Archive | March, 2006

Ship Disaster

Rescue workers bring a body ashore in Manama after a passenger boat sank off the coast of Bahrain in the Gulf, March 30, 2006

MANAMA (Reuters) – At least 57 people drowned when a tourist boat carrying more than 130 people on a dinner cruise sank off Bahrain, a coastguard official said on Friday.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry told Al Jazeera television that 67 survivors had been found. Rescue operations were underway to search for more survivors of Thursday’s sinking of the vessel carrying Asians, Arabs and Europeans.

“There are a large number of those who died who were not carrying identification so it’s hard to determine who they were and where they come from,” the spokesman, Colonel Tarek al-Hassan, said.
Reuters

My heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of those who needlessly lost their lives or were injured in this incident, and fervently hope that government agencies in charge of regulating the tourism, safety and security industries put in sterner laws to protect visitors and residents alike, and mount an honest and transparent investigation of this disaster in order to learn from it and save future lives.

People who were directly responsible for flouting safety laws should be punished, and this business should undergo an immediate investigation into their operation, training and certification of their staff and their safety measures.

May they all rest in peace.

Moving again…

I’ve ordered a bigger server for my sites from RackSpace and it should be built and made available to me to migrate all the data into it in the next few days. Hopefully that will mean better reliability and availability of the sites.

The new server will also have a new IP address, so there might be an outage until the DNS servers get updated. Once I know what the new IP address is however, I’ll publish it so that you can connect through the IP in the transition period.

I hope this will be the last of the big outages for a long time to come.

Bear with me for the next few days…

UPDATE 060401: All sites (including bahrainblogs.org) except for gbps.tv and mahmood.tv have now been moved and are operational on the new server. I’ll get tech support to change the DNS settings for the last two sites to move them to the new server. The effect of this change is that we might lose a couple of comments in the changeover period which I will attempt to rescue somehow, rather than switching of commenting altogether. The new server’s speed is sweet!

New New Garden Centre!

Yippeee!

I stopped over this afternoon at the new Jassim’s garden centre, opposite Bahrain Motors on the Budaiya highway and man, was it worth it! It absolutely floors the competition; they’ve got everything under one very modern roof. Well stocked, plenty of medicines if you need them, good selection and reasonably priced garden tools and pots, and walk to the back and out into their garden and select from a good selection of summer plants (but some were looking quite manky and needed attention).

I think it’s just a soft launch, but if you’re into gardening, it’s worth stopping by and having a good look around. It is the cleanest, most modern and welcoming garden centre there is on the island.

About time!
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It’s going to rain..

and you can bet your bottom Dollar on this prediction, and it’s going to happen soon.

Why am I so sure? Well, because he asked for the traditional rain-dance! When that happens you better believe that the best forecasters were hard at work predicting when it’s going to happen!

Hang on a minute.. isn’t looking into the future against Islamic teachings?

Time to get the wellies out again.

Roll Film!

IREX Logo To the budding film-makers in us, read this:

Grants Available to Arab TV companies to produce local content

Independent Arab television news producers TV Production Fund Small Grants awards will be made under the MENA MEDIA program, administered through the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) and AmmanNet.

Up to ten television journalists and producers from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, and the West Bank and Gaza will be able to seek small grants up to $20,000. A total of $150,000 will be available to Arab producers in two rounds this year.

Applications for the first round of grants are now being received with a deadline set for May 15th 2006. Productions dealing with issues like political processes and governments’ responsiveness to the needs of their citizens, women in public life, profiles of innovative/emerging leaders will be considered by a panel made up largely of independent Arab media workers. Projects which include alliances on content among television stations, print, radio or Internet outlets to ensure the productions have the broadest distribution possible will be given priority.
Read more…

I’m on the media advisory board of IREX and hope that I can help in any that I can to get Bahraini film-makers to participate in this. You know how to contact me.