Events

The second CCMBA residency ended officially about an hour ago, so all that remains is the drinking. And the packing. And the flying to London and thence Chicago, and not having a functioning laptop for either flight. One last photo for today, then on to other (if not better) things. I mentioned the Burj Dubai earlier, with factual comparisons to other tall buildings. I neglected to mention that it simply doesn't seem that tall, because it tapers to such a thin profile. Last night, on the way to the...

The good news: our professor extended the deadline for our Cultural Disconnect paper until tomorrow. The bad news: tomorrow at 6am. This is almost a distinction without difference, some of us muttered, and it means that I will probably submit the paper at 12:05 instead of 11:55. While I'm doing that, you can see more photos. First, our hotel and its sister building: Another photo of the Dubai Creek: And the view out my hotel window, of the Dubai International Finance Center (also known as "the Gate")...

Mostly photos today, because I have an economics assignment due before I can get some desperately-needed sleep. Today we did our Culture Dash (see the entry about the deliverable) through some of the same Dubai streets I walked just yesterday. Some highlights: first, Dubai Creek, with an abra (commuter flatboat) in the foreground and an Airbus 330 taking off in the background: The textile souk in the old Bur Dubai neighborhood: And last one tonight, a minaret during the evening call to prayer: More...

After a two-hour walk in the 34°C heat, I actually feel much better. (People who know me can feel free to express surprise and alarm.) As I mentioned yesterday, spending too much time in a hotel depresses the life out of me. When will I ever again visit Dubai? Probably never. Since the hotel has gone to great lengths to make itself indistinguishable from any other similar hotel in the world, I fled the official corporate tours and hopped the Dubai Metro for Deira, the old part of the city. Sadly for my...

Some people might enjoy a week in a five-star hotel where the weather is warm and the beaches are only 10 minutes away. I might, too, if I had time to leave the hotel. Each residency, we have to write a "cultural disconnect" blog post describing an incident within the local culture that resulted from a disconnect between the cultures. For example, in London a student wrote about making a joke in an elevator that caused his American classmates to laugh out loud but the English people nearby to flee. He...

Dubai has tall buildings. Many of them. Like our hotel, the Jumeirah Emirates Towers: The 51-story hotel is 309 m tall, about the height of the Chrysler Building. But that's not the tallest building here. No, from my hotel window I can see this: That's the Burj Dubai, which at 818 m is almost double the height of Sears Willis Tower back home. Here's a comparison (from Wikipedia): I'm working on an essay (not explicitly for the CCMBA) about Dubai's growth, including its monumental projects like the Burj...

Is anyone surprised that Hamid Karzai, who brazenly stole the election in Afghanistan not too long ago, managed to get rid of the constitutionally-required runoff scheduled for this week? It really makes you wonder what we're fighting for over there.

Now that I have a functioning monitor once again, I can post a few photos. Despite American's mess-up with my seat assignments, a lovely British Airways flight attendant found an empty upper-deck window seat, so I did, in fact, get to have a total aviation-nerd-heaven trip: P.O.V. shot: A couple of things: first, the text on the screen is in Arabic, which makes sense if you're flying to Dubai. Second, the screen shows the plane has just gone over Italy's big toe. We had great views of the Alps and the...

When they ask why I missed a guest speaker and an alumni panel discussion, I will tell them about the lovely donation I'm making on Sunday. What donation? Why, a brand-new 50 cm widescreen monitor I bought this afternoon at the Dubai Mall: And why did I buy this monitor for AED 449? Because the one built into my laptop looked like this: No, you're not going blind, and that distortion isn't a compression effect or camera artifcat. That's real. And that's why Duke will get the monitor when I'm done with...

My laptop monitor has horked. On the way over to Dubai, while hanging out at Logan, the monitor went from normal to slightly magenta and missing every fourth column of pixels. This did not make me happy. Finally today I had the opportunity to connect the laptop to an overhead projector, which showed it has a fully-functioning video chip. This means that the problem is either in the LCD monitor itself or its connection to the motherboard, neither of which I can fix. So, the Duke IT folks have gone after...