Archive for October, 2008

I used to type by pecking two-fingered at the keyboard — it was very laborious and painful, hunching over the letters with my head nodding up and down as I checked between the screen and keyboard every few seconds. Finally, I taught myself to touch type using a book from Pitman’s Secretarial College, which was a long tiresome process in itself over the course of three months. It paid off, however, as I slowly increased my typing speed over time from 20 words per minute to around 70 — 80. Touch typing helped me write my novel is easily, enabled me to do my job as a lawyer more efficiently and these days, means I can churn out e-mails, documents and blog posts very quickly. However, the downside is that spending hours on end at the computer during office hours and then in my own time in the evenings typing away means that my hands and elbows get tired and cramped. My shoulders and neck are often stiff and achey. Also, being stuck in a sitting position for long periods means that my legs and back are also badly affected.

I am guessing that this is a common experience for many people. All the discomfort that comes from having to sit and type in order to communicate on the computer takes the joy out of surfing the net and connecting with friends, doesn’t it? Well, for those of you who are fed up with typing, salvation is at hand!

I have just installed the latest speech to text software from Dragon Naturally Speaking and I am dictating this blog post while wandering around my study, occasionally standing by the window to watch the world go by. I hardly have to touch the keyboard as the program types out everything that I dictate and if I want to make an amendment, I can give it voice commands to do so for me. The version that I am using is the “Preferred” version 10 which comes with a wireless headset. It is very intuitive to use and has a huge vocabulary — it has recognised place names like Dulwich and Norwood, proper names like Joan Baez and John Steinbeck and unusual words like chorizo. I can give it voice commands to move around web pages and also control the keyboard. One of the other functions I like about it is that if I am away from my study, I can dictate into a digital recorder and then later, can next be recorded to my computer and Dragon will transcribe the audio file into text.

When you first install the program, you have to spend about 10 — 15 minutes training it to get used to your voice. Initially, it felt a bit strange “talking to” the computer and I was a bit shy! However, after a few minutes I got quite into it and now it seems the most natural thing in the world — in particular, because I use the wireless headset and tend to do my dictating while looking out of the window, it does not feel as if I am “talking to” the computer. The great thing is that I can speak at more or less a conversational pace and it is accurate upwards of 95% of the time, provided I enunciate clearly. In fact, it is much quicker for me now — one week in — to dictate than to touch type because the program is so much more accurate than my typing e.g. it doesn’t transpose letters or hit two keys at the same time!

I think to make the best use of this program, it is a good idea to have an outline in your mind of the structure and flow of your article, blog post or e-mail so that you do not have to spend much time afterwards editing and/or moving text around. Normally, I would have to do some minimal editing and rewriting just to tidy up anything that I have typed anyway, so having to do that at the end of a dictated text isn’t such a big problem — it only becomes a pain if you have to do substantial rewriting on your dictated text.

Being able to dictate text easily and accurately has really made blogging and e-mailing so much more fluid and less physically tiring. I am also more inclined to flesh out my e-mails to my friends because it doesn’t involve tiresome typing. As for blogging, it is helping me stay prolific and engaged.

So, if you are tempted to try Dragon Naturally Speaking, please do come back and let me know how you get on. (I have no association with the program or company and get no benefit from this review.)

Today, is the 79th anniversary of the Wall Street Crash, which happened on 29 October 1929. In the context of what has been happening in the financial markets this month, this blog post is not so much a celebration of the anniversary but rather a remembrance — rather like the remembrance of the Great War on 11th November of each year. Every year, on that day in November, a two-minute silence is observed and we are meant to have learnt something from that terrible conflicts that devastated Europe almost a century ago. But have we? And have we learned anything from the stock-market crash of 1929 that led to a decade of hardship, known in our collective memory as the Great Depression….?

I thought it would be apt to be reminded of what happened leading up to the Wall Street Crash and also, think about what happened afterwards in terms of social upheaval as well as some of the institutional legacies that came out of that period. The following is a link to the podcast of a history lecture by Prof Jennifer Burns of the University of California Berkeley on the Wall Street crash and the Depression.

