absenteeism and reduced spending in some sectors.”

Point being, if a real pandemic develops, we might need to be prepared to press the “sell” buttons in our brokerage accounts. Point also being, for those of you in jobs that are not funded by the government, that if a real pandemic develops, the global economic crisis will worsen, and this means more jobs will be lost.

I like to think on the positive side though, and so I would like to think this will just disappear after a few months, like bird flu.

Our new Sportage is sitting at the Kia dealership. We’ll take possession of it on Wednesday. We went to look at it and Vanessa chose the name. Her name is “Scarlet.” She’s red. Van wanted red. Tan leather, dark teak wood trim, and also a bunch of chrome trim.

So, I’m getting a new car. A few months ago, my advice to an expat would be to rent. When you figured in the total cost of ownership, renting was actually cheaper. This has changed lately because of the global economic crisis. For one thing, used cars are selling for a song in Dubai, particularly the high end models. But the new car dealers are doing just about anything. In the case of Kia, they’re offering zero down payment, 4% interest, free registration, free insurance, etc.

So anyway I’m getting a Kia Sportage 4×4, the fully loaded model with leather seats and trim, wood trim, sunroof, roof rack, USB port for the ipod, etc. Why a Kia, you may ask. Basically it’s the cheapest 4×4 and I want a 4×4 for doing things like going driving on the beach. The beach we like doesn’t actually have a road. You have to drive through little paths in the desert to get to it. And we could get to other beaches if we had a 4×4. Also there was a hell of a lot of flooding here this year and a 4×4 would have been nice. Also I want an SUV because the family is growing; we will have little Tristan soon, and Nanay Gloria coming in June. I know in the States, SUVs aren’t cool any more, but frankly, out here, gas is fairly cheap, and the SUV is still king.

I did a lot of comparison research and Kia gives the most “luxury” add-ons, such as wood and leather trim. The interior of the car is actually more important to me than anything else, because the primary purpose of the car is driving to work and the mall. So leather and wood trim and a USB port are indeed deciding factors for me. For the same price as a fully loaded Sportage, you’d get a base model Honda or Toyota. Furthermore, you know you’re paying 30% extra for the name with Honda or Toyota. Now if money were not an object I’d get a Mercedes or BMW SUV (I prefer German cars). But money is an object so it’s a Kia.I plan to stick it in my shipping container in 3 years and take it with me.

So whenever I boot up Windows now, I just get terribly irritated by how slow it is. In my office I had to boot up WIndows and I timed it, it took a full 7 minutes before the hard disk stopped spinning. I also got terribly irritated by how long WIndows has to “think” before it can accomplish the simplest tasks. I’ve gone totally Linux and I’m not looking back. I do however need to keep Windows for VBuzzer and Microsoft Money.

I’m trying to get vBuzzer configured on Linux but it’s beyond my computing powers. You can do all kinds of fancy things with VOIP that I didn’t even know about until I started monkeying around with Twinkle, a Linux VOIP program. For example there are many ways to get around this crazy Emirati blocking of VOIP, for example you can dial (eg) 0015085540068@vbuzzer.net:80. I can’t get the fraggin thing properly configured however and I’ve washed my hands of it. I also apparently need some sound codecs or something… it’s all too much, I’m not a super-nerd. Forget it. I’ll just wait until I’m out of the Emirates and then start using VOIP in a normal fashion again.

I will say this, however. I am sorely tempted to buy an iPhone to see if Skype is blocked over GSM.

Not a lot going on in Cheetopia. I have terrible insomnia, I think because of this Champix medication I’m taking. Van thinks she’s going to give birth early, a women’s intuition thing. So she wants to get teh ball rolling and go shopping for baby clothes etc STAT.

First, Nando’s has finally opened at Safeer Mall. We have been waiting and waiting and waiting. They sure took their time. We have one activity today and nothing is standing in its way: we’re having lunch at Nandos.

I upgraded to Linux 9.4 Jaunty Jackelope. I’m all about Linux but frankly I see no difference, so I’m not sure what all the hoop-la is about.

I bought a bottle of rum and got a little sauced last night. This was the first time since January, when my stomch started causing problems. My stomach was really unhappy about the booze. Woke up several times during the night from my stomach grumbling. Really a pity. I wish my stomach meds would take care of things so I can have a drink occasionally.

Anyway I’m taking Champix, the stop-smoking pill. It’s working well enough. It’s quite effective actually.

First of all, even more of my worries that have been lurking in my mind for months have been resolved. We have health insurance cards for another year. This is a big concern when you have a pregnant wife. Also I was finally given a compensation check for the TESOLArabia conference. Didn’t think I’d ever actually see it.

I’m starting to get concerned about the summer here. It’s already pretty hot out. In a month it’s going to be frakkin hot. In 2 months it’s going to be chick-a-lickin hot, like hot where you could fry a chicken by putting it out in the sun. So we will end up being cave dwellers again, like we were in Saudi. In Saudi we filled our time with DVDs from Jeddah and Amazon.com. Here, we have fast internet so we download everything. However we can’t actually watch TV any more. If you have a toddler you know what I’m talking about. Good luck sitting down and actually enjoying a movie. Good frakkin luck. The Bug will constantly be yapping, playing, wanting me to play, wanting food, singing, wanting to watch Thomas the Train, climbing on me, riding his bike (which is noisy), etc. Frankly I don’t remember the last time my wife and I were actually able to relax and enjoy a movie.

So the question is, how will we occupy ourselves this summer, when it will be too hot to go outside? Well first of all, I’m getting camping equipment, and we’ll go camping at the beach overnight. When it’s really hot in Arabia, you do things at night. So we’ll go to the beach at sunset and camp overnight and return in the morning. This will be fun.

