Monday, December 25, 2006

when will you grow up, people?

Yesterday I was on the way to Baneshwor for a little party by my friends, going to US for their study. Don't ask how many of my classmates are here in Nepal. And I wasn't saying grow up to my friends.

On the half way to the Baneshwor, it was total jam. Vehicles going up totally occupied the entire road. I was thinking what caused that - some rally, demostrations.... I was on bike. The beauty is you can tweak around to leave the jam behind. I followed other bikers, driving in the footpath. On the other side of the jam, the vehicles coming down occupied the entire street. It was disturbing to see that. Nothing was happening at all. Just hurrying people trying to get first and everyone got stuck. The major culprits are the microbus, tempo and minibus drivers, who are always in a hurry, turning, moving, crossing others way without any signal. When will these people grow up. Recently I posted a powerpoint presentation on why developing are always left behind. This attitude of people won't let the country move forward. Not just government, we are equally responsible for the present condition of our country.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

my opinion: Writing is not difficult when you are yourself.

Few days back I posed a question "Is writing difficult?". I have been writing 2/3 blogs per day and realized that "no. writing is not difficult when you just let yourself flow". One thing is if you keep on writing, the ideas just flow. But if you stop it, the same happens with your free-flowing ideas. When I used to be regular for 3 months 3 months back, I still remember how enthusiast I had become about writing. And everywhere I go, everything i do, i would think "well i can blog this." I was so conscious about my whereabouts, my whatdoings? But i still haven't developed a habit of jotting down notes as soon as it comes to my mind, which experts would consider the must-have, must-develop habit of wanna-be-writers and ofcourse all sort of writers. I was thinking about blogging on "writing is not difficult" blog in the morning. I am not trying to boast about my memory but i am trying to say that I am not a writer yet. I need to develop jotting-ideas habit.

So I will keep blogging everything that comes to my mind. Don't care about my target audiences. Infact I haven't thought about them yet, though blogging experts would say to must set target audiences to start blogging to give you a purpose of blogging. As I have said before "my purpose for now is to develop a habit of smooth writing." and forget about others. I am sorry to you (reader) but I am really bad at writing so blogging is just a medium to me.

At informal WDR2007 presentation

I just happened to be in an informal presentation on World Development Report (wdr) 2007 by Deepti Kharurel of AYON (Association of Youth Organization Network) at Sap-Nepal. Though I haven't read the entire book, I had downloaded it to my computer and skimmed through the chapters and still remember that there are 1.3 billion youths aged 12-24 in the world.



I enjoyed my time there at the presentation. It was sort of raising awareness among youths, involved in youth organizations, since WDR07 primarily focused on youths. I liked the documentary, I didn't know that wdr is also accompanied by documentary when I downloaded it. I had skimmed though the book then and liked the concept of giving second chances to the youth. There were three main concepts regarding youths: opportunity to the youths, increasing capability among the youths and providing them second chance. I also had the pleasure to see the hard-copy of the WDR, colorful, smooth pages, extravagant looking. I wonder how much a piece of book would cost. That would have been enough for a month food for a family in Africa (just my guess!). Someone raised a pretty rational query "Ok now we know some facts about world, poverty, youths. Now what are we going to do? And can we [the youths] do?".



During the tea break, I was listening to some youths talking on politics, why many youths are falling into the trap of politics. Some of them were suggesting the fact that it was because of insecurity. Many still believe that if you follow somw party leader, you will have a secure future. In fact there are many cases to support this fact. One was also giving an example of a competitive, qualified friend applying for some decent post, then another person, affiliated to some party, also applied to the same post. The result is affiliation proved beneficial. The one, who cited this example, later mocked his friend saying, "you were busy preparing yourself for the interview, your competitor must be busy calling everyone he knows". This is very fatal to everyone of us. Maybe also one of the reasons why people call politics a dirty game. I was illuminated with several interesting ideas from the youths.



PS: I am writing this at 4:30PM in "Performancing Editor". I will post it at night after my night-surfable internet resumes. Well just trying to show my gratitude to the "Performancing Team".



me: controlled by the environment?

Do you ever feel sagged, drooped when someone told you about interesting things happened to them? Most of the time, I feel that how come I did not do that when people starts to say about their interesting trips and so. I just got a message from a friend that they went for bungy jump yesterday. I am feeling really bad that I have not been to that thrilling jump. I know there's no need to feel bad or sagged. But still we are very prone to being control by the external environment than by our own judgement. I will not let that happen to me. This is the time when people like Brian Tracy, Steve Pavlina come to aid. You listen/read their energetic audios, articles and you will feel revived.

Why difficult to discipline oneself?

Disciplining oneself is certainly the hardest thing to do. We are always doing things that we are not supposed to do or should not do. And we don't feel like doing things that ought to be done. I like the Steven Covey's concept of categorizing our tasks into urgent or/and important and work accordingly. I was discussing the same thing with my friend and he mocked 'with the time in categorizing your tasks, you would be able to complete all your tasks.' That was funny.