   Podcast: The Great Depression and New Deal

The podcast is part of her lecture series on American History which was recorded in 2006. It is an excellent podcast series and although part of a university course, very easy to follow as a layperson. I have found it a fascinating introduction to American social and economic history from the American Civil War up through to the present day.

For more information about the Great Depression, you can also check out thegreatdepression.co.uk, where I found the photo to illustrate this post.

This is an easily digestible video series (excuse the pun, ha-ha) on Chinese Dining Etiquette for Westerners wanting to navigate the etiquette of dining with the Chinese, either as guests in China or as hosts inviting Chinese to your home. The expert giving the advice is an American business consultant who has a couple of decades worth of experience living in China, Mark Kemsley.

The one below is a short clip on the minefield of ordering a meal when you go to a restaurant with others in China — it all hinges on whether you are a guest or host as to whether you get to order or not.

I had never thought of it before but when we’ve been out for a formal Chinese dinner with family friends in Malaysia and arrive as guests, the meal has usually already been ordered beforehand or we settle down to chatting round the table while the host has a long and complicated discussion with the majordomo about the menu, occasionally asking us about any favourite dishes we might like to have. If my parents are the host, then my mother would be the one in charge of ordering beforehand by phone or organising the menu when we arrive.

One of the things that the business consultant does not mention in the video is the fight over the bill after the meal. Often, at these big Chinese family dinners there is a lot of excited scurrying about towards the end of the meal as the head of the guest family tries to pay for the meal in advance of the head of the host family. This usually involves a feint move with the guest pretending to go to the gents but then pausing to have a whispered conversation with the majordomo to surreptitiously pass over wads of bills in payment. This means that the host has to be on guard during the last course of the meal in order to parry this move by going over to pay first, or to have agreed a secret pact with the restaurant in advance that they should not to accept payment from anyone but the host. I guess it must be an honour thing among men but I have to say, I find it all very silly watching the various patriarchs duking it out with their wallets at the end of an otherwise pleasant evening! Perhaps I’m just too westernised but it seems to me much more civilised to allow the host to pay for the meal this time and to get the bill the next time when you’re hosting the meal…

But then, as Mr Kemsley suggests towards the end of the video, such dinners are as much to do with money as it is to do with spending time with friends or family. As the host, you need to make sure that you are seen to spend money on your guest by ordering the most expensive dishes — so presumably the corollary for the guest is to show that you, too, are generous and wealthy enough to treat your host.

I’m curious to hear from my Chinese readers what your take is on all this. Have I missed some of the cultural subtleties in my westernised view? I’d also like to hear your experiences, if you are a Westerner who has navigated Chinese dining etiquette — are there any nuances or cultural differences that have struck you?

You can also compare all this with English Dining Etiquette by taking a look at my post on The English Dinner Party

The other day, a friend gave us a pot of honey. Nothing remarkable in that, you might think. But wait. The label says “Greenwich Honey” and has his name and address on it alongside the picture of the bees and flowers. It was honey that he had cultivated from hives in his back garden. He works for London Underground and spends most of his working day in a subterranean office without any natural daylight, the passing hours rhythmically punctuated by the rumble of the tube trains overhead. In the evenings and at weekends, he spends time nurturing his bees and also tending to an allotment which is conveniently located just by his house in Greenwich. I don’t know whether it is because I know it is my friend’s honey and not a store-bought honey but to my mind, it tastes crisp, fresh and floral, and of course much better than anything that you could buy in a supermarket!

During the summer, my partner bought a tomato plant from an open garden event down the road and planted it in our back yard. We had been neglecting our garden for some time now (spending too much time indoors blogging, no doubt) and I was not convinced that we would ever see any fruit from that spindly little plant. Sure enough, we carried on neglecting our garden, including the poor little tomato plant, but to our great surprise, last week we wandered out amidst the long grass and scruffy looking shrubs and found a couple of perfectly shaped, bright red healthy, plump tomatoes hanging pendulous sleep from what was now a rather large plant! We plucked the ripest looking one, sliced it into quarters and slowly savoured each piece. Needless to say, they were each succulent and more delicious than any tomato I had ever brought home from the shop wrapped in plastic. Since then, the plant has been producing a regular flow of lovely fresh tomatoes!

