Babel fish

The ingredients for an instant translation tool already exist, and we don’t have to wait until the 23rd century. I’ve been thinking about how such a translator might work, and because I’ll never get around to doing it myself, the recipe is set out below.

Ingredients

1. One smartphone with voice to text and a 3G or WiFi connection and Bluetooth
2. One Bluetooth earpiece
3. Google

Method

1. The speaker talks into the phone.
2. The phone converts the speech into text.
3. The text goes wirelessly to Google, where one of the Google elves translates it into the target language and sends the translated text back to the phone.
4. A phone app converts the new text to speech.
5. The speech is delivered to the recipient’s ear through the Bluetooth earpiece.

According to Douglas Adams, such a device could cause “…more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

Whilst surfing the net to find a picture of the Star Trek Universal Translator (Reference: TOS “Metamorphosis”), I found that a much less clunky version of my idea already appears to exist.

http://www.speechgear.info/products/interact

Oh well. Such a shame I gave up my day job.

]}:-{>

My Little Smartphone

The Goat has been dragged kicking, butting and bleating into the 21^st century. Having had his LG handset suddenly go wrong and then refuse to behave itself even after being reset, rebooted, and even left overnight with the battery out, it was deemed a DBJ (dustbin job), and the Goat headed off to Carrefour to obtain a basic dual-SIM handset. He was sold one, which he then contrived to lose a week later. Whoever picked it up and immediately removed the SIM cards, the Goat hopes you’re happy with your new toy, you thieving git: a more reasonable person might have phoned ‘Home’ and attempted to return the handset to its rightful owner.

One trip to Dubai and two showings of his Emirates ID Card later, the Goat had replacement SIM cards for both Itisalot and d’oh, and it was time to find a new handset.

On the recent Japan trip, the Goat’s phone hadn’t worked at all, whereas Beloved Wife’s quad-band handset had quite happily connected to phone and internet. So the quest was to obtain a quad-band, dual-SIM device. It transpires that a lot of allegedly quad-band handsets are either 900MHz/1800MHz (which is fine for Europe and the middle east) or 850MHz and 1900MHz (which is what is needed for the USA and Japan). The Goat eventually ended up with the most basic smartphone he could find. It’s a Samsung that comes with a touch screen, GPS, 3G, WiFi, MP3 player and, once the Goat figures out how to use the handset properly, an app to do the ironing and wash the car.

Based on Beloved Wife’s experience with call trees, a real, physical keypad was also a must-have. Fighting the screen during a call in a vain attempt to Pless 1 for Engrish is something without which the Goat can do.

Unfortunately, it has so far been impossible to take some friendly advice and find a screen protector. The Samsung Service Centre staff looked at the Goat as if he’d asked for a lightly-grilled weasel, and none of the shops in Doha’s mobile phone souq had one either. One sales lack-of-assistant was busy sticking a screen protector on another customer’s machine before turning to the Goat and asserting he hadn’t got any. A BlackBerry 9900’s display is almost the same size, but the cutouts for the speaker are in the wrong place. Arse.

Getting more exasperated, the Goat eventually bemoaned this sorry state of affairs in the last shop. The Egyptian American behind the counter grinned, shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Welcome to Doha!” He cut down an iPhone screen protector to an approximately correct size and applied it as a temporary measure. Free of charge; he wouldn’t accept any form of payment. So much for a gem of advice offered ten minutes earlier. “You can’t cut it down. It won’t work if you cut it.”

So the Goat’s touch screen is protected for now. Maybe, just maybe, there’ll be something more suitable for sale in Dubai. Or America. Or internet mail order. As is apparently traditional, there’s loads of stuff for sale in Doha but little in the way of after-sales service.

]}:-{>

Electric string

The thing about my luxurious temporary accommodation is its luxury and also how temporary it is. Despite my only being in a one-bed flat in West Bay (there’s posh!) for up to a month, I nevertheless was disappointed to discover that the internet wasn’t working. I complained to HR, who told the computer geeks.
Then IT told the Alderney,
And he told the Dairymaid,
Until I was advised
To make a formal fault report.

I phoned Q-Tel.

As promised, Q-Tel contacted me within 48 hours, and I was obliged to drop everything and rush to the other end of town to let the technician fiddle with my router. The verdict was that there was a problem with the electric string connecting the telephone to the wall, and I would need a different cable. So as the technician left, I had a working internet but was missing the correct phone cable.

