Last month I made a trip to Dubai in United Arab Emirates and Doha in Qatar. This was my first trip to the Middle East so I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

We went to Doha to watch a MotoGP race, so we didn’t really see much of the city, so I will only comment on Dubai here. The MotoGP race deserves a posting on its own.

The pace of development in Dubai is overwhelming. There are cranes and road construction absolutely everywhere. I used to think the Las Vegas strip was growing quickly, but this is on a completely different scale. The population in 1969 was 60,000. Now it is 1.8 million. Not only is there a lot of construction going on, the scale of the building is amazing. We saw Burj Dubai, the worlds tallest building, under construction. There are also huge malls going in. One condo building was saw advertised had 120 floors. It’s hard to tell in the picture below, but Burj Dubai is surrounded by a lot of other building under constructions. It’s like they just decide to build a new city and put it up in a few years.

Dubai is very cosmopolitan. 80% of the population of Dubai is from outside of the UAE. This makes English the common language for everyone. Almost everyone we met spoke very good English (there was one cabbie who seemed to have a little trouble understanding us) and all the signs that we saw were in English only or English and Arabic. Any tourist who speaks in English will have no problem getting around.

All the new development and the prominent English actually made things a little less interesting from a traveling point of view than I imagined. It is very hard to find any type of culture in Dubai. Walking through the Mall of the Emirates (currently the biggest mall outside of North America until the next mall is finished in Dubai) was like walking through a mall in any suburb in the US or Canada.

That being said there were some interesting things I hadn’t experienced before. All the loudspeakers blaring prayers from the mosques five times a day was different. We also went to check out the Souks (markets) in the older part of town (but really not that old, we have older building in L.A. and that’s not saying much). To get to the Souks we used a Dhow (ferry boat, see picture below) to cross Dubai Creek - that was a pretty interesting experience.

Overall I had a great time, but I don’t know if I would hurry back unless I had a specific reason to do so, like maybe MotoGP again next year

Ever wanted to know the difference between a latte and a cappuccino?

Check out this great illustrated guide.

I have to agree with Jason Calacanis’ observations about Pinkberry. They are getting closer and closer. For those of you who don’t know, Pinkberry is a natural frozen yogurt shop that is all the rage in L.A. right now.

Our closest Pinkberries is on Melrose, probably about a mile away. Recently another yogurt shop, very similar to PinkBerry, Cantaloop, opened up about a quarter of a mile from our place. Now they are building a new Pinkberry a few hundred feet down the street from our place. I expect one in our lobby early next year.

We have been to both PinkBerry and Cantaloop a few times, and have enjoyed it. And we like to think they are fairly guilt-free too (not that I’ve dared to look at the nutritional information yet, we’ll just take for granted that it’s healthy). Now that one is opening so close, I’m sure we’ll be having more fro-yo in the future.

It looks like there is definitely a new frozen yogurt invasion going on. Can’t anyone remember what happened to all those TCBYs that opened up in the nineties?

This could possibly be the saddest picture I have ever seen.

The picture comes from MotoLiam, who as a mechanic on Alex Hofmann’s MotoGP machine. The full story of the picture is on his blog entry.

We were at Laguna Seca for the MotoGP race last weekend. We had a great time. I think staying in an RV right beside the track and getting Flag Room passes is the way to go. Staying at the track gets rid of all the problems people have getting to and leaving the race. The flag room was a great oasis where we could sit in the shade and have some drinks and food. Two years ago we didn’t have the flag room and trying to find ways to hide from the sun was not too fun.

We’re seriously thinking of going back to Laguna Seca for next years USGP, and maybe even to Qatar to see the race in March!

I found this great video of the race highlights of the weekend. It captures some of the stuff we saw and some of the things we weren’t able to see:

2007 Laguna Seca MotoGP

Also, here is a video that shows some of the excitement of the event:

And this is a short, low quality video, but I though it captured the speed and noise of being there pretty well:

I’m pretty excited that Michele (that’s my wife for those of you who don’t know me), is directing a play. The play is “Rumours of Our Death”. It’s a quirky, hilarious play by a Canadian playwright named George F. Walker. When I first read the play I was chuckling quite a bit, and I got a chance to see some of the rehearsals last weekend and on stage it’s even funnier. The cast is doing a great job. I’m really enjoying watching Michele go through the process of turning the words on the page into something real. I’m really proud of her.

So, if you in the Hollywood area on a Saturday from August 11th to September 15th, go see it.

Here is the official Rumours of Our Death in Hollywood web site. Buy tickets now!

I have decided to go to a Los Angeles Geek Dinner on Tuesday. I’ve been thinking about going to one for a while - I think what finally persuaded me to go was that it was being held at Galanga Thai. I’m always into trying out a new Thai restaurant, and this one is within walking distance of our place.

