Challenge

If you are here, you are at the right place.

$\sqrt(x^2) |x|$

its what we do

it's what we do that defines us.
someone told me that sometime ago.

Taking a hike

Life goes by even when we don't do anything. Not that we could spend our life without doing anything at all. We got to breathe, may be in a distant land they have discovered a way to live without the need of breathing, I wouldn't know for sure.

Life's been a mess as it usually is. There is nothing I or anyone could do to make it simple. The simplest decision in the life leads you in to more complicated aspects of life that you wanted to avoid in the first place. When you were studying, you would've traded everything you have to do in classes to be in a job. Now after being a job for year and half, I would gladly swap places with my life of two years ago.

Being demotivated in most of the time in life makes you hate your life. Not that you have ever succeeded in any aspect of life facing it head-on. There is a reason why I hate when people say "I know how that feels like",when you have never walked my path, never been through what I have gone through and never once felt the pain I feel every single second of the day; then how on world can I believe that you could empathize me.
-mode-

a true story that never happened

I meet her every day. I follow her each and every single day. I spend all day looking at her. Every chance I get to see her face is the moment I seek from the last.

That was ten years ago. We were studying together in secondary school then. She was the most beautiful girl in the class that every boy envied to be with. She was the center of the attention in each moment; at least for me, she was.

I was the geek of the class. I was the nerd who studies hard and excels in every subject but fails in everything else. Even lacks the courage to look in to her eyes when she rarely, albeit, unintentionally sees my face. 

It’s not that we never talked. We might have talked.  We studied together for next three years and had a close friendship. At least I felt she treats me special, maybe that’s stretching the truth to the breaking point.

The day I found out that she was not going to be with me in A’level is one of the many in the series of disappointments I had to endure in coming years. She left the school to seek and build a career. I studied hard in school while scraping for any news about her in every single way possible. 

The next in the series of disappointment is the last day of my school life. After five years of heartache and at last I picked up the courage to contact her. Of course she never remembered me. She never knew who I was. Exactly who am I to her is a question I wouldn't have any answer either.

Two years passed since our little non-existent and forced encounter. I had a dream. There was a girl so beautiful and lovely walking towards me. I did not dare blink my eyes even once for the fear she might vanish nor that I could even if I wanted to. She walked to me and kissed me passionately. With tear filled eyes she complained why I do not love her. Amidst sobs, she demanded why I do not fight for her as she always was mine to take away. I could not talk nor could I comfort her in way. I held on to her until she vanished in to darkness.

I woke up and spend whole night thinking about her. I have never even once heard anything about her for two years but only two days passed until I found out that she has married few days before. 

Two years passed since, today, I saw her; doting and cuddling a small girl. The girl was the spitting image of her. I did not seek her eyes for any recognition nor did I have any courage to do so.

Winning Competition in Dhiraagu style

We register in the competition by paying them.
We upload pictures by paying them.
We campaign by by paying them.
We vote our contents by paying them.

By some good luck one of us might win. of all few thousand peoples. and then get a prize.
But who is the real winner here:
Ladies and Gentlemen please put your hands together for ONE AND ONLY Dhiraagu.
The model Communication Service Provider in the World.

state of mind

 near suicidal social encounter

Maldives- Paving it's way to a failed democracy

Is this the reason why democracy is failing in Maldives?

When the Athenians invented democracy what they didn’t expect was that politicians would end up habitually lying to the electorate, telling them what they wanted to hear, ignoring awkward truths, making promises they knew they could never keep.

Actually, Plato did expect something like this, which is why he proposed a form of benign dictatorship by a highly educated caste of “guardians”. He thought democracy would lead to government by demagogues, rabble rousers and charlatans.

|Iain MacWhirter|

In reality nothing works in Maldives as it should be. Even text book economics do not work here. 

Cleaning PCs and Removing programs,

We all have this urge to reimage/format pc when it starts to get little buggy (or really buggy). But reimaging should be done as the last resort.

In a typical story, you reimage your pc, install few programs, uninstall few more, upgrade some or run a cracked old game.....after a little while your system starts get hiccups, slows down or even the almighty crashes.

Most of the time the culprits are, the leftovers from uninstalled  softwares, invalid registry values or temporary files created by running programs. The accumulated temp files slow down your system and (sometimes) eat up to 1gb of your hard drives.

