Making a camera rain cover

So the past few days have been "difficult"

1. George W made a visit to the UAE and was set to travel to Dubai by road. As such there was a total block on many of the roads throwing Dubai into chaos. The upside was that the Government declared a national holiday to ease the pain!!! Who said Mr Bush has never had a positive impact on Middle East foreign policy?

2. Downside was that it rained...and rained and rained. Not really an issue if you live in the UK or Amazon rain forest but in January, and it total, we expect ~14mm of rain and we got that with a bit to spare over the past few days. Now as we usually get so little rain

• Its a complete shock to the majority of the population and signals "The Day after Tomorrow" and other Armageddon type predictions
  
• Not all of the roads have drains or sufficient capacity to take away flood water so I was effectively living on island today
  
• Roofing that is tested for sun cover is suddenly found inadequate for water

I wanted to capture some of the "disaster" on camera as I stuck my head out of the door. Buying a proper rain cover for a camera in Dubai is like buying a raincoat...you only need it once a year and for trips abroad. So time to improvise...go to http://www.mediafire.com/?8egteviboii to download my instructions on making a quick, cheap, but effective rain cover to protect your precious electronics.

I didn't have much time to take many shots - but you can see a few at http://wardyuae.zenfolio.com/ under the "Dubai Winter" folder. You'll also find versions of the images used to make the PDF in the "Protector" folder.

Well...lets begin...

So I have finally gotten around to posting a blog. I'm still wondering where this will take me and hoping that I'll have the patience & discipline to see this through. I did BB's, newsgroups, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo, Hotmail, Skype, Myspace, Facebook...but never, until now, got to the blog. I couldn't see the point and anyway, who would want to read my ramblings? I think I missed the point.

I work in the IT industry (it will become obvious for who in later posts...as I don't want this to become a support forum!) and I am bombarded by new ideas and information daily. In my free time, the things I like to do are driven by technology. I've watched, studied, experienced and taught on the changing face of technology, business & society (...and I still can not work out why I haven't blogged yet.) So I want this place to be a way of capturing good ideas, trends and know-how from multiple sources. The topics I intend to cover are:

• Just making IT simpler - I like clever-tech but I prefer a stress-free life
• My growing passion for photography - all my spare change is all going into this hobby
• Movies, TV & Media
• Life in the Middle East - expat based in Dubai and learning things daily

It will be interesting for me to look back after 6 months, 1 year... and see where my time was being spent. I'm hoping it will also remove the hassle of wondering which drive/PC has that good idea that I now can not find.

If along the way anything here helps you then all the better. With 6.6 Billion people out there, statistically (if not factually) I have a good chance of helping someone!

- Mark