Episode 40 – An interview in Jordan

Well here is a turn up for the books.. And a handy one at that as I am bowled over with my various projects at the moment so i am posting this interview with me in my feed to not only save me some valuble editing time but also to introduce and thank a British podcaster who lives in Canada called David Bailey.David Phoned me up whilst i was working In Amman Jordan and we had time for this quick interview. David’s content can be found at http://dfbmbe.wordpress.com and more of my other updates can be found at www.OurManInside.com

You can also stream the podcast here.. DFBMBE Blog

Many thanks to Dave in taking the time to call me in jordan and for making the interview available as a podcast.

correction: During the interview i should have said… It is the largest refugee crisis to hit the Middle East in 60 years. We must not forget Afghanistan.

Geek Retreat Struck By Lightning

Tonight I got a call that the converted barn on my Dad’s farm where Geek Retreat was meant to be taking place has been hit by a bolt of lightning. It’s happened before. Such is the erratic and crazy Welsh weather

There is no major damage but it seems there are electricity and internet issues. It’s a bit to close to the planned date for me to risk going ahead so I will have to postpone Geek Retreat for the time being.

I was a bit peeved to hear this but a postponement has two hidden benefits…

One: We all get to go to attend some of the many social media events happening in and around the same week.

& Two: We can hold Geek Retreat closer to the summer and therefore reap the benefit of some better weather. Perhaps with the added bonus of an outside fire with some kind of acoustic jam session. So if you are a player of anything that does not need plugging in.. Bring it along.

My apologies to all the people that had put the time aside to get over to Wales on the 9th and 10th of Feb. I will of course keep you posted on the Geek Retreat Blog and www.Twitter.com/GeekRetreat regarding any further dates that crop up.

It’s the West coast of Wales. A beautiful spot with a view of the mountains and the sea. No charge for accommodation, just chip in with the coking and bring a bottle.

www.geekretreat.info is the main site. Email me there of here if you would like to be considered for a future date.

Iraqi Refugees in Jordan (update)

It’s the beginning of my fourth full day here in Amman, Jordan and I feel I have hardly stopped. Friday is a holiday like the west’s Sunday here so while we catch up on a little sleep I have sacrificed an extra hour to try to get a few words down on the blog.

On my arrival into the country I was to meet my friend Phil Sands. He is a friend from about five year back, where we both worked on a regional daily paper in Northamptonshire. As my trip here was delayed I had arranged Phil to come here and be a ‘fixer’ for a few days. Setting up some interviews with my contact and smoothing the way.

Phil has lived in the middle east for a good few years now, commuting between Iraq (where we have worked together before) and Syria where he has made Damascus his base. It’s about $10 4 hour taxi ride from Amman to Damascus.

Phil has also has spent some time here in the past and knows some good people. One of these ‘good people’ a professional guy who runs a business mag called Karim came with Phil to pick me up at the station and instead of waiting with a normal white placard with my name on, they thought it funny to stage a fake kidnaping.

After a nervous welcome and hello we headed out into the dark cold night.. Only to be met by a short hairy guy on a mobile speaking in arabic and telling us we had to follow him. With secret police all over the Middle East It is not unusual for people to be taken off the street in this way. I was nearly taken hook line and sinker but Karim was a little to short and not at all threatening. Phil’s acting was thankfully not that good either.

Amman is a sprawling city without a visible centre.. This does not so much make it a soul-less place but draw parallels with western developments where the old town is forgotten as the new multi billion dollar developments spring up on it’s outskirts with their plazas and manicured gardens, surrounding condos and expensive apartments.

These developments only serve a very small percentage of the population but help to push up the cost of living for all. As a result those coming in from Syria and other neighboring countries may be surprised at the cost of living.

Phil and I are currently living in a small apartment in the Hotel Draghmeh in the region of Webdah. It costs about $40/night.

The work has been relentless and hard. Iraqi’s keep strange hours at the best of time and Iraqi refugees trying to lie low in a country that does not necessarily see them as having any legal status are even harder to pin down. As a result, there never seems to be a time when I am not working and somedays can stretch into the morning of the next. Lunch-times are spent with some of the poorest yet still incredibly hospitable people while we interview and take pictures and the late night moments we snatch to find food and sustenance are spent making calls and arranging the next day. Everyone has a mobile phone here and I could not imagine even beginning to manage a project like this five years ago.

The people I have met so far have harrowing stories. One well educated guy from Baghdad fled to Jordan having had his life threatened, only to hear five members of his family were killed in a car when passing US soldiers in their neighborhood.

None of these stories are easy to hear and I am amazed at the strength of spirit of these Iraqis forced into exile. There is an infrastructure attempting to help these people headed by the UNHCR. It is these people who have asked me to come here. I can see now that giving assistance is a much harder job than any could have imagined.

I just hope that once I have finished this project it will make some people sit up and pay attention to what is probably the largest single migration of people since 1945.

(Photos and audio taken of Iraqi refugees will follow in the coming weeks.)

Not Just A New Logo

Since I went freelance about four, almost five years ago, I traded under the name 3rd Eye Photography. I still love it but the creation of this site and I guess.. brand ‘Our Man Inside’ brought together many of my projects and offerings under one roof.

Our man inside was an old blog going way back. Many of the original anonymous posts have been moved and hidden in another location to protect the names of the innocent. (Mainly me).

As I pack to fly to Jordan in the early hours of tomorrow I thought it reasonable for me to tell my clients I will be away and thought I would also take the opportunity to officially launch this new site and the direction I wish to take for the foreseeable future.

Photography is still my main focus (scuse the pun) and I feel it will always be my main passion. There are so many other skills I wish to expand upon and incorporate too.

