Rashid Saeed

What’s the most decisive part for every startup? Of course it’s the decision to start backed with intentions to stay persistent with your decision. As they say, the courage to start and willingness to continue brings the success. However it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Start-up decision could be one-time act of braveness and courage but what’s more important is to back your decision. Taking a brave step is not as difficult as it seems, how would the coward of people will commit suicide otherwise? All it takes is to put brakes to all your thoughts, stop thinking, close your eyes and jump! Be it the fire or the water you land in but that’s the ultimate solution for your problems at that specific time. No-one cares for what happens afterwards.

Once I had a chance to meet a suicide survivor, he regretted his decision. After a decent talk with him I realized that even the people who commit suicide start fighting for their lives once they’re caught in the trap. This is, perhaps, what makes suicide more of a coward end than a brave start-up. Hence every bold decision is a suicide where you burn the boats and jump in. Every decision that follows gets more and more important. What remains important is the willingness to continue in moments of despair and backing your decision.

You can get anything doesn’t mean that you can have everything. Life has so much on offer that none can have all of it. Even with unlimited resources, whether financial or social, our unlimited wants don’t seem like being fulfilled. Everything comes with a price tag, price that money alone can’t meet. Its price of emotions, price of resources, price of relations, price of other less important wishes; paid with sacrifice, paid with fears, paid with compromises and paid with money. Sometimes, even when we had all of resources to get something; we can’t get it. How more selfless human could be?

Wishes are like closed doors opening to new doors, each having numerous locks, each requiring number of keys to get opened and each one has keys(to next door) stored in it and nothing else. We keep on collecting keys, keep on opening the doors but never achieve anything, never get satisfied, never get complete. Our only satisfaction is to unlock the door, its sense of success that we get. But it doesn’t last longer, we get attracted to next closed door and yet again we begin collecting keys for the door. Keys are like resources required to un-lock the wishes.

It seems like life keeps on making us fool. It never takes hope away from us. We wish to savor sense of satisfaction beyond every unlocked door. We strive for every wish like it was our last but no-one is. It continues on, till we meet the final door, the death. Perhaps it’s the ultimate sense of completion that we’ve been looking for throughout our life. But how could it be? It’s completion of life, not ours. What have we been striving for? Our destination or that of life? Our completeness or that of life?

Our life and our self are different, entirely different things. Life keeps on driving our self in a way that we feel incomplete just because life’s incomplete. We keep running after life’s wishes and aim for satisfaction of our self, how could it be possible?

FaceBook has restored SocialMe after a ban of almost two weeks. SocialMe was earlier suspended by FaceBook for privacy issues assuring that the ban would be lifted once the application fixes the privacy issues followed with review and approval by FaceBook. I’m not sure what privacy issues it was violating but was really disappointed at its removal as it’s been most-used FaceBook app for me. I’m glad that it’s finally back, was curious to see what changes they made if either of those were “visible”.

As I tuned it on and clicked for first tag of the day, a little message popped in asking me to enter personal info followed by a privacy notice that you can see in the graphic below. I already was a member so this info wasn’t needed I thought. Intention here would certainly be to get a checked box on privacy agreement declaring user’s willingness to share the private information (s)he enters. So, that was just the formality work to me.

I couldn’t notice any other changes as yet. May be it was an explicit privacy notice to its users that FaceBook needed from SocialMe. There may be some hidden privacy concerns so I’m not challenging FaceBook’s decision to suspend the application ;).

Of many factors that contribute to evolving and changing nature of life, “a new day” terminology describes the change in more convincing and comprehensive way. May be it’s because we’ve patronized our life with day-routine, transactions are managed on day-today basis, we hope and strive to make the change turn for better at the end of the day. Simply, a day is a time span taken by change to complete one cycle. According to the time-cycle comprising of 24 hours that we’ve created, a day itself keeps changing all the time. But still, we’ve standardized a day as meter of the change by combining all the changes in 24 hours span in one general change called “day”. This is what leads us to declare each day as a new day. It’s more about the changes that go through all the day that make a day different. Although sometimes a change-span of one day seems much longer to describe a change as it seems to have happened in an eye-blink but still so fat, day-to-day routine has worked best for us.

