Ooh, shiny

To be honest, it’s not completely a new theme, but rather an evolution of the previous one. The Ulta Seedha logo has changed, but the message is still the same. The apples picture is still up there, though its dimensions have decreased. (I really felt sorry while doing that, but the new design asked for it). The color palette is again the same, with some minor differences (I like to think of these differences as “improvements”). I have rearranged almost all of the elements and changed their visual representation (for example, the way categories and other meta information of a post are being shown). I have also tried to experiment with typography — hanging bullets, bumped up type size, serif fonts for main text, and an attempt to improve the vertical motion (I say “attempt” because I know that it’s far from being perfect). And, of course, webfonts.

Webfonts?

Webfonts are font files embedded in websites. See the title of this post above? It’s very likely that the font used to style that title is not installed in your computer. So in order to use that font, your web browser first downloaded it from my blog’s server and then styled the title accordingly. No need for you to mess around trying to install a font, and no need for me to worry about my new design not working. Technology rocks, doesn’t it?

The same webfont mojo is now being used to render the text in my Urdu posts. All of you who had previously wanted nastaleeq: you now have it. (Update: Google Chrome does not yet understand the required shaping tables of our nastaleeq font, so it won’t show it. Dang!)

Oh, and if you are wondering, the font used for titles is Nevis, and the nastaleeq font used for Urdu posts is Nafees Nastaleeq. Go ahead and download them if you want: they’re free!

To those who are using Internet Explorer 6 or 7

Stop using it!

You see, here’s the thing. This new design will look all fine and dandy if you’re using Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari. I wrote it in accordance with the web standards, and all these four browsers show it as I wrote it, because they all (more or less) follow the standards. Internet Explorer (IE), however, likes to construct its own mosque of one and a half bricks (to literally translate an Urdu idiom). Yes, IE 8 shows the new design as I wrote it (except a few things that are bearable), but if you are using a version of IE less than 8 (specially IE 6 *shudder*), then be prepared for looking at a mess.

By the way, it’s not just because IE 6 or IE 7 messes up my blog’s new design that I want you to stop using it. It’s also because that these versions of IE (specially IE 6) are full of security holes and other problems that make web designers and developers pull out their hair in frustration.

And which is why if someone using IE 6 or 7 stumbles upon this Ulta Seedha corner, they’ll see the following message at the top.

You’re using Internet Explorer 6 or 7, which is doing 3 things: keeping you insecure on the web, destroying the design of this blog, & making me sad. Please use a better browser.

Seriously, it’s not my fault that versions of IE make a mess out of web standards. (I might, just might write some hacks for IE 7, but IE 6 needs to die).

What else?

Well, just let me know what you think about the new look.

Since I am human, there might be some things that I’ve broken while doing the theme update, so do inform me if you come to know of any such thing.

Meanwhile, I’ll go back to the obvious solution of the problem of not updating my blog: a new, proper post.

A few days ago, Shahzeb shared a link on Facebook about “Foxy Shahzadi”, a 1974 Beetle, which has been decorated with truck-art and is currently being driven from Islamabad to Paris by a French Dr. Vincent Loos. Dr. Loos wishes to portray a better image of Pakistan, and believes that Pakistan is not all about terrorism. I, with many others, agree.

Here is the Beetle’s story on The Guardian, and here is the earlier coverage by Dawn. And if you would like to follow the Foxy Shahzadi’s journey (named “Art on Wheels tour”), here is its blog. (The above photograph was taken by Dawn’s Tanveer Shahzad.)

By the way, Shahzeb, get back to blogging, will ya?

25 random things about me

In other news, I have been tagged by Falsa to write down 25 random things about me.

I have done similar tags in the past, so this time I am going to repeat some of them. Here goes.

