dgildeh's blog

My friend from work just sent me another one of those personality tests people love to do. You can take the test at Humanmetrics.com here. It was probably one of the more "scientific" tests I've taken, so I liked it, and I especially liked the result:

ENTJ

Extroverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging

A full description of my personality type is here. This apparently puts me in the same league as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs & Margaret Thatcher! My friends always say I'm a born leader, and the profile fits me very well I think. Take the test yourself and leave a comment below with your results!

Today I came to DC on an invite from Google.org to attend a conference they were organising for NGO's in the area. It was a great day, if anything just to see all the people I've been working with in the sector since I started ADP almost a year ago - NetHope, Ashoka, Red Cross. A lot of the people I met I'd only spoken to over email or the phone, and I briefly stopped at the Ashoka offices in DC yesterday morning to see how the site we designed was going. They have a great office in Rosslyn, and everyone there was so friendly and young, was very nice to visit!

So I have to say, I didn't know much about Google.org before yesterday, but it is impressive! The Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally came up with the idea of donating 1% of Google's profits to the organisation when they wrote their initial IPO proposal to shareholders. That's a lot of money, and makes it the largest corporate donor right now (which is all the more impressive when you consider the whole Google story and how young they are)! Actually, donor isn't the right word, they specifically said Google.org is not just an organisation for handing out money, they provide strategic grants and make strategic investments into organisations and companies to address the following five areas:

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I've been getting caught up in US politics the last couple of months as the primaries go on around me. Yesterday I actually had a chance to see Obama speak live in front of 17,000 people at the Baltimore Arena, 2 blocks away from where I work. The whole office pretty much emptied out to go and see him, and even though I had meetings and didn't get there until about 2-3 hours later, it turned out Obama was even later than me so I didn't miss a thing!

Like I said before, even though I can't vote, I think America needs someone like Obama that inspires and has a vision. As I'm not a US citizen, but a citizen of the world, I am more interested in a candidate that will fix all the screw ups Bush has made around the world, and points from his speech that I particularly liked are:

When I was working out in Hong Kong last October, I noticed the developer was using a desktop through his browser. I thought it was a remote desktop to his PC back at home, but it turned out that it was an online virtual desktop from Startforce.com. I signed up, and I've got to say I was very impressed! The desktop was very stable (on IE6, Firefox has its own issues, another blog on that later!), and apart from some sporadic interruptions, usually fast and responsive. It's also very easy and familiar to use, with a look and feel of Windows XP.

My Startforce Desktop

I'm a big believer in the future of web applications, one day nearly all applications are going to be built this way (apart from those requiring offline access) and Startforce hopes to become the online platform for these web apps, just like Facebook is trying to be the platform for social web apps. However there are two things Startforce will need to address before it becomes a standard that people will develop for and actually use, pretty much the same things all new platforms (I hate to use OS as its not but very similar!) have had to: a large user base to develop for, and a range of useful "killer" applications for users to use. The chicken and the egg problem!

One of my closest friends Phaedra, from Jordan, works as a freelance for the film industry in Jordan and has been involved in many movies that have been shot there, both Hollywood (who film most of the middle east war films there) and local.

She just let me know about this really interesting film that she and her sister played a small part in. She plays Nour's friend, and I'm sure after seeing some other films she was in, the acting is amazing! I watched the trailer and it looks really good! Its really nice to see the Arab film industry getting out there and producing high quality films! Anyway, apparently it just won the World Cinema Audience Award:Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival, so I definitely plan to watch it when it comes out, and try and look out for my friend and her sister as well!

You can check out the films site and trailer here and find more news on the Sundance Film Festival awards here.

Even though I am a UK citizen (or as I prefer to call myself a citizen of the world!), I, like millions of other people around the world, take an interest in US politics. The reason is pretty obvious, as Bush has shown with his devastating foreign policies, America is the only country in the world that can have such a huge impact on the rest of us. Even though we like to feel important in the UK, there's no way our small country, or any other, could have declared war on Iraq, and unfortunately America could go it alone without U.N. or E.U. support because of its immense resources. As outsiders, we sit and watch helpless as American politics essentially screws up the rest of the world, and wish we could have vote too!

Right now I'm in the thick of things, working for an NGO in Baltimore, so I've been watching the primaries on TV and hearing all about it from my American friends and colleagues, and nearly everyone I know seems to think Obama is great and has a good chance of being the next President. I just went to his website and I have to say, I am impressed, this guy might actually have a chance of doing some good in the world. He's definitely smarter (although that's not too hard) and his opinion on issues are really in line with what us outsiders have been looking for the past 10 years since Clinton left and was replaced by, without argument, the WORST world leader in history (and as I constantly remind my American friends, you made a mistake the first time, but how the hell did you make it TWICE!!!!! )

So I guess right now I'm rooting for Obama, and if the polls mean anything, I'm glad that this guy seems likely to be the next US president! If he is going to be the next US president, apart from clearing up the mess America has created around the world with its foreign policies, I want to propose an idea that could benefit everyone around the world, but would also greatly benefit America. I cannot claim credit for this idea, its actually an idea I read in Thomas L. Friedman's excellent book, "The World is Flat", about globalisation and its effect on the world and America, but the idea is so good I can only hope the next president will become the next JFK and do it! So here it is:

A program to make the US Energy Independent in the next 10 years

CNN did an interesting piece this morning on how new graduates are actively looking to join companies that are green and socially responsible. This is great news, as I myself have been a volunteer on Accenture's Accenture Development Partnerships for the past 10 months, and even better because CNN spent most of the piece talking all about my program!

For those of you who've been wondering exactly what I've been doing the past 10 months (other than travelling around the world) this is the spot from CNN talking all about it!

Credit to Oun, one of my developers in Bangkok, for his great acting at the end

Following on from my previous blog on this issue, today the smoking ban came into force across the UK, and although this is a great thing, unfortunately Shisha was included in the ban as the petition didn't get anywhere close the number of signatures it needed to get this issue raised (the final count is 9,566). I don't think the final count is because only 9,566 people in the whole UK cared about this issue, but more because not enough campaining was done to make people aware of the petition.

It's a shame, in Washington DC and other US cities where there is a smoking ban, it is really refreshing to go into a club and not get covered in smoke, but they are at least progressive enough to understand that Shisha bars are unique and should be exempt from the ban, so you can still go to Adams Morgan and enjoy shisha with your friends!

However, not all is lost, after talking to shisha cafe owners in London, it appears shisha will still be available in the limited outside seating that some places have on the street, however with our London weather I'd hate to be outside smoking shisha in the freezing rain!

So anyway, thanks for everyone who did support the petition, and sorry to everyone like myself who now only have the option of drinking alcohol with our friends after work. A great idea by the same government who claims to be fighting our binge drinking culture!