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. It will also no doubt have some very cool apps available including games, online bingo, videos and other things like that. I don’t need too many apps but it is always nice to have a few things to play around with.

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.

Larger version of this picture is available here. If you want the original file without the text (3500 pixels width, 4 MB in size), then please let me know.

This picture was taken from this year’s Plantation Fair where I went on Saturday. You can check out rest of the of flower and cactus pictures here.

Names will be collected and placed onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft for its historic mission bringing NASA back to the moon. You will also receive a certificate showcasing your support of the mission.

The deadline for participation is July 25, 2008, hurry!

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is the first mission in NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration, a plan to return to the moon and then to travel to Mars and beyond. LRO will launch no earlier than November 24, 2008, with the objectives to finding safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology.

Long hair became my identity over the last two years. People used to recognise me as the computer guy with long hair. There were people who thought me as a poet, writer, singer, artist, photographer, and looked up at me with respect, while some gave weird looks and passed strange comments.

Anyhow, the big news is that my long hair is gone — I got a haircut last week.

Now I do not have to tie my hair, keep an extra rubber band on the pocket, worry about drying the hair after a shower, use the straightening iron, or spend money on rebonding at a regular interval. And oh, I can use the same bottle of shampoo for a longer period of time now!

I’ll surely miss my ponytail, but it was a decision worth taken.