1. I get thirsty after brushing my teeth.
2. My favourite season is autumn.
3. I had my first computer when I was in the 8th grade (about 13 years ago). Abbu ji had bought it for us siblings so that we could “learn computing”. It used to run Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and also had a fax modem with a bitrate of 14.4 kbit/s. I never used that modem. (Yeah, I missed out.)
4. My first gaming console was Atari 2600 Jr., and my favourite game back then was Moon Patrol. (I now wish, though, that I had played this version, instead of this.)
5. I can roll my tongue.
6. While writing with a pen, I don’t like to place its cap on its butt. I either keep the cap in my other hand, or put it somewhere nearby.
7. Responsibilities scare me.
8. I have labelled each step of the staircase in my home as either a “right-foot-step” or a “left-foot step” (in my mind, of course), and I rarely put my left foot on a right-foot-step, and vice versa.
9. I read Slashdot.
10. I used to play a lot with dinky cars in my childhood.
11. I feel uncomfortable to sleep in pitch black darkness.
12. I am a morning bird.
13. I love typography. Sadly, I am not as good at it as I would like to be.
14. I like collecting title soundtracks of all those TV shows that NTM used to syndicate.
15. I have never worn a sherwani. (When I previously mentioned it, No One told me not to worry and assured me that “[my] time will come”.)
16. I like running. I used to run even on extremely cold mornings in good old days. I hope I’ll be able to resume it.
17. I have been wearing spectacles since I was 11 years old.
18. I was once addicted to Tetris.
19. My first email address was on Hotmail. I soon switched to Net@ddress and kept using it until they cancelled their free subscriptions.
20. I love reading dedications, prefaces, and acknowledgments in books.
21. When I was a child, I used to have a fear of sitting in a movie theater. My parents tell me that I had developed this phobia after watching King Kong in the cinema. (They don’t remember which King Kong movie it was.)
22. I am a fan of Tintin.
23. I had once written a detective novel that was so pathetic that I never showed it to anyone except my siblings.
24. I have been using the same mobile phone for the last 4 years. No, I don’t have any emotional affiliation with it.
25. I like fog.

From Google with Love

Like everybody else from Blogistan, I have also had my share of amusing keywords and phrases that people enter in Google and then land on my blog. Here are the highlights from the past 7 days:

• pics of beautiful cows in mandi
• very beautifull qurbani bakra
• adult imran series
• its boring time now what should i do pakistan
• studies on time wasters
• What to say at an awards ceremony
• ESSAY ON LOVEMY CONTORY IN URDU
• need shehzore on rent
• what is meant by name aabi
• nd when u find yourself lying helpless in her arms u knoww u really loved a woman

As I said in an old post, keep searching.

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. I welcome you all to the Brilliante Blog Awards Ceremony.

I have never hosted any awards ceremony before, so I have no idea what to say. A few words on the awards history, maybe?

But first, please allow me some room for narcissism. (Yes, yet again — it’s a hat trick now.) You see, a blogger can host a Brilliante Blog Awards ceremony only if s/he has received one. Mahwash, of Assorted Mundanities, has very graciously awarded me with the said award. Here’s her announcement:

Saadat, for the topsy turvy and a very cool template.

Considering that her blog posts make a lot more sense than mine ever do, I am very, very honoured. Thank you, Mahwash.

Also, it will be unfair not to thank the talented photographer, Esther Groen. She probably doesn’t even know that an apples picture that she took (and then generously gave away as royalty free stock) has become almost the identity of this ulta seedha corner.

Coming back to the awards ceremony and its history then, here are the rules:

1. The purpose of the prize is to promote as many blogs as possible in the blogosphere.
2. When you receive the prize you must write a post showing it, together with the name of who has given it to you, and link them back.
3. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs (or even more) that you find brilliant in their content or design.
4. Show their names and links and leave them a comment informing they were prized with ‘Brilliante Weblog.’
5. Show a picture of those who awarded you and those you give the prize (optional).
6. And then we pass it on!

Here we go then, ladies and gentlemen. The Brilliante Blog Award goes to (in alphabetical order):

• A, for candid accounts of her life and thoughts.
• Abbas, for his peculiar brand of sarcastic humour.
• Ayesha, for her courage and efforts for creating awareness about thalassemia.
• Hani, for his goofily funny and simplistic Dingle Days comics.
• Hina, for her simple, yet beautiful, narratives.
• Knicq, for his magnificent command over words.
• Umema, for her smile inducing posts (and for finally learning how to use an Urdu dictionary!)

An enthusiastic round of applause for all of them!