Anyways to combat these issues, there are number of very good freewares available on the internet.

CCleaner

Ccleaner is a very good optimization and cleaning software. It cleans traces of online activities ranging from as internet history to autocomplete forms. It has inbuilt registry cleaner which removes unused and old registry entries. It also harbors a Windows cleaner which deals with recycle bin, recent docs, temp files and log files.

A very user friendly easy to use UI is another plus point for Ccleaner.

Download.

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

Revo Uninstaller

This small program has helped me in lot of sticky situations in the past.

This is an uninstaller program which removes unwanted programs installed on your pc even in times when it becomes impossible to remove certain programs from "Windows Add or Remove programs", Uninstaller has done wonders.

The up part of this program is that after a regular uninstall of a program, Uninstaller scans and removes additional unnecessary files, folders and registry keys which escapes the clutches of a regular unisntallation, thereby freeing the system from the traces of the uninstalled programs.

There is a professional and freeware version of the Revo Uninstaller

Download. (freeware)

http://www.revouninstaller.com/start_freeware_download.html

If you are using a pc (even a mac or linux system), a good antivirus program is a must. If not, you and your system are paving a way for a slow suicide death. But there are lots of antivirus programs available, we all keen to test a lost of them. But when it comes to remove and antivirus program its a really a different story and sometimes the real cause of your crashing/freezing pc.

 Eset Nod32 removal tool

Nobody but I know how much I like this antivirus software ( and other Eset products), but when it comes to uninstalling them they surely have disappointed me in the past (sometimes in a very cruel way.)

The trick here is to use, a free nod32removal tool from Eset,

Download.

http://www.nod32.nl/download/tool/nod32removal.exe

 

Kaspersky Removal tool

Kaspersky probably provides the best security solutions for pcs. But if you are to remove them from your system, they don't go down without a good fight.

These are free Kaspersky Removal tools provided by Kaspersky makers.

Download.

http://support.kaspersky.com/downloads/utils/kavremover.zip

http://support.kaspersky.com/downloads/utils/kavremover.exe

 

Norton (symantec) removal tool

I haven't actually used Norton/Symantec products, but I have seen lots of Maldivians are familiar with these antivirus programs.

The tool uninstalls all Norton 2003 and later products, Norton 360, and Norton SystemWorks 12.0.

Download.

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/removal_tools/Norton_Removal_Tool.exe

 Avast Uninstall Utility

Avast also provides a free antivirus program for single users. I have used Avast in the past and when it came the time to uninstall it from my pc, they like, Kaspersky, gave a good fight.

To use the Unistall Utility, first download the program, save it in your desktop. Reboot your system in safe mode (by pressing F8) and run the little program.

Download.

http://files.avast.com/files/eng/aswclear5.exe

 

AVG removal tools

Many people like AVG as it provides a free antivirus program.

But when you get fed up (or wants to remove it) try visiting this page and reading through the instructions. Trust me, it helps a lot.

link.

http://www.avg.com/us-en/download-tools

How to delete your facebook profile permanently?

I know for a fact that most of us will get so pissed at someone or even at facebook and wants to delete his/her facebook profile. But being the good guys they are, facebook doesn't make it easy for us to delete one's profile. To be honest they make us deactivate it rather than delete it.

But if you are really pissed off and wants to delete your facebook profile, they actually allow us to delete the profile. To delete your profile:

click the link (or copy and paste on address bar then press enter)
https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

And click on the Submit button. Your account will be permanently deleted alongwith your data in 14 days.
By the way, you should refrain your self from interacting with facebook  in any way for atleast 14 days to make this journey a success.

Good Luck

Political parties-The Maldivian way

Maldives, probably, is the country with the highest number of political parties per its peoples. Let's continue with a brief introduction.

The liberals

In the season of siphoning off unknown victims to the party memberships (since it eligible more state funding), they somehow have managed to induct a man who was jailed for life (and serving it for last 10 years). Unknown to him the liberals have forged his finger prints, signature, national ID card and a membership form making him a liberal. The victim when realized what had happened - sued then the current leader of the party for defamation and fraud. Only to his surprise there doesn’t exist a leader in the first place. The ‘leader’ appears only in public rallies, nationally televised interviews and presidential (also parliamentary) elections then he vanishes to thin air especially if summoned to a criminal court.