Second, the Bug likes to watch me when I play video games on my PSP.  So I’m going to get us a Sony Playstation 3. Bug will enjoy watching and, in a few months, he’ll be able to play. I must confess that despite being almost 40, I still like video games. There are a lot of cool games on Playstation 3 and actually I’ve been talking about getting one for 2 years or so, but never could rationally justify the expense.

I decided on the Playstation3 instead of Xbox because Playstation plays BlueRay disks. I have an HD TV but our satellite feed is not in HD, so I have never actually enjoyed my fancy (and expensive) TV. It will be nice to get a BlueRay disk I imagine for really spectacular movies. Also the Playstation 3, the games are in HD, which should be really cool with very visual games like Tomb Raider.

Yeah, andyway, there is a new Tomb Raider game out, which I’m excited about. There is also a new installment of Total War out, which I’m tremendously excited about. I’ve actually been checking the games section at Carrefour constantly hoping to see it. May have to look around in Dubai.

Anyway 20 days to go, and the Cheetahhhhhhh is on vacation!

Another thing about Linux is my machines run much cooler. You’ve probably noticed your laptop starts to get hot after a whole. With my XPS it gets really hot, to the point where it almost burns my lap. Surprisingly with Linux my laptops run very cool. I’m not enough of a geek to say why this would be, but I’d hypothesize that the smaller Linux kernel is loaded mostly into RAM (the hard disk doesn’t spin a lot when you run Linux) and the CPU and video card aren’t used much, so less heat is generated.

I have had several people ask me about Linux. So here’s the scoop.

First, go to www.ubuntu.com with your windows machine, and if you click around in the download links you will find a Windows installer.

It can install 4 different systems. I have tried Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Kubuntu is flashier and more esthetically pleasing, but it was not intuitive and it seemed unstable. Indeed I erased it and went back to Ubuntu after only a few hours.

Ubuntu is like any system, I suppose; if you load it up with lots of programs, it gets sluggish. I have kept the installed programs (all free with Linux incidentally) to the minimum, by which I mean, only the programs I actually use, which are Pidgeon messenger, OpenOffice, and Firefox, and VLC, and KTorrent. With this Linux is nice and fast.

Open Office is much better than Microsoft Office in my opinion, and it reads MS Office and saves in MS Office, so I don’t know why anybody would actually pay for or use the Microsoft product, which is slow and buggy. And expensive.
Linux doesn’t come with a firewall or antivirus. In the Ubuntu documentation that say because it is not necessary. You need a firewall if you have devices that listen to the internet. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but I figure with a bittorrent downloader, you’re listening to the internet, so I installed a firewall. Regarding viruses, the Ubuntu documentation says they are “theoretically possible” but that Linux is constructed in such a way that makes virus infection difficult, and in any case, people write viruses for Windows. So I’m not worrying about viruses.

I have a very fancy laptop, a Dell XPS M140. Or anyway it was very fancy 2 years ago. It’s still extremely fast and I paid half an arm for it, so I still consider it fancy. Anyway on a fast laptop with an Nvidia graphics chip, like my XPS, Ubuntu is blazing fast. Starts up in about 10 seconds. I don’t wait around for it to “think” like you inevitably end up doing with a Windows machine.

So the Cheetahhhhhhh has a raise from the new U-RAK. Can’t complain. The contract is for 3 years, so we will be in the UAE a year longer than planned, until May 2012, but that’s OK, we like it here.

When I got the email about the raise last night, I said “Thank God” about 40 times. It’s seriously difficult to save money here. This is a very expensive place. Why a dusty little Emirate like RAK should be so expensive is, at first, odd. It’s not New York or anything. It’s expensive because the Emeratis have so much money, and this pushes prices up. For example an Emerati with no education can join the army and get a starting salary of AED20,000 a month. Because of this, a dusty little Emirate like RAK turns out to be damn expensive.

I don’t think my raise was necessarily based on job performance. I think it was because they wanted to retain me. A lot of faculty are leaving. Why they wanted to retain me in particular, I’m not sure. Van says it’s because I’m the best. I’m not sure about that. I am popular with the kids, though, and if the powers-that-be asked the kids, the kids probably mentioned me as a favorite. I’m popular with the kids for no reason that I can fathom actually.

The Cheetahhhhhhh just had a long meeting about the formation of the new university. It seemed to me, as a business man, to be positive. There are a number of things to be encouraged about from a business perspective. The sheikh has taken direct control of the venture and will be the university’s chancellor. This is good. It means that U-RAK will be stable. He has also committed AED100 million to the operation, which is a lot of scratch. There were many things to be encouraged about from the perspective of a teacher. Teachers aren’t supposed to think about money and business, you know. Many of the limitations that were imposed upon us by George Mason U will be altered to more suit the Emerati environment. For example, an extremely high standard of English was required for admission. It would be a low standad in the USA, but here it was ridiculously high. GMU imposed requirements like this on us because GMU had to maintain its standards, however, these standards overlooked the fact that we’re in a completely different environment than Fairfax VA. We also had to mirror their program, but this overlooked the things Emeratis want to study, so now we will begin to introduce courses of study more suited to RAK.
Anyway the Cheetahhhhhhh is feeling more positive about the whole venture now.

So it’s Thursday night, and the beginning of the weekend here. The Cheetahhhhhhh has a bit of a cold and sore throat. Van is a tad restless and bored. Not a lot going on actually except Vanessa and I realized a few days ago that all our stresses of the last few months have been resolved.

I downloaded season 1 and 2 of Big Love, an HBO drama. It’s great. For some reason those polygamous Mormons are actually interesting.