Also, I wish I could include more names (and the rules do say that I can) in the above list. I couldn’t, because some of those names have already deleted their blogs, some have enabled password-protection, and some… well I just didn’t want to leave anyone out and make you read a huge list, so I forced myself to listing just seven bloggers. (It’s just like passing the tag, you don’t want to miss anyone!) Still, I appreciate each and every one of them, because they have always been sources of inspiration and learning for a dunce like me.

All right then, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming and attending the award ceremony. Take care of yourselves and enjoy the refreshments!

Also, when I choose the slogan of arguably the most damned organization of Pakistan as the title of this post, I don’t mean it as a compliment to them. I mean it as an ironical device. Because, let’s face it, there is no difference. None whatsoever.

When I closed the public access to this ulta seedha corner about a week ago, I had a quick plan of action in my mind: Create backups. Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Upload the newly created theme. Make all those little changes as required. Install the plugins. Brush up the posts and pages. Write a new post. And open the access again. Plain and simple. Shouldn’t have taken more than 48 hours.

Except that PTCL wanted me to feel the difference.

The night I created all the backups, I slept and dreamed of a new version of Ulta Seedha that was smashing. The morning after I woke up and found the phone line gone dead.

“Sir ji, what can we do? The workers are all on strike. It’s been over a month.” A person at the local PTCL exchange office told me when I went there to “complain”.

I sighed and then told him that, strangely, I could still connect to the Internet by using PTCL Broadband. His face lit up, “Acha? You go and do this: There’s a dibbi through which the DSL line connects to your home. Exchange the wire of that dibbi with your regular phone line and it will work!”

I still have no idea what he was talking about.

I didn’t try to locate that miraculous dibbi, though. It turned out that the DSL connection that was running on a dead phone line was of no practical use. It kept on disconnecting after every 5 minutes (with a special consideration for mornings and afternoons, when it disconnected after every 10 minutes), and the only reason that FileZilla, the nifty FTP client that I use, didn’t jump out of the computer to slap me silly on my face, was that it was a piece of soulless software. Otherwise, I am sure it would have refused to work for a master who couldn’t even arrange a stable Internet connection.

Fast forward to seven days after the phone line went dead, and it was still dead. That dibbi person had now started greeting me with a sheepish smile and a sympathetic shrug. Then on the 8th day, he asked me to go and see some Chowdhury sahab.

I found that Chowdhury sahab, a man who didn’t look even remotely like a chowdhury, near the main gate of the PTCL building. He listened to me patiently, and then asked me who had told me to see him. He then motioned me to follow him and entered the complaint office.

The next five minutes were amusing. The way Chowdhury sahab scolded all those guys, including the dibbi person, was a perfect example of an officer gone mad in a Pakistani sarkari office. I did feel sorry for the dibbi person, though — he was always so polite. Within the next 10 minutes, a technician was fiddling through the telephone wires of our home, and the phone line went live. Just like that. I later found out that Chowdhury sahab was the SDO (Sub Divisional Officer, or whatever the hell it stands for).

Now that I think of it, there was a difference that I felt. I had to go to the upper management if I wanted my phone line repaired in the past, and I had to do it again. But this time, I was sent to an officer by one of his own subordinates. Feel the difference, really!

Anyway, feel free to extract a moral out of this story. I am just happy that I managed to do almost 75% of the work I had intended to do for Ulta Seedha. To users of Internet Explorer 7: The new theme will look jittery at some places, I’ll fix it soon. To users of Internet Explorer 6: Stop using it, you are destroying the World Wide Web. To users of Mozilla Firefox: I love you. And if you are one of those rockstars who subscribed to this blog’s feed, please update it to this one. (If everything is working fine, the previous feed will automatically redirect, but who knows.)

So this was the story of a different PTCL, and a different Ulta Seedha. Let me know if anything is not working as it should be, and I’ll try to fix it soon. Meanwhile, I’ll also pray that the remaining 25% of the work that I haven’t been able to do remains hidden from the visitors.

If there’s one thing that sets this blog apart from any other blog in the whole blogistan, then that is its author’s (that is to say, my) ability of not updating regularly. And when you consider the fact that this post that you are reading right now should have been uploaded about a month ago, you can realize that when I say that I don’t update regularly, I mean it!

