Then on 4^th March 2010 something changed. This morning when I asked my friendly treasury guy about the Interbank rate for converting dollars to Rupee, I was told the most likely expected open on Monday morning for selling dollars is likely to be 83.90 or 83.95 and the Rupee many actually strengthen further all the way to 83.75 if the trend holds.

I am not sure what is driving this appreciation. The only thing that possibly adds up is that we expect to receive a larger than expected share of the outstanding Coalition Support Fund (CSF) payments within the next few weeks or months, or we have struck oil in our most recent offshore oil well for which results should come out in late March. On the striking oil bit, please note that all we need is one or two strikes of 40,000 barrels per day and we are done. That is all the oil we need to wipe out about 5 billion dollars worth of oil imports from our balance of trade. Will we see Rupee breaking 82 (possibly even 80) by the end of April?

Last night was the first night in 7 days that I slept for 7 hours. My average naptime for the week was an astonishing 4 hours, excluding the time I spent power napping waiting for the red traffic light to change to green, on hold waiting for customers to pick up their phone and tell me when they will finally clear my invoice and catching a few winks in between at work when no one was looking.

But it was a great week with a number of surprises and some very rewarding firsts.

Google checkout made my entire week on Monday when we integrated with the Google Merchant account and put Understanding Commodities Risk and Reboot for sale with less than two hours of work. A ten year goal-in-frozen-storage that got met via a chance encounter with Badar Khushnood at Google.

Two days later we sold our first electronic copy of Understanding Commodities Risk. Off went a mail shot to everyone who made this amazing event possible.

With Zafar Khan at Sofizar holding our hands, we updated the landing page for Reboot about 3 times a day, every day for the last 4 days.

And this morning when I came in and started digging for content for the Reboot page, what did I find?

I found that The News and CIO Pakistan have both featured the book, this month in their book review section. But even more importantly the CIO content got picked up and featured in the one and only Industry Standard as well as Network world.

I am not sure how many of you remember the Standard. In 1997, 1998 and 1999, there was only Standard when it came to the Industry. You bought, read it, salivated over it and wished that one of these days, they would feature a piece that you would write about your book. On the other hand, if you really wanted to date yourself and prove that you were there when the world went up and down driven by network traffic, page views, lofty valuations, mood swings and hangovers at NASDAQ, all you had to do was to drop the name of the Standard.

So this Saturday afternoon, still recovering from my sleep deficit of the week that still has two more days to go, I looked at my byline on the Standard and wondered why I took so long to write a piece for Rabia Garib when she had been on my case for ages to put a few lines down for her.

Thank you Rabia! You are a gift from God and I am an idiot for all the times I said no to CIO Pakistan.

And that was that, 10 years ago. Then Faiz Mian (ala Fast) sent me an invite for Gmail, with its gigabit storage and the option to lock in jawwad@gmail.com and there was no turning back. As it is, I was earning my living through researching exotic financial concepts and topics through Google and running training workshops on them across Pakistan and the Middle East on them. In more ways than one Google was a mentor; a partner and reliable resource that I could count on to dig the dirt out on most things financials.

But today something happened that left that first name gigabit storage Gmail invite far behind.

http://www.alchemya.com/publications.html

You have to go see to understand why I am so happy and bubbly today. I have been trying to do what we did today at the above link for the last 10 years. The ability to sell legit copy righted locally produced digital media from a country that is not the US of A without giving up an arm or a leg or killing someone across the table on the other side.

On and off I would get started and then get bogged down in details, logistics and absurdities.  Just before Avicena, venture number one shut down, I made a last ditch effort to get started with Paypal to see if we could salvage something from the wreckage of our Californian adventure.  But we went under faster than Paypal could respond.  And as I found out with many other Paypal users, the minute you moved back home to Pakistan, Paypal disowned you with a vengeance. Your pedigree, your credit history, your Ivy League MBA, your million dollar business plan, everything was over ruled by an IP address originating from Pakistan. I had to scratch plan number one.

About four year ago, right about this time, when the Blue Screen of Death first came out, we tried to move the book as an electronic copy.  It was an enormous effort that started with Amazon and ended at Lightening Speed. The book sold all of 14 copies for a net receipt of about 220 dollars that Lightening Speed still owes to us.  To their credit they tried to pay it a number of times but because of my non-US presence and their non-Pakistani support, the money is still sitting somewhere in their suspense account.  A few months later Amazon kicked LS out as a vendor and the book went off Amazon’s inventory.  Scratch plan number two.

Last year in spring, I applied for a merchant account with a local bank in Pakistan so that I could fulfill all those credit card orders that were going to bang down my door as soon as we started selling Pakistan Risk Review online. The local bank took a year to approve the application and then told us we couldn’t process the card without the card being physically present.  So much so for overseas online transactions…Scratch plan number three.

A few months ago, somehow Badar Khushnood and I were booked to speak at the same event. We missed each other but exchanged notes on meeting the next time he was in town. Then I ran into a little hitch with Adsense on my personal Learning Corporate Finance and Oilinsights blogs and howled and in came Badar to the rescue. Yesterday Jehan and Yusuf invited Badar, me and as yet an unnamed CEO, soon to be acquired, by an un-named but exciting international suitor for lunch. Badar made a subtle pitch for Google Check out after hearing about my troubled past with online payment platforms and my search for a solution that would help sell Desi content online.

From the point that we spoke yesterday at our lunch meeting, it took me all of 45 minutes to figure Google Checkout out (I am not that smart, it really is that simple).  It took another 30 minutes to setup the directory structure to support electronic downloads, about an hour to remember and document all the combinations and their passwords and another 15 minutes to generate and post the code to the buy now page on the Alchemy domain.

With a total investment of 120 minutes, I now have a Google checkout store that allows me to sell my content online.  Obviously there are a number of major caveats. You need to have some necessary logistics sorted out (like figuring out how to get an acceptable bank account) before you could really try this at home. But just the fact that after stressing out for the last two weeks trying to figure out on collection and payment issues and asking everyone to help me setup a Paypal account, a gentle nudge from Badar Khushnood was all that it took to fix a 10 year old itch.

Thank you Badar and Thank you Google. Sign me up for your fan page.

A short six session introduction to a risk management framework for the Oil, Gas and Petrochemical industry focused on managing crude oil price volatility for Oil refiners, Polymer and PVC manufacturers and Power Plant operators with partial fixed price tariffs and no government subsidies. While the course builds up from basic discussion on policy, data and models, it also introduces the concept of margin shortfall analysis as a tool for tracking, managing and hedging volatility in crude oil prices.

Master Class: A Risk framework for Crude Oil and Petrochemical industry: Short Course: Session I

Master Class: A Risk framework for Crude Oil and Petrochemical industry: Risk Policy: Session II

Master Class: A Risk framework for Crude Oil and Petrochemical industry: Data and Models: Session III

Master Class: A Risk framework for Crude Oil and Petrochemical industry: Models and Tools: Session IV

Master Class: A Risk framework for Crude Oil and Petrochemical industry: Limits and control process: Session VI

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Scheduled for 18^th March 2010 at the Dusit Thani in Dubai.