I know precisely zero about the inner workings of telecommunications equipment. How naïve of me to imagine that, if I bought a phone cable in Qatar that had the right plug on each end and was labelled as being suitable for telephones in Qatar, that it would be the correct cable. Once plugged in, the phone remained as dead as flared corduroy trousers, and so I logged another fault complaint with Q-Tel.

Sure enough, within 48 hours a technician phoned me. “No, actually I’m not sitting at home on the off-chance that you might happen by. I am in fact at the other end of town working and earning the money that enables me to stay here. Yes, of course I’ll drop everything and head straight home to let you in. For the second time this week.”

It turns out that the cable I’d bought was the wrong type. It looks identical to the correct type, but has four internal wires instead of two. And Q-Tel is allegedly special: unique in the Gulf in using the two-wire system. So much for “fully compatible with the Gulf” as it says on the box.

I wasn’t going to let the technician escape without leaving a working land-line. He snipped off the wrong plug from the original cable and crimped the correct plug on to the end. Everything now works. Why, I ask myself, did the first technician not do that? Changing the plug took approximately 20 seconds.

]}:-{>

Who wants to be a milliner?

The Goat’s recent silence on the InterTubes of late has been because of other rather more pressing engagements. One of these involved the Goat’s almost full passport. Others involved beer.

According to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a British UAE resident has to send his applications for a replacement passport to Düsseldorf rather than the previous system that involved having it done at the local British Embassy. First pay £15 to PayPal to obtain permission to download the application form, then send off the form, old passport and nearly €300. “Up to” six weeks later, the new passport would arrive.

Unfortunately, having his residence visa cancelled upon termination of employment would give the Goat four weeks to leave the country. The potential for being trapped without a passport and incurring fines for illegally remaining in the UAE rather encouraged a holiday in Blighty.

So the Goat applied for a same-day appointment at Nanny Goat’s local passport office, picked up the application form for free from the local post office, and now has a new biometric passport. Huzzah! Visits to the in-laws in the USA without all that pesky form-filling to get a visa are now possible.

The Immigration and Passport Service has to be self-funding. It is, of course, completely unreasonable that the British taxpayer subsidises Mrs Trellis’ holiday from North Wales to Benidorm; arguably more so when the travel involves a tax-free job in Dubai. Thus a standard UK passport currently costs around £78. Same-day service by special appointment and a jumbo 48-page document is £140ish. As £78 apparently covers all the costs of the IPS, the Goat idly speculates as to the justification of nearly €300 for Brits abroad.

Travel costs didn’t count in the Goat’s case because he was going anyway.

Visiting family and friends, the Goat borrowed Nanny Goat’s car and gave it the sort of thrashing that the old rented Yaris received between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and achieved the same result: 40mpig, or 7l/100km for the rest of the planet. Poor little City Rover.

Thank you to Mr and Mrs Thrash, the Gnomad and Gnomadette, and the Lawful Goods of Cowplain for their hospitality, food and the opportunity for boating on the Thames.

The weather on the run up to Easter was gloriously sunny, even resulting in the Goat getting slightly sunburned in the open cockpit of the MV Jedi between Sunbury-upon-Thames and Windsor. Next time, wear some form of hat. A new record for possibly the slowest passage was caused by repeatedly having the river locks slammed shut in our faces because they were full of other boaters who had had the same idea involving sunny weather and messing about in boats. By the time we arrived, all mooring spots were taken and the Good Ship Jedi had to be rafted three out. This made getting small children ashore an entertaining experience; just as well they’re used to this sort of thing.

Incidentally, the Goat was appalled when his host produced a French flag. In England. On St George’s Day. And Bill Shakespeare’s birthday. There was some feeble excuse about it being an unused courtesy flag for a boat trip over the Channel that was postponed because of foul weather.

Moored in a very busy Windsor, it was noted that Her Maj., Mrs Liz Windsor was in residence up at the local castle. Witness the Royal Standard flying from the topmost tower. The Goat shared his speculation that, because of her grandson’s upcoming wedding, she might have actually been down the hat shop. (Although in Soviet Russia, as the ancient memes say, the hat shop comes to you.) Nanny Goat, who was in London on a coach trip at the time, reports that Her Maj.’s car was actually parked outside Westminster Abbey on Thursday while the monarch was inside doling out Maundy money.

