Smear Campaign

DSC_3135
Originally uploaded by Munawar Jaffer

This ol' boy in is immaculate beamer was visibly distraught when this somewhat grubby ol' gal stretched out over his bonnet, forcing a windscreen clean he really did not want.

Not exactly the image sold at the motor shoes i.e. the kind of 'lady' draped over flashy cars.

Gave me a chuckle in Marylebone, and an excuse to test out of this Flickr->Blogger posting actually works.

Tough Luck Jaffer's - maybe not?

Boy oh boy does it seem like we've had a run of tough luck in our household of late - though perhaps if I look at it with a 'half glass full' attitude it might not be so bad.

• I'm No longer @ UBS - after a really progressive eight years there
• Looks like UBS has some serous problems in their business and leadership
• It's not healthy to stay at one firm for a long time these days - it was probably the optimum time to exit
• The exit has allowed me to spend some time "decompressing" after 14 years of continuous work in the City for Investment banks

• I've had two medical 'investigations'
• Both of these were troublesome: one serious and one very painful - A reminder of what is important in our lives.
• It serves as a reality check of actually how lucky we are to keep good health and too often take it for granted.

• My youngest son was denied a place at the local school
• My other sons went to Newberries Primary in Radlett - about one mile away: Saami did not get a place there as there were 12 'sibling' applications, and 18 children live closer to the school than us. We have been allocated Meryfield Primary which is c. 4 miles away and has abysmal stats and reports!
• I was worried that this might happen, and luckily Saami was assessed and offered a place at Private school Manor Lodge, in Shenley - thou at significant cost - Three children in private school is a significant burden

• We are going through our third round of bugs in as many months in addition to chicken pocks over Christmas
• We all have to have these bugs sometime - one now is one less later!

I'm hoping Kumail gets a choice of offers for secondary school: we should get results today / this week - lets hope for (continued) good fortune.

Kumail's 11+ exams almost over!

Some lovely news this morning: Kumail has passed another 11+ exam - this one was taken yesterday at the historic St Albans School, and he has been invited back for an interview.

It's very pleasing to see the lad's hard work, and preparation pay off: So far he has passed exams 3 of the five exams for six schools he has applied for:

St Albans School

Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood

Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School

Queen Elizabeth’s School

Watford Grammar School for Boys

Parmiter's School

Some interviews are also complete - two more this week. Kumail deserves a treat and a good break - but I don’t think I can stretch to the 20,000 pound car that one classmate's father has offered his boy if he does well in his applications!

Footballers and the Radlett Crime Wave

I cannot help but notice how the much higher police presence in Radlett, and the surrounding areas, and link it to an increase in robberies, and burglaries in the area.

The affluent area Radlett is most recently attractive for footballers (pretty handy for the Arsenal training grounds in London Colney -

though the rumours about David Beckham living in Radlett are rife, after him being spotted training at the Arsenal facilities, but seem unlikely), as well as the traditional lawyers, accountants, and bankers that seem to dominate the area.

A few weeks ago I got a letter asking me to contribute towards private security that some neighbours have engaged - so much for the local bobby's on the beat!

With the house-price peak/ decline, threat of rail depot development blight, and what seems to be a new crime wave, it's probably time to move!

News feeds

In an attempt to encourage people (friends & family) to adopt 'Feeds (rss/atom), here is a link to a little guide courtesy of the BBC.

Here is a feed for this blog which you can use with your chosen 'reader - personally I currently favor the Google Reader.

Hillary KFC - Repost

Hillary Clinton: I would not go as far as to say poor Hillary, but this is nasty.

I'm becoming fascinated by the US Political race - oh democracy!

(reposted on 13/March/2008 as the image suspiciously disappeared!!)

Calendar play-pen

This calendar can be used to easily add an appointment that will be visible in my Outlook Calendar...



Ideally this is best done after this is used to check my availability....

Windows Seasonal Overconsumption

Disk Purge

Windows, and/rather applications installed on windows, are not great at cleaning up disk space.

Is it too much to ask for a base windows system to fit on an 8GB Partition - I only use office, ITunes, and some other basic apps after all – and keep data on a separate partition.

