Book Sequels Suck

Sohaib Athar

I stopped watching TV more than 5 years ago, and never had a regret. A combination of DVDs, RSS Feeds and books gives a much better value-for-money (assuming time is money) than surfing 100+ cable channels, and (mostly) no ads.

I have one complaint though, the life cycle of a good scifi series or saga is much longer than a TV show. The Dark Tower (Stephen King) finally ended (in a recursion) last year, and Harry Potter will finally end this month. That still leaves me waiting for

    A Song of Ice and Fire (George R. R. Martin)
    Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan)
    Ender (Orson Scott Card)
    Alvin Maker (Orson Scott Card)
    Harry Potter (J. K. Rowling)
    Miles Vorkosigan (Lois McMaster Bujold)
    Saga of Seven Suns (Kevin J. Anderson)

Now, when I pick up a (fiction) book, I make sure it is either a stand-alone novel, or a complete set of novels. I installed the Facebook Visual Bookshelf application last week, and wasted an hour trying to remember the books I read last year. Shelfari and LibraryThing are other similar Web2.0 sites that I have to check out after I finish Robert J. Sawyer’s award-winning novels. With the spare time that I have these days, I’m averaging about a book per two days, so if you have any recommendations, do let me know : )

Burqa – An Escape from the Heat

ReallyVirtual

I don’t understand why everyone in Lahore is talking about Burqa today, did I miss something? I personally think burqas are cool, and was glad to find out that I am not the only one.

Here’s my own list (in no particular order) of why burqa (or is it burka?) should become the blue jeans of Pakistani men:

  • ‘Escape’ from the ‘heat’ – A burqa is the ideal protection from the record-breaking heat wave in this year.
  • Time savers – Burqas can be a great time saver. Saving a minute each morning to chose what to wear will add up. Remember Johnny Bravo? A change of burqa takes only a few seconds as well.
  • Look Dangerous – A burqa-clad man is just a few steps away from looking like a ninja. ninja…burqa… they even rhyme!
  • Equality – When men start wearing burqas, they’ll be sending out the message that they have the same rights as women in the society… its about time someone raised that issue, why should we be the suppressed ones?!
  • Focus – A Burqa allows you to focus on the task ahead, and cuts down the noise in the environment. People like me (who sit in front of the PC all day) can proudly wear burqas like the helms that the roman warriors wore centuries ago.
  • Filter – With the prevalent pollution in Pakistan, a burqa is a perfect filter from the dust and the cosmic rays.
  • Art form – Burqas can be also used as an art form, imagine a stadium full of burqas of all colors, the possibilities are endless.
  • Cultural Identity – We can defy the west and define our own culture by wearing a burqa instead of jeans and T-Shirt.
  • Expression – A burqa has a lot more room than a T-Shirt, messages and images that won’t fit on a T-Shirt (unless you are an XXL) can fit on a burqa!

Burqa is for everyone:

  • For the soldiers – What could be more fearsome than a dangerous (see above) looking armored-burqa clad soldier?
  • For the suicide bombers – More explosives per cubic centimeter.
  • For the teenagers – who are not allowed to mingle with the girls at their colleges/universities, and are afraid of being seen when dating.
  • For the men – See above
  • For the women – If everyone else will be wearing them, they might as well.

A nation-wide adoption of burqa as our national dress will also have a positive effect on our economy, as mass production of burqas would be a big boon to our textile industry. Hardly anyone wears a shalwar kameez anymore, maybe a burqa can be more popular and help unite the nation.

I’ll keep editing this post as more benefits of a burqa come to my mind. Feel free to contribute to the list. And stop talking about burqas please!

PS. I did search google for images to prove my point, but sadly most of them were not safe/offensive, so click at your own risk.

Fixing Sociable plugin implode error with WordPress 2.2

ReallyVirtual

I’ve been trying to find some spare time to properly set up this blog before actually blogging. So far things haven’t gone as smoothly as I would have liked.

First, I started getting the same 404s after upgrading to WordPress 2.2. After a few email exchanges with webhost4life, they upgraded my server to PHP5 and that seems to have solved the problem.

Then I had to select the plugins to run here, and each plugin came with its own bugs and problems. For tagging support, I’ve switched from Jerome’s Keyword plugin to the Simple Tagging plugin, as it has more features, and more importantly, because the next WordPress version (2.3) is going to have a native tagging support, and the alpha release has import functionality implemented for Simple Tagging (I’m not sure about other tagging plugins), so the upgraded should be relatively easy.

Sociable, the social bookmarking plugin, gave me a tough time. On installation, its Options screen was generating a bunch of php ‘implode’ errors, with a messed up configuration screen. Though I’m not a php guy (C++/Java are my main tools), after looking at the code, one of the errors seemed to have to do with its auto-update functionality. Disabling the auto-update functionality by creating a new empty body for the function by change the line

function sociable_update_version() {

to

function sociable_update_version() { }

function sociable_update_version_original() {

seems to work. After setting the options to default, I was able to drag/drop/enable/disable the various buttons, and though the save button still generated the php errors, the blog post pages reflected my changes.

But… (why is there always a but) it broke the theme that I had finally settled on and tweaked for the blog, and all other themes were working fine.

I think I’ll let it go for now and move on to more important things, like blogging for example.