The democrats

The self-proclaimed inventors of Maldivian democracy had their first elected leader barricaded from Council meetings and then made him step-down from the leadership. Then in their next election they elected the man (the one that they marooned most) as their first democratically elected leader.

Unbeknownst to him becoming a leader is not enough to get the party ticket as presidential candidate. He still had to fight in another election in which he was beaten to pulps by the popular candidate (the prodigal son of the democracy).

To make it even worse the leader was effectively sacked by a council vote and made the vice-president as the de facto leader (since he sworn his absolute allegiance to the new presidential candidate) - which the vice president is enjoying even until now. The name of a new congress comes and goes like a breeze.

And I don’t want start on their parliamentary leader.  Just no.

The peoples

The irony of the peoples is that there were no peoples to begin with there was only a leader, The One destined to lead and rule-The One who speaks the absolute truth and The One who cannot falter. No one is above him, no one can question his authority. You can follow or fall down the pits.

After a major hiatus then an embarrassing defeat in election. He resigned from active politics but not before naming his successor. The successor is another one- The One who is destined to lead and rule. It doesn’t actually matter what people think (no, the peoples simply cannot think beyond The Wise One, can they?)

The guiders

The guiders never wanted to rule. They are selfless, humble and pious hermits calling for a better Maldives by laying out the right paths. Unfortunately they could not win any major positions in politics in that way.

They resorted to other means. The wealthy presidential candidate seemed very tempting- they rallied and pampered him like no other. But ministry portfolios are more appealing. Therefor it’s no biggie to abandon the former and go after the new toy. But they are still not above throwing tantrums time to time especially if they couldn’t have their own way with it.

They infamously blamed everyone for all wrongs in the Maldives stating that it’s the price Maldivians should pay not electing them to the rightful places. Yes, the rightful places!!

to be continued

I what? I stumbledupon??

Facebook has integrated itself in to our life so much that we spend almost of all of our online time logged on to Facebook. But Facebook has never been much of my thing, but its a necessity. Anyway my point is that apart from facebook, there are lots of other websites thats worth your online time.
One example is Stumbleupon

Wikipedia reads

StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate random Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.
Web pages are presented when the user clicks the "Stumble!" button on the browser's toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user's ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. Users can rate or choose not to rate any Web page with a thumbs up or thumbs down, and clicking the Stumble button resembles "channel-surfing" the Web. StumbleUpon also allows their users to indicate their interests from a list of nearly 500 topics to produce relevant content for the user.There is also one-click blogging built in as well.

These are couple of sites I stumpled in 5 mins. I bet you wouldn't find these sites even if you spend whole day logged on to facebook.
So lets start....

I know (assuming you are normal) that most of the people would hate maths. But you can always impress your friends by acting like a maths genius. Start from here
http://freestylemind.com/mental-math-tricks

Most of us would have lost touch with drawing, but if you still want start over, here is A-Z list of lessons
http://www.drawspace.com/

Don't want install softwares- use alternative to desktop softwares
here is good list to start with.
http://web.appstorm.net/roundups/15-web-alternatives-to-popular-desktop-software/

People still believe that, if you use Mac, you have to buy all the softwares. But thats not actually true,
http://hmatt.com/mac/macbookfreeware.html

Pencil Sculptures that would take you breath away.
http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/12-Cool-Colored-Pencil-Sculptures.html

Its been a while since you have installed windows 7 and now it seems a little leggy, you might need to check this
http://lifehacker.com/5388948/top-10-windows-7-booster-apps

And also I believe only ninjas we have are in Naruto Anime, and this cat too is supposedly a ninja
http://www.gifbin.com/bin/092009/1253886074_ninja-cat.gif

adios.

Let's start shall we?

Three years ago, I started blogging- but by midway through, the blog slowly started losing its identity.

This was started as strictly off politics blog, but writing about social and personal chronicles of people around me in couple of posts ridiculed some of my friends and created rifts between others. That created this mental argument -if I could not write about what I feel and think, what is the point of writing a blog? I could zip my mouth as well as tape my hands.

Couple of incidents above, political and civic changes that took place during last three years literally put me off blogging.

Then again whole point of blogging is to express oneself and call forth an argument hence create a productive discussion, there is no room to see if that offends anyone. It could offend people but that’s another discussion.

So let’s start again shall we?

take that, you slimey reporters!

Media, which were in an induced coma for most of the time for the last forty years, in Maldives is getting one blow after another. Right in to their very core.

