Those Hideous Monsters…

So I go to attempt the first proper open-book exam of my life. And by the experience of the open-book quiz and mid-term, I am not liking it. How can someone from our desi education system be prepared for an open-book exam? It just doesn’t make sense! What is an exam if you don’t have to rattafy things? When you don’t have to make funny-sounding acronyms of points? How do you even cheat on an open-book exam?!!!

They are snatching away my innocence from me, by subjecting me to this hideous torture. They are depriving me of my most cherished things, my memories, and are subjecting me to think and come up with logical answers to questions posed. They want me to lose my eloquence and write with succinct stub-like statements. They want me to leave behind my grand ideals and concentrate on the exam at hand, not to pepper any answers with gems of brilliance!

They are missing a chance to really see a genius at work. They are missing a chance to find out what truly a masterpiece an exam paper could be. They are missing out, really!

What’s the world coming to?!

PS: If you are still with me, wish me luck

Question of the day

How do you fry an egg if you’ve run out of cooking oil?

Use butter?

(Tech)LifeDotCom

Though I moved from Blogger quite a while ago, but just for old times’ sake I had kept my account active. For those who are new to this blog, I maintained a blog at Blogger quite some time, which can still be found here. I have now decided to turn into the technical version of LifeDotCom, aptly titled (Tech)LifeDotCom.
(I believe that’s apt enough, don’t know what you guys would think.)

Initially I wanted a separate dynamic page on this WordPress blog, but it only allows you to have static pages, if you need. Means you can have only one blog-like dynamic page and several static pages (which you can see if you look at the top of this page). So putting posts on a static page in the manner of a blog was a major pain in the backside, which was gawking at me. The solution I finally arrived on? Reuse Blogger.

I gather that Blogger has quite mended its ways with the glitches that were apparent in the Beta stage. So (Tech)LifeDotCom would mainly contain some thoughts about the tech landscape, with some snippets of code, and possibly (some) full-fledged tutorials. I only wanted to build a repository of snippets and thoughts and efficient ways of (technically) doing things which would be accessible to me, but I realize that shunning the community on little goodies is not a good thing. I wouldn’t promise to update that blog as regularly as I do this one (does that mean never at all?), but I’ll be posting updates now and then.

Most of the people that (still) read my blog are not technical at all, but hey, I updated the brief description at the top!

My Something Worthwhile…

Before coming to Singapore, when I was free in my last days in Karachi after leaving my job, I was involved for a while in the redesign of ApnaKarachi.com. A major part of the overhaul was the new section of ApnaKarachi Maps which provide street-level maps of the city of Karachi. I was in charge of developing the back end of the maps section and as well as managing the people involved in it. We planned to finish and deploy the site for the public before I’d leave for Singapore, but tweaks here and there made maps a little late. I completed the major chunk of the work when I was in Pakistan, and while in Singapore I generally just made things work accommodating the “wish list”.

The ApnaKarachi Maps are now live for sometime now. The site itself has been redesigned and different sections added to it. Its now “bigger and better” in the true sense.

The basic motivation behind the Maps was that Pakistan per se doesn’t have any worthwhile representation in major map sites like Google or Yahoo! Maps, so we intended to provide that kind of information and facility to our people. We have just started with Karachi, other cities would definitely on the way.

As everybody knows that I’m a pretty unassuming guy and I generally don’t do any kind of self-embellishment, but the purpose of this post is to solicit feedback and ideas to make the Maps better and more useful. It’s seldom that we do something worthwhile for our country/people, and while such an initiative is going on and you can be a part of it, then you must.

Please also spread the word around. This service is solely provided for the benefit of people, so the more people use it, the more we would be in the position to improve it.

PS: Don’t forget to say some nice words to me!

Sigh…

During the Decision Making Technologies lecture:

Lecturer: “Modification of EBP Algorithm… blah blah we can use Hessian-based methods which is like the Newton algorithm. Anybody remembers Newton’s algorithm from Calculus classes?”

Blank stares. Nobody flinches. Smiles creep out after a while.

Lecturer: “Okay, so as you would remember Newton’s algorithm had one value to blah blah *random crap* blah, we have Hessian to blah *again some random crap* blah blah. We’ll talk about it later.”

Don’t you just love these moments?

A Poem by a Black Kid

Got it through a forwarded mail. Simply brilliant.

When I born, I black
When I grow up, I black
When I go in Sun, I black
When I scared, I black
When I sick, I black
And when I die, I still black
And you white fellow
When you born, you pink
When you grow up, you white
When you go in sun, you red
When you cold, you blue
When you scared, you yellow
When you sick, you green
And when you die, you grey
And you calling me colored??

Priceless.

Elections, Selections?

After getting pretty much pissed off at Geo live streaming which I am simply starting to detest, I tried checking out the election results online. Pretty much to my horror, the first result on Google is about Politics of Yemen from Wikipedia. The second result is from some apparent “seer” who tries to predict future events and had written something about the elections on his blog a few days back.

