This recipe was inspired by BBC Good Food and takes less than an hour to prepare. It’s important to note that Hammour has been over-fished to the point where it is now endangered, so steer clear of baby Hammour and cut back on Hammour itself if you’re a regular.

1. Marinate a fresh Hammour fillet for half an hour in the juice of half a Lemon, ½ tsp of salt, ½ tsp of red Chilli powder, ¼ tsp of ground black Pepper and a pinch of Turmeric.
2. Place the fillet on a baking tray drizzled with olive oil and smear it with a coarse paste made out of 2 crushed cloves of Garlic, 2 tsp of Dijon Mustard, 1 tsp of yoghurt and ¼ tsp of red Chilli powder.
3. Cover the fillet with a crumble made out of 75g of powdered bread crumbs, the juice of one quarter of a Lemon, the rind of a Lemon and 3 tbsp of chopped Coriander leaves.
4. Bake the fillet for 15-18 minutes in an oven preheated to 200c.

The one thing that you could count on amidst all the change was that your reds would be red, your blues, blue, and your greens, well, green; but how about the terracotta reds, lime greens and cerulean blues? With the increasing age of today’s computer screens and the growth of new display technologies, you now need to consider the influence of color shift and gamma on the colors in your designs too – especially on the colors in between.

If you’ve never heard of gamma before, it’s simply an indicator of how bright your mid-tones are. The concept was crucial in the design of CRT monitors and holds true even for LCDs. It has no effect on black, white and primary colors, but affects everything in between.

The image above illustrates how this photograph appears on my four year old screen with a blue color shift on the left – notice the cooler hues – and how it appears on my new screen with high gamma on the right – notice the dark mid-tones. Of course, you’re probably wondering what I’m talking about, because your screen’s color calibration is entirely different from that of mine. In fact, to you the image may appear washed out on the left and warm on the right.

Sadly, there is neither substantial research on the average color shift and gamma of screens around the world, nor is there a perfect solution to ensure that your colors are reproduced in the exact same manner on every screen. However, you can do a few things to save your designs:

• Calibrate your screen’s colors to prevent your designs from being tainted by a color shift.
• Preview your templates on screens with different levels of gamma, just as publishers test their content on multiple browsers. Try an old laptop, a brand new desktop and so on.
• Embed color profiles in your images so that users with different color profiles can see them as they were intended. Most modern browsers handle this well.

When people think of Dubai, the first things that usually come to mind are the tallest, the largest or even the smallest. Yet nestled between the superlatives and the pre-fabricated wind towers that remind the city of its humble beginnings, is a street that time forgot.

The cabbage-patched street runs right through the heart of Jumeira 1 and is lined with villas that were once the homes of Dubai’s middle-class families. They now lie abandoned, silently awaiting their rebirth as something more ostentatious. Perhaps another shopping mall.

I’ve been cooking dishes inspired by bits of BBC Food, Masterchef Australia and Gordon Ramsay for a while now and thought it’s about time I shared them. This one takes just over an hour to prepare from the market to the plate if you’re in a hurry on a Friday afternoon. The glaze could have been thicker in the photograph, but I’ll have to try that again some time.

1. Marinate 300g of fresh Tuna steak pieces for thirty minutes in the juice of a grated 2 inch piece of Ginger, 1 tsp of freshly ground black Pepper, 1 tsp of Coriander powder, ½ tsp of Cumin powder, ½ tsp of sea salt, ¼ tsp of Turmeric powder and the juice of a small Lime.
2. Sear the Tuna pieces on a hot pan for 1 to 2½ minutes on each side, depending on whether you prefer them medium-rare or well done and serve them on top of freshly boiled Udon.
3. Finish the dish with a glaze made by caramelizing the juice of a grated 2 inch piece of Ginger, 3 tbsp of Soy sauce, 1 tbsp of freshly chopped Coriander and 1 tbsp of sugar.

You may have heard of the 828 meter tall Burj Khalifa that stands in Downtown Dubai, but what you probably haven’t heard of is a freshly veneered jaliboot that goes by the same name just a few kilometers due west. I happened to be strolling through Dubai’s Jumeirah beach when I came across this magnificent craft’s sails being unfurled for the first time.

It took a team of five men a whole ten minutes to untie and raise the main sail, but the captain – a young Emirati man – was visibly ecstatic when it held its first breath of the Persian Gulf. He wiped his brow and waved a proud victory sign, before the five men continued on to the second sail.

I’m sure there are several other Burj Khalifas in the country by now. Have you come across one?

I began by running through a list of every possible combination involving the words travel and trip under the sun; however, with most meaningful English dot-coms snapped up, our choices were whittled down to absurd names or obscure TLDs.

It was then that I came across the word musafir (pronounced /mʊ saː fIr/). Unlike the others, this dot-com was available, even if so for a ransom. The word meant traveler in Arabic, Hindi and Urdu, and was practically a part of popular culture in the subcontinent, thanks to a song from the seventies.

We traded our bag of silver for the domain in September 2007 and I worked on the brand through to the end of February 2008,  which you can read about on The incredible Brandini. If there was  one challenge worth noting, it was our wordmark, which had to be redrawn because of Meta’s awkward ‘fi’ ligature and the unusual balance of characters in Musafir. Our golden wings too only came about after 128 iterations involving everything from sunshine to shooting stars.

Although there have been a few tweaks in shade over the years – the most recent being in September 2010 – nothing has fundamentally changed about the brand since March 2008. It’s served us well as a startup and we’re looking to build on top of it for a new product this summer. In the posts that follow, I’ll share more about how Musafir.com was designed and the hurdles that e-business startups have to overcome in the Middle East.

I did it all to the tee, and that’s when I happened to stumble across Susan Maushart’s winter of disconnect in an article shared ironically through a tweet. For six months in 2009, she and her children unplugged everything with a screen. They began to read the newspaper, her son rediscovered his saxophone, they went to the movies and her daughters even co-wrote a novel.

While I couldn’t afford the luxury of a winter of disconnect at the risk of running an e-commerce business by paper, I could afford at least one day a week without a screen. I picked my Fridays and christened them screen-frei-days, although they sometimes spill over to Saturdays. ‘Frei’ may seem a bit formal – it’s German for free – but it has a better ring to it than screen-free-days.

In the last three months alone, I’ve rediscovered my love of writing, picked up where I left off on barre chords and begun to read twice as much in print – the last, more for typographic gratification than the fact that it doesn’t involve a screen. It’s funny how after waging a battle against print media for your entire career – and let’s be honest, it’s an unspoken part of every online advertiser’s induction – that I’ve realized I’m far happier reading works in print.

If you’ve never had a winter of disconnect or wished you had the time to rediscover all those failed new year resolutions, it’s never too late to discover your own screen-frei-day.

I’ve been on email since 1997 and written this blog since 2006, but I have to admit that I’ve never quite felt as empowered to build support for change as I have since I began tweeting earlier this month. If you don’t believe me, start by asking yourself a simple question – how many times have you wanted to drop an anvil on your computer in frustration or go out on to the streets in protest, but just couldn’t convince yourself or couldn’t, period?

Those are the exact questions the people of Iran and the Email Standards Project asked themselves this month – and they did something about it. By encouraging people to voice their opinions on twitter, these two campaigns successfully built support for change. In fact, you too can join the revolution by simply tweeting about something you’re passionate about. For example, you can start by telling Microsoft to fix Outlook 2010 before it’s too late or wake up to find all those great looking emails charred in your mailbox in 2011.