I know. I am probably the greatest procrastinator of recent times. And it’s not just blogging; there are loads of things in my life right now that are highly messed up just because yours truly is a lazy giraffe. But anyway, I wouldn’t want to talk about them while (sort of) celebrating Ulta Seedha’s 5th blogiversary. Instead, as is the tradition of Ulta Seedha, here are some random statistics.

Posts

Ulta Seedha has seen 93 posts in the five years it has been online. That makes an average of 1.55 posts every month.

Wow.

Sigh.

Of course, this post count does not include those entries which were lost in the Diary-X crash. (For those who don’t know: before Ulta Seedha got its own domain two years ago, it was hosted on Diary-X.) The post count also does not include those posts (mainly poems) that I wrote before I started blogging, and the pages which fall out of the regular blog timeline (About, FAQ, etc). All of the statistics that I provide below are based on these 93 posts.

The most lengthy post that I have written in these five years is also the last post of these five years: An Evaluation of Popular Time Wasting Algorithms, which contained 1653 words of brilliant nonsense.

The shortest post contained just 6 words and two photographs: This Morning. The shortest, picture-less post was Glass of Water, containing 14 words.

Average length of a post turned out to be 424.1290323 words.

Comments

Despite my rarely updating attitude, I have been very fortunate to have a great readership in these five years. They might not know it, but I have always learnt a great deal from every one of my readers and the comments that they left on my ulta seedha stuff. And some of the readers are also my good friends now. I guess I have just been very lucky.

Before I tell you the stats regarding comments that this blog received, let me tell you something interesting: I have not used the comment count reported by WordPress. Instead, I have re-counted the comments excluding my own, and have considered the unique number of people who commented on a particular post. In other words, if a person XYZ has commented three times on a post, I have counted those as only one. The results are quite amusing.

Total number of comments is 975. This makes an average of 10.48387097 comments for each post. (Going by the regular count, there are 1632 comments, with an average of 17.5483871 comments for a post.)

The post receiving the highest number of comments, 27, was Yet Again. The regular count says that it received 43 comments. (Runner-up is “میں کام کرتا ہوں”, which received 25 comments, and which tops with 54 comments of regular count).

The least number of comments is, well, ZERO. 3 posts share this count, and no, I am not mentioning them. They are highly immature. (That’s not to say that the rest of the blog has anything mature to offer!)

Miscellaneous

On past blogiversaries, I had also calculated the maximum and minimum number of days between updates, but for the 5th blogiversary, I won’t. I’ll only embarrass myself if I mention them.

Which brings us to the next thing…

E-book

Yep. An e-book.

I know, I know. I am not a prolific author. Heck, I am not even a proper author. This blog is certainly not a masterpiece, and has nothing to offer except long hiatuses. Still, I thought that an e-book containing a collection of posts from the past five years would be something interesting to do.

Also, I wanted to say ‘thanks’ to all of you who have been reading and supporting Ulta Seedha. Couldn’t think of any other way.

Update: The e-book has now been removed.

(I apologize for the ridiculously large size of the e-book, specially to dial-up users. Sadly, that’s the smallest size I could achieve even after all the PDF compression techniques.)

And now, dear friends, let’s just see if I can make it through the 6th year.

Let me elaborate. There are quite some “hot” topics that one can blog about these days. Specially if you live in Islamabad, then the highly dramatic hungama that is currently being “performed” on Shahrah-e-Dastoor, is totally irresistible. On the other hand, if you are a cricket fan, then the opening match of the 2007 world cup between Pakistan and West Indies is a great thing to write about (and consequently, to rant about how the men in green uniforms lost). I, however, have never understood the delicacies of neither politics nor cricket. And, as I just claimed, I am also selfish. So, standing true to my claim, I am not going to talk about anything except my blog, and it’s 4th birthday.

Some two weeks ago, a friend of mine very nonchalantly told me a very interesting thing. He was just stating that man, being the strange species that he is, longs deeply for something, but after that something is finally under his possession, he loses all his interest in it. As an example, he said to me that after I had gotten my own domain and hosting space for my blog, I had been less frequent in updating it, while before that when my blog had been hosted on Diary-X, my updates (albeit less frequent then too) were pretty regular. (I know, some would disagree with that too.) Silently, I agreed with him. Not really agreed with him on his theory (as there can be exceptions), but I had to agree with him on the example he presented. That is certainly not to say that I have lost interest in blogging. I mean, come on — I updated to the latest version of WordPress just yesterday.