Image Credits: time.com

There’s one thing about life, they say; that it goes on. To some people, it’s like a roller coaster ride which ends at the moment when you’ve understood what it actually is. Every life is a secret, even to the person living it. A secret that only death can open and at verge of death we come to understand what it was and what it could be. We’re born as a change and die for a change; both are for good. It proves the fact that change is always good. And since life’s good, it has to keep changing and a good living is when you keep up with the change.

I won’t name any of the four stages of life over here, the graphic says it all. One severe fact is that we, humans, are not meant to accept the change. As our life goes on, we seem to have strong wish to go back to previous stage of life. We have to face 4 deaths in our lifespan, one for each stage of life. And soon as we realize that a specific phase is about to end in our life, a wish for a possible reborn gets hold of us. Not because the change was unlikely or unnatural, not because we didn’t like the change but because we didn’t accept the change, because we thought we could live the past to its fullest once we get another chance.

Notice the people, who prevent the change, everyone does of course. As an example, people who dye their hair; they do it not because they didn’t like it getting gray but because they thought they had not yet utilized their black-hair-era. Its natural dissatisfaction that does us lot of good at times and equally bad some other time. We’re perhaps born to be dissatisfied, after all that is what brings all the innovation to this world. It’s strange phenomenon, we don’t accept the change because of dissatisfaction and our dissatisfaction itself is origin of the change. So the things like satisfaction and constant don’t exist here in this world but that doesn’t prevent us from pursuing those.

It’s all natural, isn’t it, the change itself, the reason for change i.e. aging, and unwillingness to accept the change. I wonder if we could ever change it but since I never could, I assume none can. We’ve no control over when we’re born, no control over when we die but have full control over everything in between. That’s only when we could accept what’s constant, i.e. dissatisfaction.

As per my week-long plans I logged into Facebook over the weekend. Before I could accomplish rest of the plans by running into my favorite Facebook apps, I noticed a significant change in my right navbar displaying my opted applications’ list. The app I was looking for wasn’t there, I went on to display the full list of apps yet not found, even made an on-page search in IE but to no use. It was among my favorite Facebook applications and I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t there in my apps list. How could it be? A risk of possible account hack ran across my mind. I changed my credentials and went on to applications list to add that application again. I couldn’t find it even there, then, I chose to go to application by typing in direct URL as http://apps.facebook.com/*appname*/. Soon as I hit “enter” following message appeared:

Never have thought of it as the one violating privacy policies, on contrary I was doubtful of couple of applications which have been adding significant to my email spam. I was disappointed of course but whatever being the reason we’d probably go with Facebook at that. Modern day social networking websites as Facebook are flooded of extensions and applications adding more value by introducing new features, introducing new ways for users to have fun and make best use of their time-waste activities.

Said application had got an interesting preposition of tagging users with keywords you’d think will fit on them. It was in a way similar to a famous activity on every other community on Orkut. That of “What do you think of the person below you”. It was a fun app as you could imagine however having fun at cost of privacy is not something everyone can afford. It was the first application whose removal I could witness and I am looking forward for few more apps getting removed from famous Social Network’s extension applications list.

I just received new promotion email from Microsoft with a . They always inspire me with glossy looks and crispy graphics, so easy on eyes. May be because emails are usually supposed to be stuffed with text all the time and hardly any rich media is involved so I always look forward for such emails. This time around it was even more exciting as it was about the all new MSN Toolbar. Here’s the screenshot of the email:

 

It didn’t take me more than a minute to click and download the toolbar. It took a while to install it, because, I suppose, because I didn’t have SilverLight installed and the toolbar is “Powered by SilverLight”. It was worth the wait though; I fell in love with the MSN Toolbar at first sight. It looked so glossy and pleasantly animated that it made the Google Toolbar look like the one from Stone Age. Have a look at the graphic below:

It makes Google toolbar so out of fashion, doesn’t it? And from all it looks it proves to be coming straight from Windows Live family. It fits so well with Windows Vista and IE and also with Windows Live services like Live Mail to make those services a pleasure to use.
Finally the weather feature looks so awesome, so useful and makes your day even brighter. It works in a way pretty similar to weather widget in Vista where user can change his desired weather location. Other toolbar functions, however, lack such customization. User can change the look and feel of the toolbar by changing colors scheme but there’s no feature like “custom buttons”. But it’s not much useful of features anyway.
Would’ve loved if they could introduce a website ranking meter like Google’s flagship PageRank to create some more fuss from nothing, for nothing, like folks at Google did! Keeping inventing Microsoft, you rock!

Let’s hope! It’s perhaps the most common and effective expression of optimism. So effective that; even a pessimist hopes, even we hope against the hope. No matter how severe and challenging the situation is, no matter how impossible it looks to get away from the darkness we’re caught into, the spark of hope always lightens in the pitch black darkness and guides our way to galaxies of possibilities. Although those possibilities are more near to what we call impossible but our hope denies the possibility of the impossible and convinces us to believe that “Impossible is only a word”. Even we may still not achieve that “impossible” but hope keeps us up to fight till the very end. The fight to acquire the impossible drives us away from the ruins of our loss and we define the moment as “well, we fought till the end”.

There’s a premier hope, the hope for life; that keeps us alive. And like with every battle of hope and impossibilities, we fight for life till the very end, knowing that we may not win the battle. However it doesn’t mean that we can never lose hope. Hope is a driving force and like every other force it needs energy. The moment we lose the source(s) of energy, all our hopes seem like fading away which eventually causes a full stop to the life for some people.

Since the hope itself is the essence of hope, a mere loss of hope demolishes other hopes and a new hope gives birth to numerous other hopes. There’s hardly any difference between a hopeless life and a lifeless hope. Both have no vision, no destination and energy. Hope requires as well as emits energy. Energy emitted from hope not only gives us many other hopes but also charges up the life and a charged up life is origin of hopes.

So live a charged up life and hope on guys!

In a life that never gives you a second chance for a “First Impression”, that constantly tells you to do the “first things first”, it becomes vital to do as many “First things” as you can and make ‘em count, always! First cry, first try, first smile, first touch, first impression, first kiss and .. first love, they all last longer, because they come just once. So virtually every first thing is the last thing as well.

It feels so different, so wonderfully different, to do something for the first time. And you can never get that first feeling again. First things are the happiest part of anyone’s life, some people take it literally and wish (and strive) to go back in time and re-live those happy moments again. But those can never be regained, can only be remembered, since there exists the single “first time”. Pleasure of living is in doing new things rather than repeating the first things you’ve done (and enjoyed doing) in life however it doesn’t take away the pleasure of remembering previous first things. Life’s at it best when you’re doing new things and remembering previous ones.

“Remember the first time we met?” This single line’s been my best tool to resolve any issue, no matter how severe, with any friend. It puts a big smile back on the face and takes us back in the time that can only be remembered.

Get on with it … think of new ways to live the life. Nature helps us with it by blessing us with the gift of aging. The chances of doing new things are always there if we keep up with your age. If we could feel, there’s something new in every new day. Its just that we don’t realize the first things while they’re occuring, mainly because we’re lost in a first thing that once happened for the first time. Not realizing is missing all the privilige the first things have on offer.

Concluding it all, first things are once-in-a-life joys that can only be remembered, can NOT be repeated. It doesn’t end here, every first thing becomes a unique memory, a pleasure for life. So, doing first things first in life helps you getting new memories from old first things every day. But as you enjoy old memories, never miss a new thing that could be a wonderful memory of tomorrow. While every missed first thing becomes a regret and when number of regrets exceeds number of memories … its suicide!

Hello world! Reminds me of my first java program

class World
{
public static void main(String args)
{
out.println(”Hello World!”);
}}

haha .. Compile once, run anywhere! Run now!!