Although I’ve lived in L.A. for almost 7 years, I have no connections at all in the tech world here - I’ve never worked for an L.A. company. Since I’ve been in L.A. I’ve worked for companies in Detroit, San Francisco and Austin. It should be interesting to meet some L.A. geeks.

Here is some food for thought from a O’Reilly Radar post: “there are only two industries that refer to their customers as users: high tech and illegal drugs”.

Update: Looks like I wrote this a little too quickly, I just found out there is a “oldest first” sort! Cool. I’m gonna switch to Google Reader and see how it goes.

I read a lot of blogs, so having a good feed reader is important to me. I’ve been using Bloglines for many years. I have noticed, however, that they do not seem to be upgrading Bloglines very often. I can’t remember the last time any significant features were added to it. I also know that Google Reading has become the most popular reader, capturing around 50% of the market.

I try Google Reader every now and then, but I have been sticking with Bloglines. I’m always disappointed because I’m a big fan of a lot of other Google product. I use GMail as my main email, I use Google docs all the time. Oh yeah, and I even use their search. They just announced that Google Reader is going to take advantage of Google Gears to have the ability to read feeds offline. This seems like a great feature that I would love to have, but I have not made the switch for a few reasons:

1. Google Reader does not let you order you feeds from oldest to newest. In Bloglines I order my feeds so that the oldest one is at the top. This makes sense to me - I want to read the entries in the order they were written in. Sometimes bloggers refers to a post they did in the past, and it gets confusing if you haven’t read the old post before you read the new post.
2. You can’t reorder the folders. I keep my feeds in about a dozen different folders, and like to keep the folders I find most important near the top. Google Reader always orders them alphabetically.
3. Screen real estate is not used effectively. Bloglines divides the screen into two frames. The right frame shows you posts, and the frame stretches right from the top of the browser window to the bottom. Google reader displays the entries in a smaller frame which is only about 75% of the height of the browser window.

Out of the three #1 is the deal breaker. If they allowed you to order the entries in reverse chronological order, I’d probably make the switch. The other two problems are pretty nit-picky and probably wouldn’t keep me from using it. But I really want that offline reading ability. So, if anyone from the Google Reader team reads this, please fix these problems, and I’ll switch.

Jason Calacanis, who’s blog I’ve been reading for a while now, has been developing a new project, but has been pretty quiet about it. Today he revealed Mahalo - a “human-powered search engine”. This is a well funded company (they have gone through two rounds of funding already), Calacanis has said that they can survive for four years with no revenue.

I took it out for a quick test spin, and the results do seem OK. I would think if you are searching for a popular topic and want some general overviews of things, it would be a good place to start. Is it going to replace Google for my everyday searching? No way. The main reason is they don’t have enough topics covered yet. They currently have about 4,000 topics covered, and they plan to have 10,000 by the end of the year, and 25,000 by the end of 2008. Even when they do get more topics, there are just too many searches I do for very specific topics for it to replace a regular search engine.

I don’t understand why they call themselves “human-powered search”. This is a directory plain and simple. Mahalo is doing what Yahoo! Directory and dmoz have done in the past. I think, however Mahalo seems to be adding some nice features on top of the basic list of links that most directories offer. The categorized links are a nice idea. They also include videos and pictures on the page. But it’s still a directory.

People also have been comparing this to Wikipedia, but I don’t really think they are similar. Wikipedia is a content-based destination site, Mahalo just contains pointers to content. Wikipedia pages get a lot of links right now because people often link to the content pages. Mahalo isn’t going to get the same type of links that Wikipedia gets. Mahalo won’t be challenging Wikipedia for search engine rankings any time soon.

Right now when a topic isn’t covered, Mahaolo provides search results from Google. This is better than a “sorry, we didn’t find anything”, but I think this could be more useful. I would personally love to see any not found result automatically redirect to Google. This way I would be much more willing to search using Mahalo, knowing that if it didn’t know anything about the topic, I would see my regular Google search results. I always have 100 results displayed on Google, and I like to see the result right up on top of the page. Right now as it is, when Mahalo doesn’t find anything the Google results are buried below teh fold so I have to scroll down, and then I only see ten results. Maybe this could be an option for power users. I could also see a nice Greasemonkey script being written to do this.

The only other complaint I have is that there aren’t very informative descriptions for each link. Right now you just get a site name and title for each link. I would prefer to see a one or two sentence description along with the link. This would give me a better idea of what to expect before I click on the link.

I’m sure as time goes on more functionality will be added to the site. Knowing Jason Calacanis, there should be some neat social elements to the site. There is a submit link function right now, which is pretty standard for a directory. there is also a message board feature for each topic, which seems like it will be very similar to Wikipedia’s discussion pages.