So, here we are. At the 4th blogiversary of Ulta Seedha. And yes, I know, this has been the most slow blogging year of them all. But anyway, as before, here are some ultay seedhay stats for this blog’s 4th year:

• Total number of entries for the 4th year is 10. (You know what, I hate to admit it, but that’s really awful. Okay, so make it 11, I am also counting Year: Three in it, but just for this particular statistic.)
• The shortest entry was This Morning, having just 6 words. But then, it also contained two photographs, and according to that popular saying, those two photographs make 2000 words, making the entry’s word count 2006. Okay, forget the photographs.
• The longest entry (996 words) was بِلا عنوان.
• Average length for an entry was 556 words. (Pretty cool, huh?)
• The shortest break between two posts was of 8 days. And it was both between The Light Bulb That Never Showed Up & Eid Mubarak, and Eid Mubarak & The Walking Stick.
• The longest break between two posts was — I better hide somewhere — 75 days, between This Morning and آزادی.
• Average length of breaks was 33.8 days. Wow.

And now that I no longer suffer from Enetation, I think I can also include stats about comments:

• The entry which received the least amount of comments (8) was The Light Bulb That Never Showed Up.
• Getting the largest number of comments (28) was, of course, بِلا عنوان.
• Average number of comments turned out to be 15.4.

Okay, let me say it again, the 4th year for this blog has been the slowest of them all. And the worst part is, I don’t know if the 5th one will be similar. I mean, I have certainly matured a great deal as a procrastinator, and the WordPress upgrade that I talked about in the beginning, should really have occurred a long time ago. (But then again, I avoided the hassle of upgrading again and again, huh?) Some of the hacks done by me are not working after the upgrade, but overall, it’s not a big deal, and can be fixed within an hour or two. That is to say, if I sit down and actually work on it. The design of this blog also needs a change. Maybe in the next six months, it might come along.

And in the end, as always, a super duper Thank You to all those who have been coming here and reading all the nonsense that I have been writing, despite the frustratingly slow updates. You all rock, you all roll, and you all rule!

I, on the other hand, sleep.

I admit, I am a fan of Junaid Jamshed. I also admit that I would love to have his cellphone number. Some years earlier, I would have used his cellphone number to tell him how great, or disappointing, one of his songs had turned out for me, but now that he sports a beard and spends his time reading religious books, I might want to have his personal opinion on some matter. Or maybe, I could suggest my own ulta seedha concept for his kurta designs. But seriously, does anyone really believe that I would be advertising his, or for that matter, any celebrity’s cellphone number here on my blog?

Search engines are such an interesting kind of computer programs. And as with all computer programs that exist, they have their limitations. I don’t remember where, but I was reading somewhere that if one searches for “car”, and then performs another search for “automobile”, should it make any difference? If you are a human, there is no, or very little, difference. If, however, you are a search engine, it makes all the difference in the world.

Anyway, my intention right now was not to write about search engines and how they work. Instead, I would like to share some of the keywords which are directing traffic to this ulta seedha corner.

Topping the list is “Maulana Tariq Jamil”. And before you jump to any conclusion, I have never ever met the Maulana. People might have been looking for any of his lectures online or something like that, but the thing I wonder about is that why someone looking for lectures of Maulana Tariq Jamil would click on a search result which is titled “Ulta Seedha”. And I just can’t imagine their disappointment (or fury) when after clicking on that result they read the description of my encounter with a speed driving, traffic cutting taxi driver.

Another recurring keyword is “Imran Series“. People have been trying to read it online (“on line read imran series novels”) and by some stroke of very unfortunate luck, they are being ushered to this blog. I actually am a HUGE fan of Imran Series (if, of course, written by Ibne Safi, and not by any of his copiers, though I’ll admit that I was introduced to this series by Mazhar Kaleem. Fortunately, after reading the original, I vowed never again to touch the Imran Series’ novels by Mazhar Kaleem or any other author). To my disappointment, though, one of the searches was “imran series mazhar kaleem”.