Now back chez Nanny Goat, her offspring is bemoaning the fact that the display on his new mobile phone has died. A fully-functional phone, but no access to any menus, is worse than useless except for receiving voice calls. Imagine being unable to read all the texts that can be heard arriving. And it can’t even be backed up. The Goat has tried and failed to switch on Bluetooth by Braille, and suspects another new handset may be in order.

]}:-{>

Small change

A vital part of my recent change in employer is my change of address. Like most individuals in the middle east, I have in the past adopted my employer’s PO Box as my mailing address, and had my SnailMail™ delivered directly to my desk. There are no doorstep deliveries in the UAE, except by Pizza Hut.

So over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been informing the various organisations that send me mail of a new PO Box number. Most can manage this change on the strength of a telephone call or an email. But – alas – not my bankers, who require a hard copy document. Just for once, the local branch of Red Triangles Bank performed faultlessly. Sadly, the same cannot be said of another major international bank, whose customer service and credibility proceeded to go down in flames last evening.

I wrote in early May: “Dear Bank, Please note my new change of address. Yours, G. Goat, esq.”

The bank wrote back about three weeks later with other issues raised by my letter. Despite the bank’s studiously ignoring of my change of address, I eventually received the correspondence. It had been forwarded through my former employer’s various offices until I was phoned and asked to come and collect it yesterday.

To sort out the address issue, I rang the bank’s published UK phone number. It’s a free phone call from the UK, but not from the UAE, of course. Inevitably, the call was answered by someone in a call centre in India.

After picking my way through security, a real person answered. He proceeded to go through all the same security questions again before putting me on hold and cutting me off five minutes later. I rang back. Twenty minutes into the second call, I was ‘passed to a supervisor’, which is call-centre language for ‘put on hold for ten minutes and then cut off.’

The third call actually produced some coherent information. Apparently, the only way to update my postal address would be to do it through phone banking. Alas, (and there is always an ‘alas’, isn’t there?) I don’t have a phone banking password. Never fear: the bank would mail one to me, and then I’d be able to update my address by phoning the call centre (for the fourth time).

Given that the only address to which they’d mail it is my old address, how useful is that? I’d have to trust that my mail would be forwarded and not opened by persons unknown, or else binned. This third call-centre operative promised absolutely not to cut me off, and then did so without even the pretence of playing some hold muzak first.

I have now resorted to writing to the bank again. I’m also considering alternative banking, despite having been a customer for thirty years. The sock-under-the-mattress approach pays the same interest, fees and charges are lower, and I don’t have to deal with call-centre buffoonery.

]}:-{>

Only happy when I'm moaning

After noting Alexander’s warning about the new chequebook thing over at Fake Plastic Souks, I got on line to my favourite group of bankers and ordered a new chequebook. A couple of hours later, Red Triangles Bank sent me an SMS to confirm that the chequebook had been dispatched to a courier whom I shall call Are-A-Mess for reasons that will shortly become apparent, and here was the tracking number. Then, a day later, the courier phoned me on my mobile to find out where I was located. The package was duly delivered a day after that.

Then after a further day or two, Are-A-Mess phoned me on my mobile to advise that there was another package - a new plastic card - from the same bank, which they wished to deliver. And they did so, less than 24 hours later.

So just when I thought it was all working...

Last Thursday I rang Red Triangles Bank, the bank that is both local and global:

Goat: Hi. I have my new credit card, thank you very much. Where is the other one?

Bank: It’s with Are-A-Mess. We sent it to them on 15 December. Here’s the tracking number.

Goat: OK, thanks. I’ll chase Are-A-Mess to get it delivered.


I rang Are-A-Mess, purveyors of Shop&Ship and also Red Triangles’ courier of preference:


Goat: With reference to this tracking number, where’s my package?

AAM: We’ve been sitting on this since 15 December. RTB didn’t give us your mobile phone number.

Goat: Well here it is.

AAM: Oh, no, Mr Goat. We have to be given your phone number by the bank.

Goat: And you contacted the bank to obtain my number…?

AAM: Certainly not. Policy is to wait until an irate customer calls, then he has to contact the bank.