During last few months, gangsters vandalised a local TV station, abused the staffs verbally and physically and going as far as death threats.

Same week, a personnel working in the print media was stabbed and was then hospitalised for critical injuries. The shocking truth is that both acts were committed in broad day light in front of public.

And now, no! Not from gangsters or dopies. The new attack instigates itself from the highest authoritative office in the executive branch of the country. Yes, from the office of the president.

Office is overseen by none other than the president himself. If I do not suffer from amnesia, he is the same president who boasts being a former political prisoner, a former journalist, calls for the release of Burmese opposition leader in speeches and going as far as naming Maldives as a sanctuary for dissident journalists from Burma.

Unfortunately; it seems for local journalists Maldives is far from being a sanctuary. When the state owned TV station alleged Nasheed's government of leaning towards nepotism and failed system, with factual data to support the claim (believe me this is only the program that was unbiased since the last presidential election.) The president reciprocates reporter's effort by launching an investigation on him for 'invoking hatred' towards the government.

That’s how the “champion of democracy and freedom” should act or what “obama of Asia” could have done. People like me would never understand and that’s why his Press Secretary has to translate his Dhivehi quotes to Dhivehi for us.

Related articles
1. Aliflaamgaaf- Switching from nepotism to spoils system
2. HaveeruDaily- News Article [Dhivehi]

now i know how he got the woods and votes.

Skimming the Haveeru News, I stumbled on this piece of news.

The Mp for Komandoo constituency, Mr Hussain Waheed is ordered by the court to pay $478,745. Apparently he has bought 60% Satin Wood Pvt Ltd and ceased paying the original owner for some undisclosed reasons.

After reading this very article, a small incident happen to cross my mind.

Nearly seven years ago, I visited some of my relatives in Sh atoll. Back then Mr Waheed was the newly elected parliamentarian for the atoll, who in turn kicked the former parliamentarian named Ahmed Abdulla out of the seat (which Ahmed Abdulla enjoyed for very comfortable three consecutive terms with out uttering a single word in the parliament). I, for one, was very impressed that the people has started showing signs of being politically 'literate'.

When I had the chance to mingle with the folks of the island and when the topic naturally fell to politics. I asked this middle aged man, what made them vote for Hussain Waheed instead of Ahmed Abdulla.
The answer was simple and logical -at least for them. But it did brush away my idea of - people being 'literate' in politics or exercising their right of voting.

The man without much thinking or whatsoever told me that Ibrahim Waheed provided woods(and some construction materials for the island school). The reason was enough for them to vote him.

And now i know where and how he got the woods, island folk's vote and mrf 62000 per month to enjoy.

long gone

long gone are the days

-mode-

screw you spammers

Damn these spammers, you are really getting on my nerves.

Happy Eid!

Another Eid is on its way. This time, to save my self from a needless torture on the boat for 13hrs, i have decided to stay in Male'. I mean last time i went to kulhudhuffushi, i paid 250/- for ticket, but had to sleep in the "wheel house" and on the deck with bonus shower of rain. So I have decided to go to kulhudhuffushi when this hype is over.

I miss my bro;
He and I used to get DVDs from friends during Eid and watch movies whole day untill that it gets our mom's blood boiling, she then kicks us out see the Eid celebrations. We both roam around the island come back with in an hour to watch movies again. Thats better than seeing crossdressers and self proclaimed bands trying to show off.

I hope my bro, end his "self imposed solitary confinement", go out of his room and enjoy his holidays.

Love you buddy.

screw your plans. be with me!

microblogging! and now microvideoblogging!

Maybe the micro-blogging can never fully replace the normal blogging, but that never stop new innovative thinking to be forged thus creating brand new platforms. it doesn't.

Maldivians, at least technologically literate Maldivians, are aware of Twitter, a micro-blogging service which allows the user to post 140 character status updates and read updates from other users. Quite addictive actually. :)

Now there is a another micro-blogging service known as Robo.to, which allows users to publish 4-second videos that act as visual status updates. According to NewYorkTimes.

" In addition to microvideos, which can be uploaded from a webcam or a mobile phone camera and pushed out via Facebook and Twitter with a few short lines of text, Robo.to is meant to be a digital calling card online or a hub that houses information about an individual’s identity on the web. [Read more]

So would this be as addictive as Twitter/Facebook? We will have to wait and see.