I won’t write late into the night as I am a little sleep deprived and I don’t feel tomorrows flight to the Middle East will be the most conducive for sleep. So I have linked the pdf newsletter I sent out to a few clients at the end of this post.

Should anyone want to contact me from tomorrow night (the 14th) I will be on my Jordanian mobile.. +962 795 316 772 or the usual electronic places. I will warn you in advance though, communication may well be sporadic.

Please click the link to read the PDF..
OMI-rebrand

Nokia N95 8GB on Vodafone

Great phone.. crap network.

Am I asking too much to want my cake and eat it too?

I have only had it a day or so and am pleasantly blown away at not only the UI but by all the apps floating around out there.

The only issue that arose on day one was the realisation that the ‘Unlimited Data’ package I was sold by Vodafone was infact limited to 120meg.

Hang on.. let me pause for a moment so you can realise jut how ridiculous that is.

The Nokia N95 8GB prides itself on being able to use Vodafone’s lightning fast High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA). Vodafone brags that their network can handle up to 7.2Mbit/sec.

So if my maths serves me correctly, on a connection running the mythical top speed of HSDPA, my entire monthly data allowance would last me around 17 seconds.

This is hardly what I would call unlimited. Especially when T-mobiles Web and Walk offer up to 3GB and an Iphone on O2 offers true unlimited data (all be it at 2G speeds).

So this morning I looked at my data-crippled phone as it chomped at the bit aching to behave as it was bred and decided to call Vodafone.

I got myself a hugh double scoop of coffee and dialed 191 expecting to be listening to some old pop track for an hour. Less than a minute later and i was talking to a human called Amy. This was a bit of a shock as I always remember Vodafone as being a nightmare for keeping people hanging on the line.

Within a few minutes she agreed that I had been duped into an unlimited contract that was nothing of the sort. She said 120 meg is nothing and that she would upgrade me to unlimited at no extra cost. I was in shock. This was all to good to be true. I asked for her to email what she had said just so as i had it on file.

I could only imagine that i was not the first to raise this issue and infact Trading Standards were in fact breathing down the necks of this mobile giant ordering them to make things right.

I was a very happy bunny and the call ended with me thinking all wrongs had been righted and that I was going to have to eat my previously harsh words in this very blog post.

Not so.

Twenty minutes later I still had no confirmation email and while mid call to a friend the phone cut off. I thought nothing of it. Perhaps he was driving and dropped the signal.

When it looked like I was not going to get an email i picked up my mobile and dialed 191. No connection. All I got was the error tones. I called a landline.. the same tones.

I could not believe it. I had been cut off.

Luckily I have a land line handy so i could call vodafone customer services. And i did.

Within a few minutes with the assistance of another advisor we had ascertained that Amy had assigned to my phone a data card tariff which had cut my phone services off. WTF.

Not only that, but the tariff I have been on for the last few years is now unavailable to me. I was only kept from migrating away recently because I could keep my pretty decent free minutes and texts with free weekend calls to both landlines and mobiles! They blocked me out from it and now I am not allowed to get back in! Surely they are in breach of some kind of contract here…

“Ok”, i said. Trying to remain composed.

To cut a long and stress filled story short.. Vodafone have buggered up my contract and stomped on any faith I had left in them. To top this they have absolutely nothing bigger than 120 meg for on-the-phone data and I think this is just ridiculous. Especially when T-Mobile offer 3gb on an unlimited (fair use) tariff.

Vodafone’s offerings are hardly cutting edge. Why advertise spangly new ‘VMI’ (Vodafone mobile internet) if all it is good for is downloading a few email headers and surfing wikipedia in the pub quiz?

So, the way things stand at the moment are they are offering me an extra 100 mins a month making it 300 free minutes to any landline, 500 free texts, Vodafone ’stop the clock’, which means after the first three mins on a weekend and every evening I can talk for an hour at no charge. On top of this they will give me £30 credit on my account and a free month of the £7.50 bolt on data tariff to see if i like it.

This is the absolute best they could offer me. The only thing I really wanted is a few mins and a decent data tariff, which they don’t can’t give me. They can’t even give me my old tariff back.

So i have about 14 days to make up my mind and in the first 14 minutes of this, my friend Giles has informed me that I can have a free Nokia N95 8GB on their Flex 35 contract (900 units, either text or mins) and for an extra £7.50 Web and Walk which is up to 3GB !!!

I seriously think that Vodafone are missing a trick here. If they really thought 120 meg was enough for anyone why not have the confidence to offer 1GB a month or even 500meg for starters? Why not put their meg where their mouth is.

Today mobile phones should enable us to leave our laptops at home. They have the capabilities to run a multitude of apps and stream data from cameras with decent resolutions. Never-the-less, some of our mobile network providers (namely Vodafone) seem to want us to stay in the dark ages.

Project Update.

My flight is booked and in a few days I fly to Jordan. Although I am still to get my hands on a D3 I am satisfied that I have the use of the new D300 for at least a month. Thank you to those that humoured me in my testing of the website chipin.com. £40 was donated, before i pulled the widget. I really appreciate the gestures and that money is safely put away and will be put toward other savings when they accumulate.

The unexpected death of my Mother over the holidays has not only allowed me to re-evaluate my goals in life but also meant the luxury of a new work tool will have to wait as my savings have been put towards her burial and send off.

My next assignment will be dedicated to my Mother Liala.

On the podcasting front I still have a backlog to get through but as you can imagine these have been unusually difficult times. I promise to do more podcasts in the future. So please sit tight and stay subscribed. I was going to pop all this in a podcast but thought those that subscribe may well read this blog too.

I am not one to look forward to much as i feel living in the moment is the best bet. Still. I am open to all kind of possibilities this new year and feel strangely optimistic for the future.

Cheers guys.

christian.