Rang the bank again. Got cut off several times. Eventually:


Goat: Are-A-Mess needs you to tell them my mobile phone number. Then they can call me to arrange delivery.

Bank: We’ll contact Are-A-Mess and call you back.


Time passes. Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.

Bank: We called Are-A-Mess, and they’ll phone you on Saturday, or Sunday at the latest, to arrange delivery by Sunday.

Goat: Huzzah!


Sunday afternoon:


Goat: Hi. You didn’t call me. This is the tracking number. Where’s my package?

AAM: Please tell us your location, and we can deliver it tomorrow. Is this your landline number?

Goat: Yes it is. Would it help to use my mobile in case I’m ‘not on my seat’ when you ring?

AAM: We only have your landline number. We’ve had it since December. But not the mobile. You have to get the bank to tell us your mobile.

Goat: So if you had my number why didn’t you call? It’s my firm’s main switchboard, so don’t try to tell me that there was no answer. The only way to fail to get an answer during office hours is not to dial the number!

So who is lying?

• Are-A-Mess for telling me that they had no contact number when they had it last December?
  
  
• Are-A-Mess for telling me that they’ve had my number since December, when they only got it last Thursday?
  
  
• Red Triangles Bank for telling me that they told Are-A-Mess my mobile number when they didn’t?
  
  
• Red Triangles Bank for telling Are-A-Mess my office landline number and then telling me they gave out the mobile?
  
  
• Are-A-Mess for telling me that the Bank hadn’t given them my mobile number?

I don’t know who has a tenuous grasp on the truth, but for sure it’s at least one of the above.

Meanwhile, Muggins is stuck like flat-nosed curly-tailed dog in the middle, refereeing between Are-A-Mess and Red Triangles Bank. Both of these organisations (for a given value of ‘organised’) are stuck behind call trees, so being a referee is a time-consuming exercise in frustration and futility. “Press 1 to be ignored; Press 2 to listen to our annoying hold music; Press 3 to get cut off, etc”

]}:-{>

Dubaisengard

Beloved Wife and I spotted this last weekend. The only clouds in the sky were over Business Bay, and Dubaisengard - the tallest free-standing structure on the planet until someone builds a bigger one - wasn't so much scraping the sky as piercing it.

Apologies for the quality of the image. I was driving, and the only available camera was attached to an ancient Nokia steam-powered telephone.

Before anyone asks, the phone cam was wielded by Beloved Wife from her vantage point in the Goatmobile's passenger seat.

]}:-{>

Jack in the greenwash

How much of an environmental footprint does a mobile phone leave? It’s huge, apparently. Apart from the packaging and the manual that weighs in at a pound or so, the handset is made of a miscellany of plastics, there’s a liquid-crystal screen, various bits of rare and precious metals, and a rechargeable battery.

Sony-Eriksson reckon that they can apply a 15% greenwash by using recycled plastics, reducing the packaging, and supplying the C901 phone manual electronically, in the handset itself. So if you can’t figure out how to install the battery or switch it on you’re gonna be royally shafted. I had a giggle at the idea of saving the Earth’s finite resources by using a 30 milliwatt charger instead of 100mW, and then, as is not mentioned, sitting around under the air conditioning for an additional hour at three kilowatts or more waiting for the battery to charge.

Lithium-ion batteries don’t last for ever. I’ve just discovered a fading battery which results in a super short standby time and my Nokia reporting a full battery when it obviously isn’t. So it’s time to replace the battery or buy a new phone. Surely extending the effective life of an otherwise serviceable handset by a couple of years is environmentally preferable to lashing out for a whole new one? By not changing the entire phone I also neatly avoid yet another new mains charger and replacing the car charger.

How much for an appropriate Nokia battery? In “Not Coming In” Dubai it’d be an astonishing and ridiculous Dh145. £25. Twenty-five quid. As the shop assistant pointed out, for only a little more cash I might as well buy a complete new handset. And charger. And manual. And carrying case. It’s the electronic version of flogging the car ‘cos the ashtrays are full, the only obvious beneficiary being the phonemonger.

