Just a quick note here to say thanks to my friends, the Hammonds, for having me over to dinner regularly on Wednesday nights while I am away from my family. You guys cook awesome food and the company is great. I love the stories and I love hanging out with the girls too. Tonight the girls and I played Ludo or something like that and it was just fun to laugh and be goofy with the them. They are great kids and lots of fun. Thanks dear friends for taking care of me and sharing your family with me.

I have an amazing wife. She in beautiful, kind, loving, giving, beautiful, and she is a total super mom. Did I mention she is beautiful? Well I was not sure if I did… Even tough I know it is the right thing for her to be taking care of her mom, it is so hard being apart. I cannot wait to be with her again as soon as that happens.

This video will give you just a taste of how how amazing she is. I hope you enjoy it.

Ok so I am not sure why I am writing this as no one is reading my blog except my wife and she certainly does not care too much about how I have hacked my iPhone, but here goes. I hacked my iPhone (1st gen) to dual boot iPhone OS and Android. It took me a few hours and in the middle of it I was doing some helpdesk requests (supporting teachers at school) A week or two ago a guy on the internet showed how it was possible to do this so I just got this wild idea to try it. I have limited experience with Linux but I know enough to get around and found some decent instructions online so it was not too tough. So there you do, I have proven myself to be a true geek. If you want to do it yourself, check out the creator’s blog: http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/

It was Libby and I’s anniversary this week and she did a great blog post about us. So this is my response. I have also dug up some old photos of anniversaries and other romantic times (Libby has most of them with her on her computer) so here goes:

This one above is our 10 year anniversary. We went out to Indian at Chingari in the Ramada restaurant in Doha.

Our 11 year anniversary at the Sheraton hotel in Doha. We ate dinner at the restaurant on the beach (I think it was Italian, but I don’t remember the name.

Not an anniversary, but a romantic place nonetheless (even with baby Acacia on your back) Cinque Terra, Italy.

This on is was a school fundraiser. Doesn’t Libby look amazing?!? Tolan was there too 🙂

Ok so this was not super romantic, but it was a fun memory together. This was the Asian Games opening ceremony. Yep, it poured down rain in Doha that night!

Thank you for introducing me to Africa, a place that will never leave my heart.

Thank you for opening my eyes to the world and traveling.

Thank you for carrying and bearing our 3 beautiful children.

Thank you for teaching me to love art.

Thank you for tolerating 30+ cars (and for a while, not knowing which one to grab the keys for or which one was running).

Thank you for seeing my potential from when I was only 18 yrs old.

Thank you for being such an amazing mom to our kids, especially right now.

Thank you for pursuing God even when it is hard to make time for doing your “Bible study homework”.

Thank you for letting me teach you to drive even when you already knew how.

Thank you for actually enjoying a date in the back of a truck.

I went down to the “Najma” area of Doha last night to get some pipes and curtain parts. In Najma there is a souk where you can get almost anything from used furniture to plumbing parts to used air conditioners. I went there to get some blackout curtains for our home (the sun is coming up at 5:00am these days and it is kind of nice to keep it dark until a little close to wake up time) as well as some pipes (to fix a couple of parts of our trampoline) and some kind of bar to bolt to the house to hang a swing from for the kids. I should first say that this souk is one of those unique places in Doha where you really feel you are a part of the “life” of Doha. It is full of men standing around with wheelbarrows and trucks, ready to drive your stuff home. Inside you will get “mobbed” by men trying to help you buy things, etc. I hit the souk and looked for the first shop I could find that had the words “Curtain” in English. I actually remembered a very important thing, a sample. I carried my sample of blackout curtains into the shop and haggled for a set of three of them. (By the was, if you are getting curtains, make sure you OVER estimate size, the ones I bought barely fit) Next stop was a hardware store for the pipes to fix the trampoline. I tried three shops before I found someone who had the pipes I needed. After negotiating the price I asked them to cut the pipe so that it would fit in my car (a 30 second job) One of the guys started cutting for a second, then stopped and said something in Hindi. His friend translated: He was asking how much I was going to pay for the cut. I laughed out loud, realizing they had me cornered. It wasn’t going to fit in my car unless they cut it. So I got them down to 10 QAR ($2.75) for cutting three pipes (one was a pretty large square pipe) and then set off to get my “swing bar”. It turned out that I needed to find a welder. Of course there was a guy standing around right outside the pipe shop that was willing to do the work for me. He did not speak English but I did understand “sayara” which means car. So I followed him to his truck where his welding stuff was. After spending 30 minutes trying to get his welder started with no luck we were both sweating. Poor guy. He was middle aged and I felt a little bad that he was out there trying to get his welder going. So I helped him load up his welder (that thing was sooo heavy) and set of for home. It was a long night of haggling and sweating but in the end I got 2 out of 3 things done, which for a night in Doha, is pretty good! Below is a quick shot I took of the guy’s welding truck. Enjoy!