An expectable keyword is, of course, “ulta seedha” (with or without the space). They might have been searching for the show which goes on air (on Geo TV, I guess) with the same name (“download ulta seedha”), but let me now clear this: That show did not inspire the name of this blog. Heck, I don’t even watch TV and came to know about the show by a friend. But anyway, as a proof, this blog was started before the show started. There!

The winner among the keywords (or I should say keyphrases), though, is a result of the greatest disease on this planet: boredom. Somewhere on earth, a person sat in front of a computer, connected it to the Internet, and then googled this: “feeling bored want something interesting”. Tragedy, I tell you. Even more tragic is that person’s fate of clicking on the 4th search result, and then torturing himself/herself to read my ramblings about the first day of the 5th Semester, when actually all s/he asked for was “something interesting”. Whoever that person is, I really feel sorry for him/her. I really do.

Some other worth mentioning keywords are:

• tariq bin ziad spain
• guess papers of 10th class (I don’t know how that student would find them here)
• rent a car in pakistan
• funny sms
• dhuwan
• mortein mats (Bhaijan, you were right: Include a macchar in anything, and it clicks!)

And now that I have included so many search keywords in this post, I wonder how many hits it is going to get.

Some two months ago, when this place was hosted on Diary-X, I had put on a I-shall-be-back notice on this blog/diary/journal/whatever, because there were some other things I had to take care of. I was hoping that I would finish those other things properly and quickly, and then return to this ulta seedha corner and start posting again (once in a month). Things were going as they were planned by me to go, when suddenly, two things happened:

1. I came to know that there are a lot more other things that need to be taken care of by me, and
2. Diary-X crashed. Without any data backup.

Needless to say, I reached heaven.

But soon, I had to come down on earth. The things I had to take care of kept on moving on their own pace, while I kept on thinking about the decision of to-blog-or-not-to-blog. Then one day, I searched through the caches of Yahoo! and MSN Search, and the decision was made. To blog.

Although all data was lost on diary-X, copies of many posts were there in the caches of above mentioned search engines. Also, since the comments were handled by Enetation (a service with which I have a true love-hate relationship), I was able to retrieve and save them on my machine too. And thus began the work on a new version of Ulta Seedha, which is being visited by you now.

There are so many things that need to be done or fixed in this version, and I just hope that they don’t create much problems for you all. I might even change the whole layout after some time (except, yes, the apples). Feel free to report as many errors or bugs as you can, it would be highly appreciated.

And now to the 3rd year of this blog. On the previous two blogiversaries, I had posted some ultay seedhay stats, telling which post was the shortest and longest, and the duration of breaks I had had, and etc. I was looking forward to do the same for this post too, but unfortunately, I couldn’t retrieve all the posts from the caches, and thus I am unable to make those stats complete. Maybe, just maybe, if we reach the 4th year, then the stats will be back.

And in the end, a very, very, very big Thank-You to you all. For being there to read my nonsense, and for being there to send me wishes and prayers whenever I requested for them. You are all rock stars!

The word ‘blog’ in 1337 would come up with many interesting interpretations (such as 8109—which, if tried to be converted into some day in a calendar, would become the 81st day of the 9th month). But anyway, leetspeak is certainly not what I want to talk about (rather what Shirazi would want me to talk about, since he tagged me). It’s about the Blog Day, and on a blog day, one should talk about blogs.

Choosing five best blogs that I enjoy reading is one hell of a job. Every blog is unique and different in its own manner. (Reminds me of the one liner I read somewhere: ‘You are unique, just like everybody else’.) Every one of the blogs out there in Blogistan has something to offer, whether it’s their writer’s most intimate secrets, or an autobiography of the day, or a sizzling opinion on something controversial. Whatever there is on a blog, it has something for everyone. And that’s what makes the selection of five blogs difficult. On your right is the list of blogs I blurk around. There are many which aren’t on the list (just because I am such a lazy brat), and there are many others on which I have never left a comment, but I read them regularly. And then there are many which stayed in the Blogistan for a very short period of time—they just came, they just saw, they just conquered, and they just left.

