Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Transferring contacts into your iPhone

Nick transferring contactsSo you have bought your new unlocked iPhone from the local Indian market trader in Dubai for 2900 Drm ( 386 UKP) and now you want to transfer your old SIM card contacts to the iPhone contact book. Is there a neat utility (like on the Treo’s) to do this?

Nope! you need the waitress to give you her pen and pad and do it like Nick using the iHand© method.

You cannot bluetooth/email contacts either or receive contacts by bluetooth in fact the iphone is missing loads of features that I loved on the Treo. However, what it does it does exceedingly well and maybe the other features will arrive in time 🙂

Update: Apparently at Macworld on 14 Jan 2008 this fone2phone will be released

UK Drivers look the other way…..

Whilst on my walk from Nicks offices in Media City. I came across a filling station:-

Petrol prices

That is at the exchange rate today:-

6.25 AED

=

0.834319 GBP

United Arab Emirates Dirhams United Kingdom Pounds
1 AED = 0.133491 GBP 1 GBP = 7.49114 AED

or about 83 pence per gallon, Nick says, don’t forget about the free window cleaning and that you don’t have to get out of the car to get it filled up.
Office viewI guess that’s why he has a gas guzzling  Jeep Wrangler.

Here is a view from his office window, with his view of the Persian Gulf, beache and the One and Only resort .(apologies the link is to a crappy flash site 🙁 )

Dubai past and present

Fred Wilson posted these two images of Dubai taken 13 years apart on his tumblr page (linked to the Edibek blog), which contains loads of interesting Dubai facts.

Cranes in DubaiDesert site I went out this afternoon in the area next to Nicks apartment and you can see the furious rate of building from the number of cranes in this picture and an aerial photograph of the same area taken a couple of years ago.

Turning off the candles.

Quentin took this fine picture of Kings Parade in Cambridge. Which had me thinking about the current state of street lighting on Kings Parade. Especially after Cathy and I visited the Shire Hall a few years ago to complain about the new columns.

Richardson Street Light

A bit of history first, In 1957 the new Richardson lights were installed, These were custom designed for the City of Cambridge by Sir Albert Richardson and custom-made by REVO some 64 columns and 26 wall mounted candles were made, Trinity street is still illuminated solely by them and they give the city a unique presence at night.

However, our council decided that Kings Parade needed improving! The key starting point was the Cambridge Lighting Strategy document which arose out of a consultation session in1997. This began the investigation of possible street scape & lighting improvements for King’s Parade.

The Kings Parade Street scape Improvement scheme was approved in Jan 1998 but no decision could be reached on the lighting and so the county council installed standard steel columns, allegedly as a temporary measure because Cambridge needed brighter lighting than the Richardson lights could deliver (although to my knowledge Kings Parade hadn’t suffered from excessive muggings etc in the previous 40 years)

However, the council remains committed to finding better designed lighting as these March 2005 minutes show

commitee meeting

Minutes of a 25th October 2007 meeting show the lights still to be on the agenda with Cllr Holland asking questions.

I await to see what the council decide to waste our money on. IMHO I would just remove the ugly steel columns and leave the candles in, I would imagine they could easily be refurbished.