Half Time

I've just completed second week in KSA. Tomorrow one day off relaxing, get my stuff together and leaving Jeddah, back to the Eastern Province again, this time to Dharan.

It was the first time I've been in Jeddah, it's a bit difficult to describe. The traffic is plain crazy. Forget about Dubai, here it's even more busy on the streets and no signs of any safe-driving skills around.

I haven't seen much other than the Hotel and customer site, but appearently it's great for Scuba diving here, so I will at least get a taxi to the beach tomorrow and hopefully will be pleasently surprised.

I found people here very friendly. All day long I get a friendly "Salam Malaikum", on the street, in the elevators, everywhere, non-stop. This happens only occasionally to me in Riyadh or Dubai.

School vacation started here, subsequently to my shock I couldn't get a flight out of Jeddah. All Airlines were fully booked! Out of desperation, I've already booked the Hotel Limo to drive me up to Dharan to be on time for the next scheduled customer meeting. That would have been a crazy 14+ hours drive through the desert. This morning I checked one last time online with FlySama and couldn't believe my luck when I found one available seat to Riyadh for Friday. Wow, now I only have to get a driver from Riyadh to Dharan, which should take something around 4 hours. What a relieve!

So, this is half-time, I've got about another 12 days to go before take-off back to Dubai. I start to miss it:-)

One-Page-Sales-Letters

I've created a profile on Hubpages.com. I must say, I'm becoming a big fan of these Web 2.0 applications. They are really cleverly put together.

Yesterday, I got my hands on a very popular, but un-ethical e-book, which led me to write this article.

Once I'm finished reading it in more detail, I will explain a couple of interesting practices some people are willing to carry out for some money. While I would think 5 times about things like cloaking a website, and possibly getting banned for life by Google, it's very interesting to see what others are up to.

The Eastern Province of the Saudi Kingdom

I'm currently on a 3 weeks business trip in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. While there's nothing else to do than work and back to the Hotel, I somehow do enjoy these trips. Mainly because I can get a lot of work done, there are no interruptions. And I can spend a lot of time on the Internet and work on a couple of other projects I've got running. Currently I've got 2 great business opportunities I'm working on, one is building up a online shopping business and the other one offering Internet Domains. It takes a lot of time, but it's what I love to do, searching the Internet, absorbing new information, finding opportunities which add value to others and brainstorming about ways to share this with people around the globe. Keeps me busy and creative:-)

Past week I've been in Jubail in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom. It's about an hour and a half drive from Bahrain. It's a real Industry city, but also very beautiful around the cost-line. The limo driver brings me to customer site every morning along the beach road. Very nice.

Internet & Phone Submarine Cable Cut

Last week we experienced major phone & internet problems. A submarine cable in the Persian Gulf has been cut by most likely an anchor.

It's kind of a funny feeling not being able to use the Internet as we are taking it just for granted. But it makes me think in what a very vulnerable position we are.

Every day we are relying more and more on the Internet for professional and personal business, all it takes are a couple of cable cuts and we are all down.

It would be very interesting to research deeper into this issue and to learn what safeguards and backup systems are in place to prevent a complete shut-down of the Internet. Let's see how much time I'll find to take this project on :-)