Today was a great day. Several years back our family met another family who was in Doha to work for the Asian games, the Reynolds. They had 2 little girls the same age as our two little girls and we just clicked with them as a couple. They were only in Doha for about 9 months at that time. When we said goodbye little did we know they would come back to Doha! Andrew, the dad/husband is here alone (the rest of the family is still in Australia) getting started with his job so we connected and went to see another friend of mine race his Civic in a sprint race here at Losail. Peter is a new friend of time whose family we just got to know not long ago here in Doha. So today was cool. I got to see an old friend whom I have not seen in years and see a new friend compete in the QMMF sprint championship. He even got first in his class. Nice job Peter. After the race my old friend and I went to a little Ethiopian restaurant, ordering was a challenge this time but we had fun talking. Pics and a very windy video (from a long ways away) are below.

A guy came to the door the other day who was working for the census. The first weird thing I noticed was that he called me by name, creepy. When I asked how he knew my name he pointed to the number on the door and told me he looked it up. He was carrying this huge PDA and asked me tons of questions, most of which were normal (for me) but a few stood out. #1 odd question was he asked how many kitchens we had in the house. Mmmm I guess people in Qatar have multiple kitchens? The other, more obvious one that still through me at first was he asked how many wives I had. Of course, Muslims can have four wives so it was a normal question for Qatar but it still threw me for a loop!

Funny I just saw the same guy walking around the neighborhood tonight with hid gigantic PDA. I guess he is not done with our little area of about 20 homes yet!

http://www.qsa.gov.qa/QatarCensus/

So my last post about “going Google” was about migrating mail via IMAP from your “local” Exchange 2007 server to Google’s behemoth server farm (Google Mail) I may have failed to mention that option is only available for those running Google Apps Premiere (paid version) or Google Apps for Education (free but only for schools) So there, you are warned. OK now on to this post. I wanted to go full circle and see if it is possible to get the full Outlook experience using Google mail (syncing mail, contacts, and calendar AND get the Google GAL to show up in Outlook) Well, as it turns out it is pretty workable, but not as simple as it could be. You need two tools: on called Google Apps Sync and the other is the GAL generator. You may also find help on this page of Google’s help site. The purpose of the Google Apps Sync is twofold: first it will take all your “stuff” from Outlook and migrate it to Google’s mail servers and second it will then make Outlook your mail client, reading Google’s mail, contacts and calendars. Well in my case I had already done a full migration of my mail FROM Exchange and TO Google mail so I simply set up a new mail profile (I am using Windows 7) so that there would not be any confusion about uploading my email for the second time, etc. So I set up my new mail profile and ran Google Apps Sync and it cranked away and downloaded all 1.3 GB of my mail, contacts and calendars. It defaults to allowing up to 1 GB to be synced but you can up that to 2, 4, or unlimited syncing.

OK, so now the tough part. In order to get your Google global address list (GAL) to show up in Outlook you have to follow several steps, including editing the registry! Why this is not simpler is beyond me, but oh well I was determined to try it. I followed those directions from the link above and things seemed to work fine.

Basically you:
1. Download Google’s GAL generator.
2. Move it to the same directory as the Google Apps Sync program.
3. Run it. It generates a local GAL (static snapshot of your Google GAL)
4. Edit the registry (you have to make a new key that tells Google Apps Sync where to find the GAL you just downloaded)

One thing to note is that I did not create the network share or deploy this solution via MSI file, edit GPOs, etc. Obviously if you are going to roll this out in an large Windows environment you’d want to do all this and I cannot see why it would not work. The only trouble is that this Google GAL generator just generates a snapshot of your GAL so when you add a new user on Google Apps you have to run that again and copy the resulting file to the network share, etc. Might be more work than it is worth unless your people are totally tied to Outlook. There you go, my $.02 about Google Apps Sync for Outlook and the GAL generator.