There is something delightful about food that you or someone you know has grown or cultivated with their own hands. It feels even more special when it has been nurtured, almost unexpectedly, in an urban metropolis which you would usually associate with concrete, Tarmac, skyscrapers and steel. For most of us who live in cities, maintaining a connection with nature and the earth can be elusive — and we often forget how important a nourishment that connection can be to our mood and spirit. So for me, it was great to be reminded of that connection through being reminded that our food comes from the earth and not from supermarket shelves! It is so easy to re-establish that physical and spiritual connection by simply spending more time tending to my garden — there it is, waiting for me to give it some love and affection: all I have to do is make the space in my busy schedule to go out there and commune.

So in the next few months, we will be out there much more in the fresh air mucking about in the dirt to get the main part of the garden back into order. We are also going to transform a small section at the back into a vegetable garden — that is a slightly daunting task but we’ve got the books and we’ve got the Internet so we should have all the information we need to start on that new projects! I just need to make sure that I tear myself away from the books and the Internet for long enough to actually get the vegetable patch going as a physical entity and not just a grand plan that I blog about…

Photo: thanks to imageo from flickr.com (CCL)

A little while back, I tried an experiment to go shelfless — this was an attempt to reduce the number of physical books that I had in my house so that I could either have fewer shelves or use the shelf space for other things e.g. ornaments and photographs. This meant seeing if I could compile a library consisting of only e-books or audio books. I explored the various websites offering the books and also the various e-book technologies and initially, it all looked quite hopeful. I also discovered an audio books site, audible.com, where you can download audiobooks as MP3s and I was quite excited because I really do enjoy listening to audiobooks — I like being able to do something else while I am being read to.

Unfortunately, the experiment did not go as well as I had hoped. The current state of the e-book landscape is that there are very many file formats and you need different types of e-book readers in order to be able to read a particular format. I downloaded the Mobipocket application as it seemed to have a lot of functionality, including the ability to annotate the E book text. And then I found that some of the books that I wanted to read were not available in that format and I had to download other applications in order to enjoy them. Also, there are not yet enough books being published in electronic format so there were of course some books that I wanted to read which were not yet available electronically.

I was doing all this on my computer and/or laptop that I was also keeping an eye on the dedicated e-book readers that have been coming onto the market e.g. the Amazon Kindle (currently available in the US only) and the Sony Reader. These devices are pretty expensive although sleekly designed — and all they can do is read the books. You can load hundreds of e-book onto them and that is the main advantage. For now, I was not prepared to spend £200 or more on these gadgets so I was stuck with reading books sitting up at my desktop computer or half lying down on the sofa with a hot laptop on my lap.

It all got too complicated, too cumbersome and too irritating so while I am still an advocate for e-books in theory — because of the space saving aspect as well as all the digital advantages such as being able to search and add annotations — at this stage in the game, I have given up on e-books until they sort out the “e-Babel” mess. Having said that, the one device where I have a number of the books still loaded on which I access consistently is my mobile phone: I have an English-French dictionary which is very handy when I visit France and also a book that I am reading very slowly when I am waiting at a bus stop or out and about and have nothing else with me to read.

As for audiobooks, because I live in the UK the audible.com website, which is a US site, would not allow me to sign on and sent me to be UK version of the site. The US version has over 40,000 titles but the UK site has around 20,000 — and the UK titles tend to be the kind of books that you would find in the large print or audiobooks section in your local library i.e. the modern-day equivalent of Catherine Cookson and lightweight titles. The US site has a lot of current affairs and non-fiction titles that are up-to-date with the top seller lists e.g. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Fareed Zakaria’s The Post American World. I found myself meandering listlessly around the UK site half-heartedly choosing audiobooks that I did not really want just because I was desperate to download a book to listen to. After several months, I gave up and cancelled my account at audible.co.uk. If they increased the selection of titles to the equivalent of the US site, I would certainly consider signing up again.

