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.

Bangladesh is tagged as a “moderate” Muslim country, but how long can it hold this image? Even today the country witnessed rampages by Muslim fundamentalists in Dhaka. Anyone with a minimal IQ and sense of humour will laugh at the cartoon published on 17th September issue of Prothom Alo‘s supplement magazine Alpin, but the twisted minded fundamentalists has turned it upside down.

The cartoon depicts a conversation between a little boy with a cat on his lap and an elderly cleric:

Elderly cleric:  Hey kid, what’s your name?
Little boy:  My name is Babu
Elderly cleric:  You’re supposed to say Mohammad before a name. What’s your father’s name?
Little boy:  Mohammad Abu
Elderly cleric:  So what’s that on your lap?
Little boy:  Mohammad cat

The cleric teaches the boy to use “Mohammad” before a name and like any kid he follows it and says “Mohammad” before saying “cat”. Anyone will laugh at the mistake the boy makes, but the Saudi sponsored evil fundamentalists relate it to “insulting” Prophet Mohammad and compares it with the infamous Danish cartoon series.

Here’s a scanned copy of that cartoon, judge it yourself how this had “insulted” Islam and Prophet Muhammad:

The interim government has already lost popularity, and the way they handled the situation by arresting the cartoonist has made it worse. The only good side of the arrest is that the cartoonist is in a safe place now. The fundamentalists would have tear him apart if they could find him somewhere. So called followers of a religion which means “peace”!

August is gone, but this month will be remembered by Bangladeshi people for a long, long time.

Here’s a picture that I want to share with you all:

It’s said pictures speak a thousand words, and this one is a perfect example of it. It was published on The Daily Star last month, and to be honest I couldn’t stop laughing when I first saw it! The goddamn army got a good teaching! :p

Changing DNS entry for any TLD is done through the domain’s control panel, which takes nothing more than two minutes. However, if you want to do the same for your .BD domain, then you’ll have to go through lot of hassles, and moreover you’ll have to wait for more than a week! Here’s what my experience was like:

Day 1:  I went to BTTB’s Internet services office at Mogbazar, where they told to submit a formal application to the Division Engineer requesting him to change the DNS entries for my domain. They gave me a sheet of paper and showed me to a table to sit and write.

So I worte one and submitted it to the clerk. He told me that it’ll be taken care of the next morning.

Day 2:  I waited, hoping they are working on it.
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I couldn’t have been happier than to see Bangladesh beating India on the World Cup cricket! Go Tigers, Go!

Jitse ke? Bangladesh! Harse ke? India!