Before – You take my breath away.
After – I feel like I’m suffocating.

Before – Twice a night.
After – Twice a month.

Before – She loves the way I take control of a situation.
After – She called me a controlling, manipulative, egomaniac.

Before – He makes me feel like a million dollars.
After – If I had a dime for every stupid thing he’s done.

Before – Don’t stop.
After – Don’t start.

Before – The sound of music.
After – The sound of silence.

Before – Is that all you are eating?
After – Maybe you should just have a salad, honey.
(more…)

By Edgar Albert Guest

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit – rest if you must,
But don’t you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns.
As everyone of us sometimes learns.
And many a fellow turns about when he might have won had he stuck it out.
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow – you may succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than it seems to a faint and faltering man;
Often the struggler has given up when he might have captured the victor’s cup;
And he learned too late when the night came down,
How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out – the silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And when you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar;
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit – it’s when things seem worst,
You must not quit.

Edgar Albert Guest (August 20, 1881, Birmingham, England – August 5, 1959, Michigan, USA) (also known as Eddie Guest) was a prolific American poet who was popular in the first half of the 20th century and became known as the People’s Poet.

I’ve been using Flickr for one and half year, and right now I’m completely hooked to it. I had a hard time to get rid of my Facebook addiction, but seems like giving up Flickr wouldn’t be easy. But hey, I don’t need to do so, cause it’s helping me to improve my photography skills and acquire more knowledge on photo-taking techniques by seeing the works for renowned photographers from around the world. So yay for me!

Here’s my account stats:

• 370 pictures;
• 23 sets;
• 223 contacts; and
• 137 favorites.

You can also see my huge list of tags here.

All the photographs on my account are under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which means you can legally share, use, and modify them for non-commercial purpose as long as you put my name on the credit line and release them under the same license. If you want to use any of my pictures commercially, or looking forward for the high resolution version, then please get in touch with me.

Long love Flickr!

I was lying on my bed talking to a friend on the phone, and I suddenly felt that the bed was shaking. Within 3 seconds, it stopped. My first impression was that a cat got under my bed and it was shaking it, but then I realised that it’s impossible as the bed is way too heavy. (Plus there was no cat, I checked!)

I quickly asked my friends on IRC, and they said they felt it too.

So it was an earthquake for real! Quake in Dhaka at 12:51 AM!

I tweeted instantly. Within minutes, tweets poured in from my friends, confirming that it indeed was a quake.

At 2:15 AM, BDnews24 reported that the Meteorology office recorded the quake to be of 5.6 magnitude on the Richter scale. An hour later, AFP reported that US Geological Survey pinpointed the epicenter 115 kilometers (70 miles) north of Dhaka in Mymensingh, at a depth of 5.2 kilometers.

No news of significant damages till now, except that a Dhaka University student broke his leg jumping off a floor of his dormitory panicked by the quake. What a dumb prick!

Update: This post was mentioned on Global Voices on July 29th.

I needed a second set for myself, so bought a cheap one — Samsung E250. It comes with all the stuff that I need, such as Bluetooth, EDGE, MP3/AAC support, Java, FM radio, and most importantly good looks… well, it has got it all.

It has a sucky camera (VGA, 640×480 pixels), but I’ll never need to use it. My Sony Ericsson W810i comes with a very good camera but I’ve hardly taken any shots with it.

E250 is very light-weight (80 grams) and has interesting features such as mobile tracker, voicemail, offline mode, and more. Not bad for a $100 phone!

Easter eggs are fun, are they? Here are two easter eggs that you can find on your favourite browser, FF.

Type about:robots on Firefox 3.0 to get this easter egg:

Type about:mozilla to get this one:

Here, Mammon is Internet Explorer, which slept for the 5 years between releases. The beast reborn refers to Firefox, which gained supporters who self-organized through Spread Firefox, and undertook publicity for the browser, taking out an advertisement in The New York Times and making a crop circle shaped like the Firefox logo. The cunning of foxes is a direct reference to Firefox’s name. The new world refers to modern, standards based dynamic websites and open source applications. The latter half of the passage links to the Mozilla Manifesto and the about:Mozilla newsletter, and describes Internet Explorer as a follower. Additionally, this quote from the 10th edition, an allusion to the Mozilla Foundation’s 10th anniversary during the Firefox 3 development cycle.