Moving to the list of blogs I enjoy reading most. So here they are (not necessarily in that order)…

• Silent Spring: This man is responsible for making me know what a blog is. Back in those days when I used to have a static website with pages full of self-praises, he came there and signed my guestbook. I went to his diary, got puzzled (who on earth puts a date on a personal website, I had thought), liked the ‘feel’, and googled about the whole thing. The result was that I was blurking around a lot of blogs. Silent Spring has a fluency in his style I have seen nowhere else. The way his writing flows his emotions and thoughts into words and lets the reader feel his joys and sorrows is simply remarkable.
• Rambling Monologues: An example of a classic blog. Yasmine has a brilliant way of narrating different interesting incidents from her life, ranging from the adventures with her family and friends to her university hungamas and to brilliant conversations with total strangers. ‘Lively’ is certainly a word to be used for her blog.
• Inconsequential: The witty Mr. Nauman and his equally witty daughter. This place is full of little things from life, sure to spread a smile across your faces. There are conversations between the father and his daughter, which are intelligent, humorous, charming, and simply cute.
• Amir Saleem: Writing short stories is what he likes doing, and writing short stories is what he does so brilliantly. This writer and photographer beautifully captures life in his writings and pictures, and possesses an expression so unique to himself.
• ShutterBlog: Now this one I don’t read, but see. Faraz has a superb skill when it comes to using cameras, and he does not hesitate to show it. His photographs are vibrant and full of energy, and at the same time, witty and impressive.

As you may notice, only two of the above are present in the links on the right. The reason, you ask? My ever lazy self. To be honest, I am now more interested in reading other blogs than in updating mine. Don’t know if it’s a phase or what, but you can’t really blame me…

After all, it’s an interesting Blogistan out there.

Technically speaking, I wasn’t a blogger at first place. A blogger is someone who blogs, and keeping in mind the cutter definition of blogging, this ulta seedha journal is far from being a blog. But as we generalize things up, and start grouping and merging different concepts together, and as we leave behind the cutter explanations because of the so called ‘enlightened moderation’ (I hope I am not being too political here), then loosely speaking, an online diarist or journalist can be (and is) called a blogger.

That’s what amuses me the most: when words start losing their original meaning and evolve to encapsulate wider and more interesting (and sometimes completely wrong) interpretations. Being a Gemini, words have always been important to me. I like playing with them, despite of the fact that I am not a very good player, and I like to know about their origins and ‘real’ meanings. A classical example would be the noun ‘hacker‘. I first heard this word during a conversation with a very good friend (which reminds me that I haven’t seen him for ages now) and was impressed by its oral beauty. (You can call me a weirdo, but I really think that ‘hack’ is one stylish word). That friend of mine was a great admirer of hackers (and still is), and needless to say that the first impression I had of hackers in my mind was that of geniuses (which they really are). After some days I searched the Internet, and came to know about the wordplay which has been misleading the whole world. Thank you, media.

By the way, for those of you who don’t know, ‘hack’ means ‘to cut or chop’ or ‘kick with toe of boot’.

Anyway, I hadn’t intended to write about all this wordplay thing (and, ironically, I was thinking before I started typing this entry that I have nothing to write). So I was saying that I am turning into a blurker. I visit different blogs, read the entries, then follow a link to another blog, read the entries there, and then follow another link, and so on. I would want to comment, but feel too lazy to do that, and I would want to update this place of mine, but feel too lazy to do that too. (Note, however, that I do not mean to say that blurkers are lazy. Being lazy is my personal attribute to which blurkers may, or may not, relate). But tell you what, being a blurker is fun: hopping from one blog to another is just like visiting different minds and meeting new ideas, which are the very foundations of word-evolutions our dictionaries keep on adding in themselves.

In other news, I have been tagged by wild1, and according to that tag, I have to post the lyrics of a song to which I can relate. So here goes: Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now, sung by David Pomeranz, and the theme song of the famous comedy series, Perfect Strangers.

Sometimes the world looks perfect
Nothin’ to rearrange
Sometimes you just
Get a feelin’ like you need some kind of change

No matter what the odds are this time,
Nothing’s going to stand in my way
This flame in my heart,
And a long lost friend
Gives every dark street a light at the end

Standin’ tall
On the wings of my dream
Rise and fall
On the wings of my dream
Rain and thunder, the wind and haze
I’m bound for better days
It’s my life
It’s my dream
Nothin’s gonna stop me now