So the upshot of this sad, sorry tale is that I am back to having very little shelf space while my physical book collection steadily increases! I suspect that this is because we are still in the early days of e-book technology and that once the cost of e-book readers comes down and the different formats and platforms resolve themselves, it will be a lot easier to enjoy electronic books. As for audiobooks, the problem seems to be international copyright issues — given that this is a fraught area of law, who knows when those issues will be resolved! Also, I expect UK listeners’ taste for audiobooks being different from US listeners’ tastes - my sense is that a lot of of US listeners listen to audiobooks in the car during long commutes wearers this habit is not so entrenched in the UK so it is likely that I will had to wait quite a while to be able to access interesting audiobooks in the UK.

What is your experience with the books and/or audiobooks? Are you not surprised by my experience or have you had better luck? Do add a comment and let me know.

Photo: thanks to Muskingum College Library from flickr.com (CCL)

Susan Macaulay is a dynamic Canadian living in Dubai, whom I met while in Barcelona for the IABC EuroComm Conference earlier this year. Susan is a public speaking coach and also the founder of the social network for amazing women, aptly called Amazing Women Rock. I invited Susan to share her cross-cultural experiences for Fusion View.

Susan writes:

I got to the United Arab Emirates by accident. Like the castaways in the 1960s American sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” my then-husband Bob and I set out on what was meant to be a little adventure in 1993, only to end up marooned on a desert island for the next 12 years. It was all terribly unplanned, but then I guess most adventures are.

Our collective travel experiences had been rather limited until then. I had wandered around New Zealand and Australia for a year and half in my early twenties. He had been to Hawaii and Mexico I think, and we had holidayed together in Europe for six weeks in 1990. But that was the extent of it.

Our move to the Middle East (from Canada), was driven mostly by boredom (his, with a routine job in Calgary), and thirst (mine, for adventures in exotic foreign lands). When a friend who worked for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company called to say there was an opening for a technical instructor, Bob jumped at the opportunity and I prayed he would ace the interview.

He went on a 10-day reccie to Abu Dhabi just before Christmas 1992, and was offered the job. We gave the move some thought over the yuletide holidays, got married on January 9, 1993 (after seven years of co-habitation), and he hopped on a plane a few days later – leaving me to hold the fort for six months in case things didn’t work out.

Fifteen years later, Bob and I are divorced, he’s based in eastern Canada (working 28-day shifts at a refinery in the Algerian desert), and I’m in Dubai making the most of one of the few places in the world where the economy is booming, and people are arriving in droves to stake their claim in a 21st-century Middle-Eastern version of the Klondike gold rush , which, by some accounts was started by a woman in 1896.

Unlike their 19th century counterparts, however, many of these latter-day prospectors are panning for property, instead of the nuggets of old. Scores of speculators who have bought into the Dubai real estate dream are banking on ‘happily ever after’ not turning into disaster, as it seems to have done the world over in the last year or so.

Whether the whole thing will implode (or explode), leaving investors holding the proverbial bag remains to be seen. Time, as they say, will tell.

Back in 1993, expatriates couldn’t own property in the UAE, Abu Dhabi and Dubai weren’t global household names, the Dubai World Trade Center (at 34 floors), was the tallest building in the country, and I couldn’t find work in my profession, because public relations was still unknown in the Emirates.

So I wrote. A lot. Mostly to friends and family “back home.” Mainly about my experiences as a successful career woman suddenly having to cope with being an expat wife.

A few weeks ago, I began republishing those Letters from Abu Dhabi (LADs as I called them then), on www.amazingwomenrock.com , a website I conceptualized, created, and finally launched in July, after three frustrating years of development.

