Let Us [C]ook

Absar’s mousse misadventure kinda motivated me to cook something for dinner tonight. It’s always a risky business at a full house dinner when your item is supposed to form a part of the main course (we usually have one course dinners anyways ); the risk being that everyone is relying on you and your cooking skills for food!!

I’m not a neophyte in kitchen activities but that doesn’t mean I’m a pro either. I decided to go for Boneless Chicken Handi which I saw some time back on some cooking show in Pakistan at the height of my boredom.

Fortunately, I guess everything turned out to be well. The whole thing was wiped out and everyone loved it. I always look for the comments of my dad, who I must add is by far the best cook in our family. Here is a snapshot of what the end product looked like.

I wish I had those little handis to serve these in, but I don’t know if they have those here in Abu Dhabi.  I’ll keep a note of that next time, but for now, this has been a great finger-licking success!

Note: The title is indeed inspired by Yashwant Kanetkar’s Let Us C

Bunking Classes…

When was the first time I bunked a class? I thought for this about a good ten minutes. The answer wasn’t easy and went back to all my childhood days. As far as I recalled, it was in grade 3!! I can’t believe this!

My first ever bunk (as best as my memory serves) was a karate class in grade 3. I also remember the reasons pretty well. It was the karate instructor who thought he was playing with people of his own age while the kids were atleast three times younger than him. I remember him hitting a fellow classmate badly (but that kid was strong!) and I fled in the next class and ended up playing soccer. I had no idea that would be the first of many bunks in the coming years.

If I plot a a graph of the number of bunks versus the time of academic year, the maximum activity is by far concentrated in the years 2005-2007, the university days. Not only I sacrificed a P on the attendance roll but also risked falling below the minimum attendance level benchmark. I was fortunate enough to have people who fell well below that mark but still managed to squeeze their way out which gave me enough courage to take that risk. I was also fortunate of being in the ‘good books’ of most teachers and instructors which helped a lot. I could always argue that my academic performance despite being absent was never affected.

I also received an honor at my postal address warning that the current attendance situation may lead to my withdrawal from the college They always used that at NUST to threaten the parents!

Back to the bunking subject..Why does someone bunk a class? I had many reasons (not in any particular order):

1) Potential boring lecture
2) Pathetic teacher
3) Awesome weather
4) Pending assignments
5) Test prep (for the next class!)
6) Project work
7) Sleep, hunger or need for some caffeine Cricket match (sometimes)

And we usually ended up at Mc Donald’s (stadium road) after bunking. (yeah, we prepared there for tests and exams and did our assigns there)

I actually believe that bunking classes can enhance the performance of a student if he/she is really interested in studying. If not interested, then sitting in a class idly does no good either. A serious student will study his books more carefully after missing a class and be less dependent on the teachers.

On the same note, the minimum attendance limits should therefore not be placed because if a student is capable of missing classes and still able to do well in his exams then why force him to attend classes? Can someone please agree?!!!!

Note: ‘Bunking’ and ‘not attending’ may have been used interchangeably above – I’m not reviewing it!

My First WordPress Plugin! [Comment Replacement]

Last night someone posted a profane comment and I was forced to replace that comment with a warning that the comment has been removed for so and so reasons.

A friend (Awais Karim) then commented asking whether I modified that original comment or was it a feature of the blog? With an empty stomach and a lot of time for Iftar, an idea of automating this process with the help of a WP plugin rushed through my mind. And believe me, without knowing much of PHP, I actually DID manage to create this plugin (within fifteen minutes) which I am proud to announce

So what does the plugin do? An array of unwanted words is maintained in a list. If the comment contains any of those words, the WHOLE comment is replaced by text of the webmaster’s choice.

For example, the list contains the following words: shit, sex, bitch

Someone comments: shoaib akhtar is a son of a bitch

Comment that appears on site: Shut Up!!

It’s not very intelligent, but hey I made it myself!!! A very useful video tutorial of making your own plugins is here.

I will put it up tonight (after eating something!!) together with a guide of how to use it.

BTW, I don’t know if such plugin is already available. Also, I haven’t named it yet [abhi abhi paida hua hai] so all suggestions are welcome!

Set Firefox 3 to Launch Gmail for mailto Links

How many times have you cursed Outlook for opening up when you click on an e-mail address linked on a website? In fact, I began to wonder if those mailto links were of any use if someone doesn’t use an e-mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird??

But the problem is solved now! Clicking on those mailto’s will open up your Gmail with the intended address in the To field in your Firefox 3.

Here is the step-by-step guide of how to do it:

1) Enter about:config in the address bar and hit the enter key. Scroll down to find gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost and double click on it to set it to true.

2) Enter the following in your address bar:

javascript:navigator.registerProtocolHandler(‘mailto’,'https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s’,'Gmail’);

You will now be prompted to add Gmail as an application to mailto links, which you should add by clicking the button.

3) Now go to Tools->Options->Applications. Scroll down to find mailto and using the dropdown list select Use Gmail and hit OK.

4) That’s it, now repeat step 1 to set gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost back to false.

Yes, This Is You!

Gmail is known for many of its top features including labels, filters and search. But did you know that you have an unlimited number of aliases in addition to your primary address? Consider the following:

If your email address is username@gmail.com, then user.name@gmail.com, us.er.n.ame@gmail.com, u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com, etc. are all yours as well. The number of dots can be unlimited, the system just strips out the dots so the whole string of text (with any number of dots) belongs to you.  See the image below.

That’s not all, all those usernames are equally valid on the domain googlemail.com i.e. gmail.com and googlemail.com can be used interchangeably. Why? Read here. The image below shows a test mail.

It’s not yet over! Any thing can be appended to your primary username after a plus sign as well. For example, username+school@gmail.com, username+work@gmail.com, etc. and filters can be made to apply different labels to these and route them to different folders.

With all this and more, how can we not love Google?!!

Read the links below for more info:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-awesome-gmail-tip-you-dont-know-about-seriously/

http://somegirlwitha.com/2008/04/17/the-dot-plus-and-googlemail-gmail-hacks/

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=10313#