shimweasel

In Doha, the cold water tanks are on the roof.
The hot water heater is inside.

The only way to get a reasonable shower is to turn the heater off and temper the boiling-hot cold water with soothing, cooling hot.

I’m living in something called the Al-Waab compound. A compound. With a 24 hour security guard. I’m feeling quite unwarrantedly important: I’m hoping that the next step is a large man with an unobtrusive suit and a discreet earpiece.

It’s actually a very pleasant place to live. Most of the people living here are DAE personnel, so there’s always someone around to hang out with, but there are a few locals around, so we can’t get too disgustingly rowdy. (Tales of the other compounds keep leaking out: paintball fights seem about the tamest rumour so far.)

We also have a gym and a pool. The pool seems to be a constant blood temperature, which is a little disconcerting: apparently the trick is to hide under the diving board to escape direct sunlight. We can’t be more than a few kilometres from the work site, but the roads are under constant construction, and we seem to wind around the backstreets for an extremely long time before we arrive.

Oh, and just for a bit of local colour: I went to the local souk and bought a big fuck-off wok, so I can start cooking again, as well as a wallet that doesn’t tag me as extremely cheap.

and I’m watching Samurai Champloo. How did we cope with long flights before laptops and iPods? Third world, seriously.
Mad bought me some seriously cheesy dog tags for my birthday, and I love ‘em. (Especially the engraving - “Qatar’s Leading Playa” indeed.)

Some people would say that you can’t put two completely unrelated thoughts together and call them a blog entry.
That’s why I’m a pioneer and they’re not.

So, it turns out that there are an awful lot of costumes with controllers in them to be programmed. One way of doing this is to take a laptop around to each of them, and spit a carefully handcrafted string down a serial port. Another way might be to hire someone with no lighting experience but some C chops to write a little program to take a specification of a lightshow and compile it down to said string representation. Oh, and because we don’t want to have to lug laptops around everywhere, it should run on a PDA running linux called an Amida.

It’s not the easiest dev environment in the world: the machine has no handwriting recognition, so getting it to run telnetd was a pretty high priority. (sshd was the first choice, but cross-compiling all the dependencies was an … interesting challenge, I will say, as “heart-breaking and frustrating approximation to a death of a thousand cuts” sounds far too dramatic. Eventually the bastard compiled and ran, but segfaulted somewhere after skipping domain name lookups, and I timed out on trying to make it work.) I eventually hacked telnetd to allow root login with no password. Somewhere in Security Heaven, an angel is sobbing and carving “4 REAL” into his arm with a broken harp string.

Next step was trying to cross-compile GDB in order to work out why the program I’d slightly modified was crashing. This was another fairly frustrating experience: standard MO seems to be to compile gdbserver to run on the target, and gdb to run on the dev box, and I ended up getting a connection, but gdb on the dev box was not at all happy about the executable, despite compiling with the –host=arm-linux flag. Luckily, some kind soul has already hacked together a little library for making C be a bit more forthcoming about segfault causes, and I managed to track down the worst of the bugs. Fritz is a good electronics technician and knows far more about the chips themselves than I do, but his coding tends to be of the cut-and-paste variety, and local variables seem to be scorned as a bit girly. So far, I’ve managed to get the program down from 2500 to 800 lines, and have eliminated most of the globals, which makes me feel awfully virtuous. Another few days, and I think I’ll have cracked this one.

Apologies to anyone bored rigid by mind-numbing debugging exposition: I’d love to talk more about the incredibly cool things that file in and out of the warehouse (some of which are distinctly Mad Maxian), but the NDA is still in place. More about Qatar when I’ve actually seen some of it.

Qatar is a very strange place.

I know this is perhaps an unsurprising thing to say, but I don’t mean “ha ha, they drive on the wrong side of the road” or “gross, they eat goat eyeballs.” There’s something distinctly weird about the social structure of the place. To illustrate: while I have learnt enough Arabic to get myself into trouble (sharmuta? kis umak? Are you trying to get me roasted alive, Walid?), I have not yet had the chance to use it, because I haven’t yet met a Qatari. 70% of the population are foreign workers, and to a first approximation, no Qatari works. The law states that any business must have at least 51% Qatari ownership, so there are many, many companies and joint ventures with a Qatari citizen drawing a salary as a boardmember.

Apart from that, the place is hot, humid and dusty. My address is “down the dirt road behind the Mercedes dealership”, which speaks volumes about Qatar in general: awe-inspiring science-fiction structures are everywhere, but the desert is never far away. Cranes are omnipresent: buildings are thrown up so fast that the cement is generally only cured for an afternoon, and the useful lifespan for a building is 10 years, if it isn’t knocked down first.

This is the Spire. The Spire grows about ten metres a week, and is currently about 300m high. You can’t see it in this picture, but there’s a cantilevered pool on the side for the amusement of the Emir and his guests: this is where he will be living for the duration of the games. If only it was glass-bottomed - you could be afraid of water and heights at the same time.

I only have time for a quick note - Qatar is ridiculous, as well as ridiculously cool. 41 degrees is considered balmy. Sci-fi structures butt up against acres of dust and sand. A thin haze of dust, humidity and heat covers everything. I’ll get pictures as soon as I can, but I’m working hard and having a hell of a lot of fun

alas, perhaps due to my drunken state, most of the pictures are streaked and blurry.
This one illustrates the tone quite nicely, though.

Damn you, Bean. I should be getting ready for my party and instead I’m watching Japanese swordsmen cut each other apart to hip-hop.

Aw yeah.

You can see the tickets for the Games here.
Tickets for judo seem to be 10 QAR, or about 3 bucks.

… does that sound worryingly cheap to anyone but me? Tickets to the opening ceremony are a reassuring 500 QAR (about $200), but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t get nosebleed tickets to the synchronised swimming at the Sydney Games without leaving a kidney as a down payment.

Anyway, no point looking a gift horse in the mouth. With any luck, I might get the chance to see some world-class judo for the Sydney cost of an indifferently good beer.

Waaaaaa-SMACK!

Damn, that was cool. I’ve just got back from a tour of DAE workshops, where I saw some of the things they’ll be showing at the Asian Games.
Unfortunately, they made me sign a confidentiality agreement, so I can’t actually spill any of it. Most frustrating.

Anyway, it looks like being extremely exciting. So many different things happening on the floor - it felt more like being on a movie set than anything else, and I get the feeling that’s the background that most of the crew has. It’s certainly a million miles from your typical sterile, fluorescent IT warren. They did ask me some questions, but they were all on the order of “Do you have current tetanus shots?”, rather than “How do you rate yourself as a team player?”, so I’ve pretty clearly got the job, even if I haven’t seen the contract yet.