At first glance, the first page of results doesn’t look really promising. There is this elections.com.pk link with the title of Pakistan Elections 2008 results, but you know how search engines work and you definitely check out the full link of the result; which apparently is results2002.php. So that result should go in the bin also but a little probing reveals that it is supposed to be a valid website with current results (I think so).

The whole motivation for this post was that people around the world aren’t generally taking interest in elections of our little homeland. Checking out Google Trends for the phrase “pakistan elections” tells you promptly that:

“Your terms - pakistan elections - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.“

I feel that it’s only being treated like a chutti in Pakistan. I mean, even Benazir Bhutto assassination made it to the top searches in Google at least for that day. No such thing for elections. Nobody is interested in our elections. We don’t even have a proper website for elections. Okay there may be a proper website but its not Web 2.0. Its not glossy and shiny. Even the Pakistani population is not checking the results out online. It all comes down to the same conclusion: farcical elections.

Let’s see what happens when results are really consolidated. Who gets in and who is being kicked out. Who would become the master of a volatile nation, if its not decided already.

We are not cool…

I am not dead, no, I am not…

Hmmm so that may have become a sensational title of the post, but at 4am in the night when you’re really pissed off at your assignment that is not getting completed and you just feel like killing time somewhere else (sleep is out of the question dude!), that’s what props up usually to revive an old blog that might be dying a slow death (and might not).

So that’s the reason the title is there. Not anything “item” going on. Really.

The reason why this blog has been lying dormant for a period now has somewhat got to do with me being busy (a bit) and with nothing really having to share. I have almost quit blog-hopping too. I feel that there is no originality in the new crop of blogs that’s coming in, people are just hopping on the band-wagon so that they can boast of a blog that they supposedly write. And what they write is literally trash.

Like they just pretend to be someone they are not, and that brings us full circle to why I am not updating my blog regularly. Short and sweet: I feel disgusted.

I’ll be content with the few blogs I am an avid reader of, who still have some originality left. You guys know who you are. Whereever I am, sooner or later I’ll come back to read up on your lives

So that outburst makes me feel a little better. Guess I switched the direction of the guns, but nevermind. And hey, I put up a cute little Singapore flag beside the Pakistan flag right up there. You know, the second column, top? At least you guys wouldn’t forget the Singapore flag now. And that makes a bold statement: I am content with Singapore!

That ends a boatload of crap that was in my system. Sorry I couldn’t find any sweeter words for that. In fact, I can’t remember the word for “sweeter words”, it’s right there on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t force it out… I forgot my thesaurus at home!

For a New Day

Today I leave the sanctuary of my home in search of a better future. I leave behind the environment I am so used to, the people I grew up with, the people who taught me to laugh, to hope, to struggle, to never give up. I leave behind the comfort of my own abode, the comfort of getting up when I want, the comfort of consigning everything to hell, to take life as it comes. Today I leave the place that I called home.

Things will never be the same again.

For a few months at least, I’d no longer have a home to return to after a long day, no longer would I have my mother waiting for me on dinner, no longer would I get the dinner to my liking, no longer Mummy would be there to fuss about everything, from my hair to my shoes.

No longer my sis who acted more like an elder sis, no longer the bhabhi who became my confidant. No longer Abbu and brothers who sheltered me, being the youngest one. No longer the cute kids that I so adore, and who have become a major part of my life, no longer the bhaiyya/bhabhi who gave us those cute kids and did so much for us.

No longer would I be able to come home and fight with 9j, to shout, to scare, to laugh, to share, to bully, to pamper her. No longer would we have those crazy shopping sprees, and those crazy eating binges. No longer would I have those late night calls, no longer would anyone be able to wake me up on time.

No longer would this guy remain the same…

I love all of you, and I’ll miss you guys terribly. Thanks to all who have done everything to me, and forgive me for any thing that I erred in. I promise that this will soon pass, and I’ll be back.

Wish me luck.

He is back!

Okay so the deal is this: uXuf wasn’t exactly busy as he originally claimed as an excuse of not updating his blog, he is actually a real lethargic bum who thought he has started getting better things in life. He is such a dork.

The better news is this that he is going to Singapore for his studies. Surprised? There is a nifty little university that goes by the name of National University of Singapore, and makes it big on the top 20 universities of the world, and on the top 3 universities in Asia.

Waisay bhi he doesn’t like to brag. Very humbling, isn’t it.

He knows that most of you guys have never heard about NUS, what with the current state of WOWness associated with all the Western universities. He laments that his generation is actually doing a great disservice to his region by ignoring the better universities in Asia and Australasia. He has vowed to change that impression.

He will probably be flying out in January 2008. Wish him luck guys!

He is also working on a top-secret web project that according to him would take the world by storm. Well, if not the world, then at least the people of our region… If not them, then…

He is also apologizing to all his readers for not updating his blog in a long time. They who have him added on Facebook probably have had a glimpse of what he was into (hint: 9j). But he will be back in action soon.

And he has started talking in third-person again. :\