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Swiftly Moving On…

Published

shahid

on July 27, 2008

in Family, Friends and Ramblings

. 2 Comments

A couple of years ago the thought of a Saturday without my girls would have filled my guts with a gnawing emptiness. This weekend I have moved on enormously.

I didn’t rail pathetically at my ex like the powerless loser that I used to be. More to the point, I didn’t allow myself to waste the weekend moping about and pining fruitlessly for my girls either.

I watched Dark Night on Friday evening with my patient wife. Today I received my 16GB iPhone after multiple attempts with broken credit. Then my wife and I test drove a Fiat 500 around Hyde Park. It was funky, stylish, chic and cheeky. Long term readers of this blog might recall my beloved Smart Roadster; well this had a similar feel, albeit with greater refinement and more driver aids. We fell in love with it.

Then we popped into Selfridges for some Skippy peanut butter and some Oreos for the girls. Then back to the flat.

My friends came over and while I set up my iPhone they kept themselves busy with geeky computer stuff.

Later we had a lovely dinner prepared by my lovely wife and finally, we played four player split-screen Call of Duty 4 on the PS3. Beautiful.

I got to speak to my girls briefly because their mum took them to the Qadiani Cult Camp, an annual gathering of brainwashed Punjabis in some field in Surrey. No matter. I have had a beautiful weekend so far. AlHamdulillah.

(The best part is that I’m blogging this from my iPhone.)

George Galloway Speaks Truth To Middle England

Published

shahid

on July 14, 2008

in Iran

. 3 Comments

It terrifies me that the moron speaking to Galloway might be representative of ordinary folk in this country. It means that the government doesn’t have to do much at all.

Muslims on Top

Published

shahid

on June 23, 2008

in Ahmadiyya, Islam and Islamophobia

. 6 Comments

The top ten thinkers in the world today are Muslims!

In a poll conducted by Prospect, a British magazine, of a hundred of the world’s top thinkers, the top ten were Muslims. Alhamdulillah! This is especially surprising considering the poll was jointly hosted by Foreign Policy, a US publication. Of course, the value of such a poll is dubious when proven intellectual frauds like Ayaan Hirsi Ali make the top 20 ahead of he likes of Vaclav Havel, Niall Ferguson and even the spineless apostate Salman Rushdie.

Still, it’s great to see Muslims on top, ousting rabid right-wing wannabes like Christopher Hitchens - who once was left-wing, but having never outlived or outclassed Gore Vidal, resorted to the journalism of convenience and dipped his nib in the vitriolic ink of hypocrisy and hatred that represents the majority of the West’s Islamophobic media machinery today.

So here we have it, the top ten, led by a guy I’ve never heard of…

Fethullah Gulen
Muhammad Yunus
Yusuf al-Qaradawi
Orhan Pamuk
Aitzaz Ahsan
Amr Khaled
Abdolkarim Soroush
Tariq Ramadan
Mahmood Mamdani
Shirin Ebadi

Nice especially to see two of my favourite Islamic writers in that list. (I won’t tell you who they are). Two of that list are also Nobel laureates. Interesting things happening in Turkey these days and I don’t just mean their football team reaching the semi-finals of Euro 2008, though I must confess to having cheered loudly when they equalised against the prematurely euphoric Croatia.

Oh by the way, no Qadianis in the top 100. Funny that. I tried to think of a solitary Qadiani thinker. I failed. You see, they don’t think. Because if they did, they wouldn’t be Qadiani anymore now, would they?

Richard Keys on Al-Jazeera

Published

shahid

on June 21, 2008

in Football and Television

. 0 Comments

I thought I’d seen it all, but obviously not - Richard Keys, the Sky Sports presenter famous for talking to the camera when he should be talking to his guest, has been presenting Euro 2008 for Al Jazeera Sports!

A Muslim friend of mine recently told me that globalisation has already happened, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it and I should get used to the idea. I should add that he was quite happy about it too. He calls himself a citizen of the world. Richard Keys is clearly following in his footsteps. It’s just not what you expect to hear Keys to say though, is it? “This is Richard Keys for Al Jazeera Sport”.

Escape to the Past, Ignore Today!