It’s interesting, and a little ironic, to be posting those long-ago LADs on this internet creation of mine, which is as much my passion and joy today, as the LADs were a decade and a half ago. I could hardly have conceived of a website then. In fact, it would be years before we could even access the internet in the UAE.

(To steal the words from a 1970s cigarette ad targeted at women, I’ve “come a long way, baby.” So has the UAE. We’ve transformed ourselves in tandem, and at light speed, my adopted country and I.)

Even more interesting is that, alongside my LADs of the mid-1990s, I’m publishing a series of recollections by Gertrude Dyck, a Canadian nurse and missionary, who went to the UAE in 1962 (almost a decade before it was even a country), and who lived there for more than 40 years.

We are collaborating: two expat women of different ages, from different eras. The result is two sets of impressions about the same initially-foreign-to-both-of-us country, seen through totally different lenses, 30 years apart, and yet presented side-by-side (years after they were originally written), on the internet.

As I tap out this blog entry (sitting in an airport in Germany), for UK-based Yang-May (whom I met at a conference in Spain in February), Gertrude is reviewing the next installment of her story from a retirement home in western Canada. I wonder where you will be if and when you read the fruits of our joint labour?

All of this suggests something about culture change, I think, about how small our big world has become. Here we all are – you, me, Yang-May, Gertrude and who knows who else – continents apart, or perhaps unknowingly sitting next to each other in a café somewhere, paradoxically separated, and yet interconnected (by choice), through time, space, and experiences – some shared, some uniquely ours.

But I digress. Let me see. Where was I? Oh yeah, Abu Dhabi, 1993…

OK, I have to admit it here. I’m a great fan of Jackie Chan movies. The plots may all be a bit silly but his action stunts are balletic and witty in the way they use the natural environment. And he also does them all himself for real with no stunt doubles or CGI. They are literally death-defying.

Here is a video documenting some of the injuries that he suffered while filming some of those amazing stunts. It’s a miracle he’s still alive let alone walking, jumping and karate-chopping.

Hat tip to One Inch Punch for first alerting me to this video

I love blogging but I have to confess, sometimes I really do not feel like sitting down at the computer to write a blog post. Do you ever feel like that? Usually it’s because I am too tired or I have spent the whole day at work sitting at the computer and I just don’t feel like staring at pixels anymore. Or I just don’t feel very inspired at all. So what is to be done to keep the momentum going?

Regular commitment

It can be very tempting to say, I’ll just skip it this week — maybe next week I’ll be more inspired or I’ll have more energy or I’ll have more time: then I will blog, I’ll blog next week. But I know myself too well — next week will come along and I will feel the same way and say to myself: next week, next week. So I try and make a commitment to myself to blog at least once a week — that’s manageable for me as a minimum and if the spirit moves me to blog more than that, then that’s a bonus. I also think of it as a commitment to my readers — rather like any relationship, it’s all about making a connection regularly. So I decide on a day each week that will be my “blog publication day” and I try to stick to that schedule. So far, it seems to be working.

Jot down ideas

I also keep a notebook to hand — or at least a scrap of paper or a post-it note — so that whenever I have an idea that would make a good blog post, I jot it down immediately. Even if I have an idea that is not so great, I jot it down. Keeping all these blog post ideas together in one place means that when I am not feeling very inspired, I can look through them - and more often than not, these notes can prompt me to explore more deeply something that inspired me some time ago. This means that even though I may be feeling a bit flat at that very moment, my old inspirations can still spark and rekindle my energy for blogging.

Try a different way of doing it

I have also been trying alternative methods of blogging. As you can see from my efforts over the last year, I have tried audio blogging and video blogging as well as the usual written texts. Occasionally, I write a blog post on my mobile phone while I am at a cafe waiting for a friend or sitting out in the garden so that blogging does not trap me at my computer. My latest experiment is with speech-to-text technology (I have recently installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 10) so that I can dictate e-mails, letters, blog posts and — who knows — maybe even my next novel or book project. I am dictating this blog post while standing at the window in my living room, looking out at the autumn colours in my garden!