In any case, the point is moot because nobody I asked had a BL-5B. They do exist on the interwebs though. They’re offered at between £5 and £15, plus whatever shipping charges are deemed appropriate. The problem here is that the on-line suppliers I contacted couldn’t ship beyond the impenetrable English Channel (Fog in Channel: Universe cut off) and were similarly incapable of accepting a credit card payment when the registered address isn’t in the United Kingdom. Only non-expatriate Brits ever use credit cards, obviously. www.4mobiles.co.uk promised to contact me with details for taking my order by email but they didn’t. So I’ll not be buying an iPhone or BlackBerry or N98 from them, will I?

I have now found a solution to the original battery problem at £6.95 that involves Nanny Goat, Eid Al Adha and Boeing. She’s coming anyway, so the carbon footprint incurred by schlepping a phone battery doesn’t count.

In related greenwash news, I have just learned that it is impossible for my UK-based credit card company to switch to paperless statements. The company needs a UK-based mobile phone number to SMS so that I’m reminded to check the balance and cough up the moolah. International numbers ‘aren’t acceptable’, and alerting me by email is ‘impossible’. So I shall have to continue receiving the dead tree version every month, air-freighted to my PO Box at enormous environmental expense.

]}:-{>

My Little Phoney

It’s approaching time for a new mobile phone handset. I really like the Nokia 3100. It’s dead simple to use and has an inordinately long battery life. There isn’t a camera, FM radio or MP3 player, it doesn’t make tea, tell jokes or do the ironing, but in the words of a parody advert that I now can’t find, “Get a life. It's only a f****** phone.” Unfortunately, it now seems impossible to buy “only a f****** phone”, and the 3100 is as obsolete as flared trousers, kipper ties and vinyl records.

What I really wanted was a new handset that accepted the same computer cable and charger as the 3100. I have no desire to throw away a load of house and car chargers and the hands-free kit. The Nokia 6020 appeared to fit the bill. It does have a crappy camera, but this now seems unavoidable. Cheaper phones aren’t tri-band; a ‘must have’ when travelling to the States.

Unsurprisingly, mobile phone handsets on sale in the UAE come configured to support Arabic text. It’s not only on the keypad. Having bought the new handset I got it home and switched it on, only to be confronted with Right to Left text. Whilst I can read Arabic, albeit extremely slowly, I had to rummage through both English and Arabic manuals for some time before I could find the language settings buried deep within the menu tree.

Ah, success! English.

Except that any form of text input always defaulted to Arabic. Sure, hitting the ‘#’ key twice to get Latin characters was easy enough, but remembering to do this each and every time I wanted to search for a contact name or write a text message started to be a right royal pain en al shams la laisa*.

Back to the shop. “Oh, no problem Mr Goat. It’ll take us half an hour because we have to reprogram the handset to disable Arabic text support.”

The duly-appointed half an hour later, this had turned into: “All electronic devices sold in this country support Arabic text, and in the case of your phone it’s impossible to switch it off.”

“All electronic devices? Half the laptops in your shop don’t even have Arabic keyboards, and neither do my old phone handset or my own laptop purchased from this very emporium. With all due respect [i.e., no respect at all; the amount you actually deserve], what you have just told me is complete bollocks. Anyway,” I enquired, “Why do your staff say that it’s no problem when you, and presumably they, know that the task is impossible?”

“It’s company policy,” the manager replied. “We always tell the customer that we can do it.”

Well, this sums up Dubai customer service, doesn’t it? Company policy deliberately to lie to the customers.

“We’ll give you a refund, but you’ll obviously have to go home, pick up all the paperwork and packaging and come back here again. We’re open until midnight.”

Having obtained my refund, an almost unprecedented occurrence, I tried several other shops in the mall, but to no avail. Eventually, I discovered that the i2 booth, located about as far as it’s caprinally possible to get from the ski slope without going outside, had a pile of Nokia 6020 handsets. The salesman and I booted one of them up and were confronted with Arabic text. His Arabic was worse than mine (is this actually possible?) but I found the language menu and changed it to English. Miracle of miracles, all references to Arabic text disappeared from the display. Sold.

So “...it’s impossible to switch [the Arabic] off” has now proved to be “complete bollocks.”

I returned to the first shop. Having defaced the English manual with handwritten PINs and PUKs, it was only fair to give the shop the clean one out of the new phone’s box. How interesting to learn from a further staff member that the technician who couldn’t disable the Arabic was “an idiot.”

Now all that remains to be done is to ensure that the phone doesn’t have an annoying ringtone, but is still obtrusive enough that I can hear it.

* Where the sun shineth not