Published

shahid

on June 20, 2008

in British Society, Music and Television

. 0 Comments

Politician Resigns on Principle

Published

shahid

on June 12, 2008

in British Society and War On Terror

. 7 Comments

Yes, it’s a stupid headline. Surely, politicians don’t have principles?

Some do. David Davies is one of them. I won’t repeat what he says so forcefully and eloquently. Instead, I will refer you to his statement to the press in the wake of his resignation from the House of Commons to force a by-election on the issue of detention of innocent citizens for 6 weeks without charge.

Do have a listen - and remember - there is a large, and more and more vocal broad-spectrum minority who just can’t stomach this nonsense anymore. Could we be pulling ourselves back from the precipice?

David Davis’ statement

Steve Jobs and the Cult of Apple

Published

shahid

on June 8, 2008

in Apple, Imperialism, Iraq, London, Propaganda, Technology and USA

. 3 Comments

stevenote

I admit it. I left one cult to join another. That’s right, much to the displeasure of one particular friend, who hates Apple like Dawkins hates religion, I love all things Mac and most things Apple.

Today is the closest Macophiles get to Christmas in our cult. Steve Jobs delivers a keynote speech (more popularly known as the “stevenote“) at 10am PST, today, the first day of the WWDC - a developers’ event in which Jobs typically announces several products, including at least one magical new product which Macophiles know as “One More Thing”.

We speculate, but we just don’t know. We think it might be a 3G iPhone with more memory, GPS and location aware software, delivered to Regent Street in padlocked-until-Monday boxes, but we really have no idea.

What I know is this: Whatever I hear in the stevenote, I will probably want it with an intensity of desire that isn’t matched by that for any other product. It is marketing genius and doesn’t happen by accident.

You mightn’t be aware of the excitement these events generate. Hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, conspire to bring down Twitter and other services that struggle to deliver blow-by-blow accounts from the hall in which Jobs delivers his stevenote. Queues form outside Apple stores days before the event. Speculation reaches fever pitch. It’s amazing.

This kind of fervour isn’t reserved for WWDC either. In a show of commitment that makes queues for new game consoles look no more impressive than the disgruntled throng of teenagers outside an Indian “two schoolchildren at a time” corner shop, I was staggered recently to see a queue that encircled the entire block outside the Apple Store in Regent Street for the release of Apple’s OS X Leopard release. It was the longest London queue I’d ever seen. The only time I’d seen more people stand in line for the same thing was when over a million of us walked through London against the war in Iraq that the Crusader Blair had already committed to going into on behalf of his master George Bush.

It is one of life’s continuing ironies that the country that shoots up copies of the Qur’an, gangrapes Muslim girls whilst torching their families and defends apartheid whilst shouting “democracy” Orwell-style can also inspire such love and passion. That’s empire for you.

Go Steve! You know your customers. And you know that practically anything you announce tonight, I will crave beyond reason.

Hosting: USA v UK

Published

shahid

on June 3, 2008

in Technology

. 0 Comments

I’m on Bluehost after experiencing a lot of downtime with Midphase.

Sadly, despite the excellent telephone customer service (they appear to know what they’re talking about), the server is not that great. All my sites are experiencing frequent slowdown. (Can you call slowdown frequent?)

I’m also having problems with memset, which is supposedly PC Pro’s readers’ choice. They are pretty reliable, but not particularly helpful (they can’t be, they’re not a fully managed service) and recently I’ve experienced really slow page loading.

You tell them about the 30KB/s download speed you’re getting trying to recover 5GB backups and they tell you to buy more bandwidth! You tell them you’re on unmetered 5Mbps and they tell you that it’s contended 40:1! You ask them if they are fully contended all the time and they say “we don’t have those figures, buy some more bandwidth!”

You tell them that their support is not great and they ask you to buy more support. You buy a support package and they can’t cover everything, so you pay extra for that too.

I can forgive all of the above (they’re a British company, they’re bound to be worse than an American company when it comes to the Internet) except the bandwidth throttling. Sometimes, pages with barely 100K on them were taking 7 seconds to load. Unacceptable.

Which brings me back to Bluehost. Can I really expect anything much at all from a provider I’m only paying £4 per month to? For that £4, I get unlimited hosts, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage and more SQL databases than I could use in a lifetime.

Won’t someone just take a bit more of my money and give me some peace of mind?