Nov 11th, 2008 | Etc | No Comments
At the occasion of the World Usability Day, the Interaction Design Center has organized an event at the UMT Campus on Thursday, November 13th. The event will consist of a series of talks, case studies, and a documentary screening. Every year the event has a theme and this year’s theme is transportation.
Three reasons you should attend:
- Lahore is home to a lot of “interesting” means of transportation not found anywhere else in the world
- “Helvetica” is a great documentary
- Registration for the event is free
So if you have some time to spare this Thursday, and are intersted in “Usability” either as a user or a creator, head over to the registration page and let IXDC know.
Oct 8th, 2008 | Pakistan | 8 Comments
Last night, some terrorists succeeded in planting three time-bombs in the Garhi Shahu area in Lahore, an area that is 4-5 kilometers away from my house. Thankfully, nobody had died until the last update.
I had to turn on the idiot box (after many months) to catch the live report, and was lucky enough to witness the uber-intelligent reporters standing inside the shop that was destroyed. Using their extremely intelligent brains, and standing on top of the scene of the blast without caring about forensic evidence, they decreed that “The bombs were planted to create panic in the common citizens”.
I think they are wrong, and I have an alternate theory. It involves the terrorists’ big boss telling them to → continue reading
Sep 6th, 2008 | Life, Pakistan | No Comments
I had almost forgotten that I was added as an author on Lahore Metblogs, but today’s three hour long electric shortage cured my whats-the-word-for-memory-loss amnesia and finally provided the motivation that I needed to write my first post on LMB. Here is the link.
Sep 2nd, 2008 | Pakistan | No Comments
If you use twitter, you can follow iftar2008pak to get iftar (and later on, sehri) alerts for Lahore (and later on, other cities).
Right now, iftar2008pak will send out a tweet 15 minutes and zero minutes before iftar - due to various lags, it won’t be entirely accurate (but close enough), so please don’t blame me on judgement day if anything goes wrong 
Do add me up on twitter too, I’m ReallyVirtual there.
UPDATE: I’m a bit too busy to enter data for other cities like Karachi, Islamabad etc. but if anyone wants to help out (it should take a few minutes of your time), do get in touch and I will share the login details and steps to take.
Aug 18th, 2008 | Pakistan | 6 Comments
I often spend my early mornings on the porch, recounting the wires outside my house (twenty-four in total, including the electric, phone, cable and a couple of unidentifiable ones) while I take in my morning nicotine hit. My neighborhood is a closed ‘colony’ with no shops or commercial activity allowed inside its premises, so I was surprised to find a billboard advertising the “naturally thick relationship of Haleeb with Pakistan”, along with a Pakistani flag right outside my house on one of my favorite poles last week (true, the pole isn’t exactly pretty, but the billboard was uglier).
So, in the evening, when my son asked me if ‘our neighbors would think we have started selling milk and come to buy some’, I started thinking of my options to get rid of the hideous billboard.
- There was the pacifist approach - going to the colony committee (or whatever they call themselves) and asking them how and why they allowed these hideous billboards inside and how much money was involved.
- There was the vandalistic(?) approach - taking a can of black paint and painting them all black (ala The Rolling Stones)
- There was the extremist approach - taking a knife and slashing away the billboard.
- There was the activist approach - pasting these “You don’t need it” stickers from the Anti-Advertising Agency on all the billboards and taking a picture, and perhaps contacting the agency handling Haleeb campaigns
As I did not have a printer readily available, so I was inclined towards the one that let me use a knife. Before I could hack and slash however, the billboards were gone on the 16th of August.
I used to think that we do not have underground electricity in most of Lahore due to the high installation costs, but my new conspiracy theory is that the advertising agencies probably pay LESCO and PTCL to make sure they have plenty of poles available.
We should take a long and hard look at Brazil. Before we can solve a problem, first we have to identify it and acknowledge its existence. Only then can we come together and draw the lines to make our city/country a better place and improve our quality of life just a tiny bit.
Haleeb, by the way, is not getting any more of my business in the future.