The point is I have been really lazy. With my lots of tasks piling up, I am confused with what about of time to give to those and end up with doing other things besides the thing I should be doing.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

A funny joke to put smile in your face

ONE NIGHT 4 MBA STUDENTS WERE PLAYING TILL LATE NIGHT AND DIDN'T STUDY FOR THE TEST WHICH WAS SCHEDULED FOR THE NEXT DAY.IN THE MORNING THEY THOUGHT OF A PLAN. THEY MADE THEMSELVES LOOK AS DIRTY AND WEIRD AS THEY COULD WITH GREASE AND DIRT. THEY THEN WENT UP TO THE DEAN AND SAID THAT THEY HAD GONE OUT TO A WEDDING LAST NIGHT AND ON THEIR RETURN THE TYRE OF THEIR CAR BURST AND THEY HAD TO PUSH THE CAR ALL THE WAY BACK AND THAT THEY WERE IN NO CONDITION TO APPEAR FOR THE TEST.



SO THE DEAN SAID THEY CAN HAVE THE RETEST AFTER 3 DAYS.THEY SAID THEY WILL BE READY BY THAT TIME. ON THE THIRD DAY THEY APPEARED BEFORE THE DEAN.THE DEAN SAID THAT THIS WAS A SPECIAL CONDITION TEST. ALL FOUR WERE REQUIRED TO SIT IN SEPARATE CLASSROOMS FOR THE TEST. THEY ALL AGREED AS THEY HAD PREPARED WELL IN THE LAST THREE DAYS. />

THE TEST CONSISTED OF 2 QUESTIONS WITH TOTAL OF 100 MARKS.



Q.1. YOUR NAME ............ ......... ............... .......( 2 MARKS )

Q.2. WHICH TYRE GOT BURST ? ............ ....( 98 MARKS )



THE ANSWERS OF THE 4 STUDENTS FOR QUESTION # 2 WERE:



Student 1) Front Left

Student 2) Front Right

Student 3) Back Left

Student 4) Back Right



SO BEWARE! THERE'S ALWAYS A PERSON WHO IS SMARTER THAN YOU AROUND.....!

Again "performancing" at a glance...

Well I installed "Performancing" add-on to my firefox and posted a test post yesterday. You may have noticed "powered by performancing firefox" at the bottom of the post. I thought now I have edit it online to remove that powered tag. I wouldn't want to have it in all of my posts. Fortunately there's an option in settings from where you can choose not to insert it. I hope this time, that "powered by" tag won't appear (i have disabled it).



Someother things that I liked about "Performancing"

You are writing some content and you are maintaining multiple blogs. If you are using browser for blogging, you have to go to the dashboard and choose "create post" for the right blog. People in developing countries would understand how difficult and tardy life is in the internet world. I am delighted to say that "Performancing" definitely makes our life easy to certain extent. You write a post and choose the blog from the sidebar where you would want to have your blog posted. Just a click and everything happens in the background.



Other thing I liked is "History" feature. Choose a blog from the list and click history, 10 latest posts are retrieved from online to your desktop. Choose the one you want to edit and click "Publish as Edit" to edit that post. Life is certainly getting easy. Sometimes I would write online and wouldn't feel like writing after sometime, then I would save it as a draft, so that I would return in future to complete that post. The result is I would totally forget about it and it would remain as draft for ever. "Performancing" wouldn't let that continue in future, now I have that draft in my desktop and complete in my leisure time. Thanks Performancing.



I would love to see more HTML tag options in editor toolbar. Since "performancing" is a sort of desktop utility, it wouldn't be difficult to add more features in the toolbar. By the way, there are even add-ons to the "performancing" add-on. It's funny though that there are add-ons to the add-on. Add-ons/plugins/extensions are the must-think-and-have feature in any application, be it web or desktop. That will really aid the application to extend on and on, re-usability also increases.



I thought inserting image would also be comfortable. "Error: Error contacting server..." welcomes me. I tried with the browser, the image gets uploaded without a question. Well there was a "I agree" checkbox, maybe because beta tag was removed from blogger.com. But still insert image from performancing would not work. I used the url of uploaded image from browser. It worked (see my pic?) . Why uploading from performancing editor not working? A bug?





I think I just found another flaw. As I was typing this post, I have to use "Save as Note" and everytime it asks "Overwrite the note?". That was quite disturbing. I would love to have the option to turn that off. And I almost lost 2 paragraphs. I was writing this post and just happened to browse the posts in the history list. When I came back to the Notes, there was not 2 paragraphs. I got mad. I forget to click "save as note". How insensible is this system to ignore changes when I move to other sections. It should remind me to save the content when I moved around other options. Fortunately undo/redo (Ctrl-Z/Ctrl-Y) worked and I got my content back. That was really scary. This issue should be addressed asap. People will get mad if the content gets lost. Auto-save feature would be really appreciated.

Friday, December 22, 2006

Testing from "Performancing" add-on for firefox

I just installed Performancing Add-on for firefox. According to the site,



Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browser and lets you post to your blog easily. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as well as post to your blog.[...]


I was actually looking for similar kind of tool to ease in posting blogs. In this you can also create multiple blog accounts, and choose the one in which you want to post your blog. I have already created 3 accounts in Performance. I hope it will be easy to post regularly.



