Yaaay!!!

The BlogRolling.com update feature appears to be automatically working again!

Finger crossed that it continues to do so.

Bit of a break

Sorry for the lack of posts over this past week.

We're going through a bit of a busy time at the moment, and the blogging had to give way.

Hopefully normal transmission will resume shortly!

In the meantime, I'm still keeping up-to-date with all your blogs and leave you with a image which I took of J and the boys chasing a turtle in the Maldives.

We wish that we were there right now!

** Those little stars **

If you're listed on the UAE Community Blog or a Blogrolling.com user and want to know how to get those *Updated Blog notifiers* (the little stars) to show again, you need to read this!

Over at the UAE Community Blog, there are long lists (known as Blogrolls) in the left and right hand columns of blogs whose owners have requested to be listed there.

To manually maintain these lists by having to type each blog's URL into the UAE blog template would be a nightmare of a job, so the UAE Blog moderators use an application called BlogRolling.com to manage the lists.

We do too - all the links that you see in the right-hand column are managed in BlogRolling.com - no more tedious adding of html to our blog templates everytime we want to list a new blog!

All we now add to our blog template is a string of code provided to us by BlogRolling.com which is the link to our blogrolls that are now managed in BlogRolling.com.

Adding blogs to our blogrolls using BlogRolling.com
To add a blog to our lists is now simple. When we see a blog that we want to add to our Blogrolls, we click the Blogroll It! (a plug-in available from BlogRolling.com) link in our browser links bar.

The BlogRoll It! Plug-in as it shows in our browser


This opens a window which lets us log into BlogRolling.com and add the blog to the list in which we want it to appear. Refreshing our blog page then shows the blog added to the list - it's that easy!

The window which opens into BlogRolling.com so that we add a new blog to our blogrolls


Updated Blogs Notification
A really useful feature of BlogRolling.com is that you can activate a setting which will notify you of when a blog on your Blogrolls is updated.

On the UAE Community blog, you can tell which blogs have been recently updated by the addition of a little * beside the name of the blog.

The UAE Community Blog has chosen to show 1 * beside blogs which have been updated


On our blog, we can tell which blogs have been updated by the addition of ** (2 stars) beside the blog name, as that's what M has chosen as our notifier.

Pacific Islander (Pandabonium and Momo) and Rod Drury have new posts!



It's not working!
Sadly and alas, the automated Update notifier for Blogroll hasn't been working properly, so unless you're using an RSS feed or another option such as Bloglines to keep tabs on updated blogs, it's been difficult for us BlogRolling.com users to know which blogs have been updated.

However!
I've noticed that the manual Pinging feature in BlogRolling.com still works and this will activate the Updating feature.


What's pinging?
Pinging is when you send a trigger message to a site like Technorati, BlogRolling.com, Feedburner etc to tell them that your blog has been recently updated. In turn, this updates their info to include your recent posts.

BlogRolling Pinging
BlogRolling has their own form to fill out which is available on their website.

BlogRolling's ping form and, circled in red, the link from their menu to get to it


Ping-o-matic
Or you can use a generic Ping form such as the one from Ping-o-matic which will then notify a whole lot of Blog aggregators that your blog has been updated - including BlogRolling.com!

Ping-o-matic's ping form - select the sites that you wish to notify about your updated blogs and do them all at once!


For blogs listed on BlogRolling.com-generated blogrolls, using the Pinging services will then activate the selected updated symbols whenever your blog is updated, such as on **ours** and the *UAE Community Blog*.

It's a good workaround until BlogRolling.com can fix their automatic pinging.

Now let's see how many UAE Community Blog members read this blog and start to manually ping!

To my Valentine

I love you - and if you can't see the player in IE, then it's worth switching to Firefox to hear the song! xo

Smile
You could smile away the storm clouds
Even fill an empty space
And it feels just like sunshine baby
When that smile lights up your face
I’m so glad we’re together

I can’t dream of a better place
That I’d rather be
Than right here with you loving me
With a smile that makes the angels start to sing

La la la la la …
La la la la la …
La la la la la …
La la la la la …

You make the angels sing
In celebration of the joy you bring
And I know there’s no better place
That I’d rather be
When you hold me close in your arms
Whoa I can feel your heart beat inside me

I have found an oasis
A treasure island in the sea
Waves of gentle love and understanding
With a smile that captivated me
I will cherish the day
That you chased all my storm clouds away

With your smile

Oh baby

Everyday’s a holiday when you smile
You can chase the thunder clouds away
When you smile, smile
Bathe me in your sunshine

Smile because I’m happy, yeah

Smile can even soothe a broken heart
Smile a day can keep the doctor away
Smile can lift your spirits
Smile is just a frown turned upside down
See that everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody everywhere
Needs a smile
Smile Smile
Your smile shines bright

sung by the great Dianne Reeves who also wrote Smile in collaboration with her famous cousin, producer, song writer and piano player George Duke.

Snowy Scenes

Ok Buj, Louis, CG and all those craving for snow, we had more of it when a light shower fell very early on Saturday morning.

The ground was colder because of a minus-temperature day on Friday, so the snow coated everything including the roads and footpaths, and stayed around until rain dissolved it on Saturday night.

I ventured out further this time, and walked around the parks and streets.


Anyone with children and dogs was not exempt from being outside.


Dogs still needed to be walked


Kids needed to burn off energy by sledding on the slopes.


The Saturday morning flea market at Fehr Belliner Platz was in full swing.


The secondary streets were not swept clear


We have a mosque located around the corner from the house which is currently undergoing much needed renovation. I found out more about it from a wall plaque that I hadn't seen before.


Built between 1924 and 1927, it's a mosque erected by people from Lahore, Pakistan. As far as I can make out, it's called Ahmadijja Andjuman Jschaat-el-Jslam, but the name appears to have been (phonetically?) translated into German, given the spelling of Islam.