After some hounding around here are some locations/applications worth looking at for recovering some disk space…

a. ITunes - this thing is messy. It keep, and never seems to purge

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Apple

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Apple Computer

The iTunes installer seems to re-create what it needs, so purging this is worthwhile.

b. IPod photo cache - if you have changed it within iTunes, you will need to manually remove the old one more info.

c. Uninstalling Photoshop Album leaves some stuff in

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop Album

This needs a manual purge - its where that app keeps its catalogue of your photo's.

d. Windows updates

C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download

Can be purged …more info.

e. Compress Service Pack files C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386 ….more info.

Jaff featured in Windows in Financial Services Magazine atricle

I was interviewed by Windows in Financial Services Magazine regarding the Microsoft acquisition of Parlano and the original UBS Intellectual Property that spun out into Parlano - it's a fast moving world - published now - on an interview about a month ago - but already it's starting to date !

My Photo's @ Flickr

Yesterday I started using a website to share photos. I happened to have a couple of photo's uploaded to Yahoo Photos - but they are shutting down that old service, and moving to all users & photos Flickr - and offering an unlimited account for those that move - good news: I hope My ISP will be able to deal with the uploads over the next few days/weeks.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/munawar for the photos - there an RSS feed too.

Deli.cio.us Web

I've been using another 2.0 site/service recently - del.icio.us t o try an manage/ share my bookmarks - I think I'll need to start using Digg as well.

Keeping bookmarks on the "server side", or "cloud" seems obvious, but then I've used yahoo's toolbar for that for a while - the ability to share these bookmarks, get some 'hand-chosen' URLs, make recommendations to your fiends (Network), and subscribe to keywords is interesting.

I probably am in the habit of storing too much in the way of bookmarks - but tagging , and being able to search them helps.

These networking/2.0 services are all very transparent - e.g. If I browse and bookmark a site whilst at work it is very obvious. I see no harm in this in my case - Sadly the division between 'work' and 'personal' time is increasingly blurred - but it could trouble some.

Google-Bell

I've added some Google ads to this my blog site - not so much to earn any cash - just to see learn a little more about how easy this has become, and how effective, and context sensitive advertising can be. BTW I've now earned $0.02 from it! Must declare that on my tax return :-) - It’s a while since I had to do a US one - I hope the UK US tax treaty still holds.

This led me on to include some Google analytics, and other web-site analytics tools to the blog.

Google have been handing out free £30 'vouchers' encouraging people to run ad campaigns - I'll have to give it a try !

I hear the deep pockets of Google are going to stretch to parts of the US EM Spectrum that can go through walls (700 Mhz?) - though that rumour seems to have quietened of late. If Google purchase this, and turn on all that dark fibre that they also, apparently, have, the Telco's (mobile/land/and perhaps even VIOP) and ISP's better start thinking about a new business model !

Social Mobility

Credit where it's due, my eldest son, Zaahid, worked very hard aged 10, for the '11+" exams, and was lucky enough to get his choice of offers - deciding to go to Merchant Taylors' School, in Northwood.

I helped him prepare for those exams in autumn/winter of 2004 - it was one of the hardest things we have ever had to do: The boy rose to the challenge - and I am hopeful Kumail will Join Zaahid's ate MTS in September 2008.

In a country that apparently has a very low "social mobility", I guess the boys, burdened with their ethnicity [sic] will need all the help they can get!

Sports day, Manor Lodge School

On Wednesday 20th June I took a couple of ours out of the regular day to go to see my middle, and somewhat talented son, throw and run for Centaurs house, at Manor Lodge School, which he joined in September last year.

He has settled there as well as we could ever have hoped, and is happy there. He said the 'people (children) are nicer, which was very pleasing to hear, "but , dad, you really don't have any idea how hard they make us work!"

Achievement , academic, and otherwise, seems to be very important to Kumail - he's extremely determined, and motivated - he gets it from his mum "She who must be obeyed" . It was very pleasing to see him do well on Sports Day, and get a place on the Cricket team this week to add to his rugby b-team 'cap'.

Networking, Socialising & Assets

This week I started using a '2.0' site for "networking", called LinkedIn.

