Updates!

– I am listening to “Azeemushshaan Shahenshah” from “Jodhaa Akbar” at 5 am in the morning, and I’ve killed the night doing absolutely nothing, while the other half sleeps peacefully besides me. Am I weird?

– That song is not on repeat, but that’s all I have listened to in the past hour. I am always on the fence 😛

– I have to attend a little get-together/birthday bash in a bohemian (and popular) bar in the evening. I don’t drink, but I eat. Though I am not sure if the someone is coughing up for the drinks, I am not planning to pay for Calamari (that’s all I can eat) 😦

– I am craving for the nachos they serve at Brewerkz. This place again is a bar, and that’s how I pass time at bars!

– I like the redesigned admin portion of WordPress, it looks sweet and stylish and very laid back. I’ll have to play around though.

– I think Internet Explorer 8 just might be a good piece of software afterall, but in my geeky zeal I updated my beta version (installed previously) to the Release Candidate they just pushed. I shouldn’t have. Now the trackpad scroll wheel emulation works erratically most of the time, and the text cursor/caret positioning is just weird, being almost half a letter away from where it should be!

– I am downloading the beta version of Windows 7, though my harddisk is almost filled up to the brim. I’ll run it on a virtual machine anyway and it needs 16GB of free space, which is haaaaaaaard to get in my harddisk. I think I’ll have to say bye-bye to some cherished movies 😦

– I am enjoying every moment of being a hubby. Though its more like we’re friends. I think the reality hasn’t settled in yet, it would soon though as a trip to Pakiland is due!

– I am eating home-made food these days (anything cooked at home qualifies as home-made, right?), and that too almost three times a day. As a result I am gaining flesh on my sides. She says they are love handles anyway, so it doesn’t matter. I think it does!

– I am thinking of working on an idea. Any idea. Do you have one?

– I think I should go to sleep. I don’t want to be slacking off at work and dozing off in the lecture, and it almost seems like Shahenshah sahab is pounding away in my head! 😛

Oh and how I love my chotuuu!!!

Mosques in Singapore

Of course I realise that this particular map only contains mosques that are near the downtown area, but if you click on the “View Larger Map” link, it would take you to the Google Maps results page which contains around 120 results from different areas in Singapore. A handy map to refer to, and no more excuses!

A Perfectly Logical, Sensible Conversation…

An all-too-usual occurrence with me at local gatherings etc:

Them: So?
Me: So… you think you can tell?
T: What? (they have no idea what I have to unleash)
M: Heaven from hell?
T: What?! (taken aback)
M: Blue skies from pain…
T: Oh!
M: Can you tell a green field…
T: …from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? (And they think that they quite have matched my wits)
M: So you think you can tell!

And that’s where I end it. Most people try to drag it to “Did they get you to trade…” part but I draw the line there. Muahahaha. Don’t “so” with me ever again!

The Meaning of Ramadan

Since the past few days, a couple of (non-Muslim) friends have come up to me who know that I was keeping fasts, and asked about the significance of Eid-ul-Fitr. What they specifically wonder about, is that whether this festival after a month of fasting, is a day of eating. That whether us Muslims eat the whole day and go crazy about it.

That set me thinking. Though Eid is not specifically meant to commemorate eating, it is what we do mostly on the day. We mostly (and conveniently) forget the essence of Ramadan on the very first day!

So what exactly is Ramadan? Is it something we Muslims observe to show our devotion to Allah (another interpretation by them)?

In a nutshell: no. It’s a month which is there for Muslims to have a chance of going back to basics. It is a month in which Muslims are supposed to repent over their misdoings, ask forgiveness from Allah, condition our minds and bodies and generally strive to attain taqwa. It also reminds us what really being a Muslim means, and that we should not just go through the motions just because we were born in a Muslim family, rather than strive to become Muslims who have chosen to do so.

The festival of Eid-ul-Fitr then marks the end of Ramadan, and is generally a festival of happiness. A festival when you visit your relatives, help out the poor, forget differences and skirmishes and make sure that the world is a better place. It is there because Islam is a community-based religion, a notion that many non-Muslims don’t really understand, and on which I might talk about later.

So all of us who have really strived through the month of Ramadan to generally shy away from things generally not appropriate for a practicing Muslim, let’s hope that we do not forget all that we put in the month of Ramadan to be on the path of righteousness. Let’s carry over the discipline we learned during this month to at least a few months, if not until next Ramadan. For those of us who somehow missed or did not strive enough, it’s never too late to start.

With that, I wish everyone a very happy Eid. Eid Mubarak!

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?

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!