This has intrigued me, as the dates indicate that Muslims were in Germany during the time of Nazi occupation.


It raises some questions for me that I will investigate to satiate my curiousity:
- did they flee Germany during the war?
- did they take up against the Jews also, or were they neutral in this instance?
- were they largely ignored by the Nazis, or did they undergo the same horrors as the Jews?

If anyone knows anything about Muslims in Germany and Europe during WWII, please share your knowledge in the comments section.

Maybe it will get me off my current infatuation with the falling white stuff - snow that is, not dandruff.

My dog has fleas

Pandabonium has posted about a remarkable Hawaiian ukulele player Jake Shimabukoro.

Head over to Pacific Islander blog to hear Jake play George Harrison's While my Guitar gently weeps on a ukulele - both song and instrument played like I've never heard before!

Absolutely brilliant!

Waddya know, we have snow!

Dang those weather forecasters, they were right.

Hey BuJ, we have snow too!

It's melting now, but apparently more is on the way. The squirrels are standing at our back door, peering in and begging for nuts!

I risked life, limb and frostbite to venture 10m out of the house to get these images!

Coexistence

Blogs are wonderful things when they spread good news.

Two great posts that I read today have a common theme: peace and understanding between jews and muslims as neighbours and schoolmates.

Via The Sudanese Thinker blog, I learned about King David Primary School, (a state school in Birmingham, UK), which is a Jewish institution where half the pupils are Muslim.

It's infant prize day at King David School, a state primary in Moseley, Birmingham. The children sit cross-legged on the floor, their parents fiddling with their video cameras. The head, Steve Langford, is wearing a Sesame Street tie.

A typical end-of-term school event, then. But at King David there's a twist that gives it a claim to be one of the most extraordinary schools in the country: King David is a strictly Jewish school. Judaism is the only religion taught. There's a synagogue on site. The children learn modern Hebrew - Ivrit - the language of Israel. And they celebrate Israeli independence day.

But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school's catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world.

Here's the whole article in The Independent Online.

Via Lirun's East Med Sea Peace blog, I learned of a dedicated band of people who belong to the OneVoice Movement - an organisation to empower Israeli and Palestinian citizens against violent extremism.

Please watch the whole video - it's goosebump material.

So heartwarming to read about positive steps. It's a long way to go, and through people who believe in taking steps like these, the destination has to be closer.

Outlook for Thursday..

...your guess is as good as mine.

Actually, the forecast is for snow on Thursday which will be only the second snowfall for Berlin this winter.

It's been at least 10 degC warmer on average for this time of year around these parts.

The squirrels are still holding us to ransom for nuts, and show no signs of hibernating.

Spring bulbs are popping foliage and flowers, and we've got very premature hyacinths and crocus all over the lawn and in the garden, mixing it with the snowdrops which should be out at this time!

Just in case it does snow on Thursday and kill all the plants, I went out today and grabbed some pics.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the title of this post, it's a song by an excellent 80s NZ band called DD Smash.

Song here: click arrow to play



Lyrics here (although not entirely accurate), and upon reading the lyrics, I realise that this is a song for Louis and his Sunshine, Catherine!

At least the lyrics may help you to interpret Dave Dobbyn's kiwi accent!

Climatic Differences

From sand and smog...


...to snow and fog


Clearly, (or should that be unclearly?) the pollution issue is not going away for the UAE as proven by the image of Sharjah taken as our plane took off from DXB.


We landed to a light snow covering in Munich and Berlin.


The jet trails over Berlin as we exited the plane at TXL were amazing.


The next day, Samantha was back under the table - a warm refuge as she snuggled down into the bark.


People viewing the house, (it's for sale - see the top right of the blog), were enthralled that a fox would choose to sleep in the yard!

Blood Diamond

J and I have not been fans of Leonardo DiCaprio, but we warmed to him in The Departed.

We're now totally hot on his acting prowess after seeing Blood Diamond tonight.

T.I.A.

Playing diamond smuggler Danny Archer, DiCaprio is transformed into a white man who was born in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Apparently, drinking sessions with South African soldiers helped to knock the Australian twang out of his Saffie accent!

Set during civil war in Sierra Leone in the early 90s, Archer finds himself in debt to his bosses because of a failed diamond smuggling attempt on the Sierra Leone/Liberian border.

Imprisoned, he hears a leader of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front), accuse a fellow prisoner (Solomon Vandy played by excellent Djimon Hounsou) of having found a huge pink diamond which he hid, before being captured.

Once out of prison, Archer also frees Vandy and circumstances lead them to team together to return to the mine to recover the diamond.

Along the way, Archer meets Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a hardened American war journalist, to whom he tells his story of his involvement in the blood diamond trade.


There's a whole lot of substories going on in this movie which blend together in a powerful assault on the viewer's senses and emotions. African politics, child soldiers, refugees, the indifference of the rest of the world to Africa's plight (with a focus on America because of Bowen's viewpoint), intertwine with the relationships between the 3 main actors and their stories of how they came to be where they are.


Horror, humour, shock, disgust, sadness, hopelessness, respect, love, honour, acceptance, loss, vindication.

You have to see Blood Diamond.

DiCaprio deserves the Oscar for this role, but he's up against some stiff competition from Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.

(Images from the IMDB website)

A photo of us at Petra in Jordan

heh!


I blame Roba!

Become an M&M

DIC Cyberfest 07

Dubai Internet City held a mini food festival in the amphitheatre last week. Lots of yummy food from the various stalls and some good entertainment from ethnic dance troupes.

Here are a few pics of the acts.

The Russians go Chinese




The Kenyans acrobats were terrific



The boys from the UAE coffee tent watch the dancers