I am ever so impressed that we are finally using computers & the web for something as productive as trying to keep people in touch .I think if this kind of tool/site carries on growing in popularity it could become effective in helping firms recruit better, and better value their People, and their Teams.

One of the most destructive things to an organisation is miss-hires: typically, we do not to much traditional reference checking when staff are hired – this tool allows people to have recommendations – it may help in reducing miss-hires, and all that comes with it.

LinkedIn facilitates the registration of some websites in you profile - so I recalled, and referenced this site, and it has encouraged me to start posting to it again.

It was interesting to see how many people I've worked with are already LinkedIn "users" - I reached out to over 100 that I wanted to get/keep in contact with - many have responded, and Its quite interesting to catch-up on what they have been doing. Apparently, it counts as “socialising” for IT-types!

One Telecom start-up, Uma, actually has teams of people mapping out org-charts of companies, and they are targeting staff across many industries to hire, simply, the best talent in the world.

I hope that ultimately 'networking 2.0' helps ensure that those that deserver it - those that are effective in their work, are well/better rewarded – perhaps that the ‘social’ part of LinkedIn :-) .

Jaffer's on Joliday, Javea, Spain, 26 Jul - 2 Aug, 2005

I'm glad winters over

Experienced professionals - job boards - Job details

"Chat Engineer" - ref #25513BR

"Chat Analyst" - ref #18613BR

"Product Manager - Chat & IM initiatives" - ref #21944BR

Japanese PM does Elvis impression at Graceland

While Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi were at Graceland, the PM starting singing Elvis Presley songs during the press conference. If you check out the video of the press conference, he starts singing about halfway through.

read more | digg story

First Stellar Outcast Speeding at Over 1.5 Million Miles Per Hour

Star escapes our galaxy

Rookie Imam's

Following BBC Radio 4’s exploration of the worlds of Britain’s
Rookie Reverends, two new programmes enter the tough and
demanding worlds of Rookie Imams and Rookie Rabbis.

Dirty Wars War against Terrorism ?

BBC - Radio 4 - Dirty Wars War against Terrorism ?

Super Size Me - Mickey D's effect on your liver, cholesterol, libido, headaches, depression, not to mention heighten

Super Size Me

The US and Sharon will dictate future of Palestine from the Whitehouse Lawn - so much for the peace "roadmap".

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Arafat Says U.S. Backing of Sharon Could End Peace Plan

As expected Bush backed Sharon's plan to 'disengage' - which includes keeping the major Jewish settlements in the West Bank. When Bush was asked by the US Press how this was aligned with the peace roadmap, Bush gave his usual intelligent response.

Bush said, the "realities on the ground and in the region have changed greatly" and should be reflected in any final peace deal - i.e. the fact that Israel has large [illegal] groups of settlers in the West Bank means that they should remain.

In almost the same breath he said Palestinian refugees, as part of any final peace deal with the Palestinians, should be settled in a Palestinian state, not in Israel.

Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem from Jordan in a lightning victory over Arab armies in the 1967 Middle East war.

For several decades, U.S. administrations have operated on the assumption there could be some adjustments in the borders that existed between Israel and the Arabs before the war.

But Sharon eyes more than a small part of the West Bank, hoping to hold on to five large blocs of Jewish settlements there.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/middle_east/2001/israel_and_the_palestinians/default.stm

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Motorists: less Motorhead, more Mantovani!

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Motorists: less Motorhead, more Mantovani!

Sick as a Parrot

I seem to have come down with food poisoning or a really bad tummy bug. Honk count:5. Give dinner a miss tonight !

Murdoch Wins Again!

Very irritated today to watch Arsenal go out of the FA cup competition in the Semi Final: Arsenal 0-1 Manchester United,

I'm not sure if that, or Pakistan losing to India in the cricket was worse. One thing is for sure, I should not have bothered paying Mr. Murdoch for the privilege!

Saami Hussein

Hello!

It's the early hours of Saturday - ahh the weekend at last.

Its been a very heavy week at work, but sort of exciting, and rewarding.

My new baby son, Saami, is growing fast - before going to work I had a moment to splash some water on him while my wife Masuma was giving him a bath - The highlight of my day :-)