There's also "Save as note" button, that saves to your desktop. I guess it means I can write offline at any time I want and post it later. Otherwise I used to write in a notepad and save it in my desktop. That's cool. Well this still needs to be explored. By the way this is just a test for Performance add-on. I hope this will appear in my cupboard blog. Ok..publishing now....





powered by performancing firefox

men are happier than women...are they?

Well I love getting insightful forwards. This one is insightful because i get to know so many things that we, men, have advantage over women that we are taking as granted. Perhaps we should think about these things more and be happy :-) Well some points may not apply to all but still we will be happy.

Men Are Just Happier People!!
What do you expect from such simple creatures?

Your last name stays put.
The garage is all yours.
Wedding plans take care of themselves
Chocolate is just another snack.

You can be Prime Minister.
You can never be pregnant.
You can wear a white T-shirt to a water park.
You can wear NO shirt to a water park.
Car mechanics tell you the truth.

The world is your urinal. You never have to drive to another gas station restroom because this one is just too icky.
You don't have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt.
Same work, more pay.

Wrinkles add character.
People never stare at your chest when you're talking to them.

The occasional well-rendered belch is practically expected.
New shoes don't cut, blister, or mangle your feet.
One mood all the time.

Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat.
You know stuff about tanks.

A five-day holiday requires only one suitcase.
You can open all your own jars.
You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness.
If someone forgets to invite you, he or she can still be your friend.

Your underwear is £5.00 for a three-pack.
Three pairs of shoes are more than enough.
You almost never have strap problems in public.
You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes.
Everything on your face stays its original colour.

The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades.
You only have to shave your face and neck.

You can play with toys all your life.
Your belly usually hides your big hips.

One wallet and one pair of shoes one colour for all seasons.
You can wear shorts no matter how your legs look.
You can "do" your nails with a pocket knife.
You have freedom of choice concerning growing a moustache.

You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives on December 24 in 25 minutes.

No wonder men are happier...!!

maybe...I haven't found one

I started this blog almost a year ago, with lots of ins and outs. Since Sep 2006, I finally decided to be a regular blogger and I did. But again the past trend continues, with lots of irregularities. I am reading a blog on "how to start a blog?". It days "post something right now" soon after registering for the free blog sites. Mine is pretty old and yet it's hard to convince myself saying "write it anything". This is just a junk.

I think I haven't found one. The same blog 'how to start a blog' says to find a perfect match.

[...]2. Pick a topic — you can change it when you know what you’re doing.
This is like dating. Pick something that seems good, and if it isn’t, try again. Don’t get hung up on topic. As in dating, you’ll know when you’ve found one that’s the right fit. There are some obvious things, like pick a topic you have a lot to say about, pick something that interests you, pick something that will help your career. This is great advice, but you already know that if you look for a perfect match you’ll never actually go on a date.[...]

I guess I am still trying to find a perfect date so that I can be regular and enthusiast about it and i will have a sense of purpose of maintaining blogs. If you scan through my blogs, you will see content on many diverse topics. Anyways I suppose "My Cupboard" can store anything. This is not a specific cupboard. It's my junkyard. I have also started some other specific topics blogs on Tech, ICTs and I am not actually feeling like posting there. The reason is I have to write a good planned content for such specific topics and I wandered around net easily. I am learning new things, techniques almost everyday. I recently found a beautiful php framework "Codeigniter". It's damn simple. Then I found another wonderful jquery, a javascript library, that makes javascript a toy. I myself have tweaked in lots of jquery plugins and codeigniter to suit my needs and there are so many things I could have contributed and yet....

Friday, December 15, 2006

People are reading my blogs...

When I first started to track my blog readers using sitemeter, I used to check that site every so hour. I was very happy when the number started to increase and reached 10/11 views per day. That was a great achievement for me. It's been 2 weeks that I am not writing and yet people are still coming to my blogs, and I feel bad that I just stopped blogging for no apparent reason than just procrastinating. I so much hate procrastination and yet I do.

I guess I will give at least half an hour for blogging. Many people would give different reasons for blogging - earning money, spreading your voice, easy to let others know about your existence. But I am writing just for the sake of writing and nothing at all. If people are interested, then I would be very happy. But again my purpose for now is just writing and break away what amateur writers often experience "the writer's block". At least I have a purpose, though for myself.

Is writing difficult?

Well it's been almost 2 weeks that I totally stopped blogging. Now even though I want to write, the words wouldn't flow as 2 weeks back. I listened to power writing series by Brian Tracy and he mentioned that if you want to be good at writing, then just write. Probably why I am writing right now. Just let the words flow and keep writing, there'll be plenty of time to review and any writing needs at least 5 edits. Wow... I have never done such ever in my life. I don't know how many of you like writing and yet find it difficulty in doing so? It's difficult if you think it's difficult. I have been reading and listening to lots of self-help stuffs and I really like the one called the power of mind. If you can envision yourself that you achieved something, it's really easy to fool our mind. I guess I will try to fool my mind saying that writing is damn easy and I am really good at it. Will update you.