How do you keep the momentum going when it comes to blogging? I hope you will add a comment and share your tips and tricks as well!

Photo: Death Valley Marathon - thanks to El Hombre on flickr.com (CCL)

The other day, all this doom and gloom about the financial crisis was getting a bit too much for me. It was a beautiful sunny day and I’d had enough of banks going bust, falling property prices, talk of unemployment and general fear, uncertainty and doubt wherever you looked in the press, broadcast media and online. So, I thought, what better way to cheer me up and distract myself than to find some good books to read — maybe a good old-fashioned story to warm the cockles of my heart or a rollicking thrill to keep me on the edge of my seat, or even a history book that will take me back to another simpler time.

However, as I scanned my bookshelves, looking for that good book to distract me, my mind was still busy with phrases that it was still processing from the news: “Depression”, “Wall Street”, “greedy bankers”, “speculation”, “financial bubble”… and my hand was guided to 3 books that are no distraction at all in the current climate!

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — I read this many years ago and my memory of it is strongly influenced by the John Ford black-and-white movie starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. Set during the Depression, it is the story of the Joad family who have lost their farm due to the drought in Oklahoma and along with thousands of other destitute farmers, “Okies”, they head to California looking for work. All their worldly possessions is piled onto the back of an old truck and their journey west takes them from desperate squatter camp to desperate squatter camp across the Dust Bowl landscape of Depression-era America. It is haunting, dark and depressing.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe — this is a great satire of high capitalism during the 1980s and if by the end of The Grapes of Wrath you are deflated, beaten and downtrodden, this book will give you your cynical, hard edge back. Investment banker Sherman McCoy, “Master of the Universe “, heads for a fall from grace and fortune when, driving through New York one night with his mistress, he takes a wrong turn and ends up in the Bronx. This book was also made into a film, like the Steinbeck book, this time starring Tom Hanks but the movie is a much weaker affair losing much of the political and social bite of the novel. If you want to experience a bit of Schadenfreude in the unravelling of an arrogant, greedy banker, then now is the time to read this one.

Tulipomania by Mike Dash - I read this book earlier this year, semi-inspired by a visit to be charming Dutch town of Delft last summer. It is a very readable historical account of the tulip fever that obsessed Holland in the 1630s. No, tulip fever is not an illness like swamp fever. Rather, it was the obsession with buying and selling tulip bulbs that gripped Dutch society four centuries ago - much like house fever, that obsession with buying and selling property that has gripped the UK, US and other developed nations in recent years. The Dutch back then coveted beautiful tulips, a plant that was new to the West at that time, having been brought over from Turkey and the near East. The plants that were the most desired were those that had unusual colouring and unique patterns. Tulip bulbs take a long time to mature so this desire for the plant evolved into a desire for the bulbs, in the anticipation that those bulbs would eventually bloom into a unique prize flower. The trade developed within little over a year into a trade for futures in tulip bulbs with people selling bulbs that they had not yet taken delivery of and others buying the opportunity to sell on that future blossoming plant. The mania reached such a peak that people were selling their houses to buy a single tulip bulb! It all fell apart one morning when a seller offered his bulbs up and there was a deathly silence from all the other traders in the room — for some reason, the desire was no longer there. Uh-oh. Within a day or so everyone was rushing to sell with no one there to buy. Fortunes were lost and lives were ruined. The governing authorities had to step in with bailout plans. Hmm, sound familiar?

Well, I don’t think my attempt at finding distracting books was a great success so I think I’ll go back to watching the telly…

Following on from my Joan Baez experience a couple of weeks back and the video I showed of her last Monday, I was thinking about how her name is as connected to Bob Dylan as it is to the protest movements of the 60’s. Checking out YouTube, I came across these three videos - the first of him on his own singing his most famous song, Blowin’ in the Wind, which became the torch song of that period; the second of her singing the same song on her own and finally, the third showing the two of them many years later singing it together.

Aaah, the good old days of revolution and protest and strange bandanas…