MyLifeDump

I recently went to Dubai for a one month vacation and had the opportunity to see the world’s sixth largest and U.A.E’s biggest mosque, Sheikh Zayed Mosque. The mosque is located in Abu Dhabi which is approximately 2 hours from Dubai.

Here are some of the pictures:

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I haven’t updated my blog for quite sometime because I am currently vacationing in Dubai. My Mom, Dad and Brother are residents of Dubai and I am visiting them after four years, first time after I got married.

Dubai has changed a lot and I feel more like a tourist even though I lived in Dubai for 19 years before moving to California. I have seen quite a few wonderful sights in Dubai and I plan to share it as soon as I get back.

I really miss blogging but I have decided to really take a break from everything and concentrate on having FUN. I will be going back to California end of June.

Stay tuned for all the fun things that I will be sharing with you once I get back

Like most people, you don’t think about death everyday. If you don’t think about death then it would be a wrong to say that you know what will happen to your social networking profile when you die. I personally don’t care about any other website besides Facebook where my deeds are depicted in most personal fashion imaginable.

The question I sometimes ask myself is what will happen to my Facebook profile when I die? I decided to search for the answer in Facebook’s Terms and Conditions but couldn’t find anything. I then searched for the term “Death” on the Facebook Help page and this is what I found:

Please report this information here so that we can memorialize this person’s account. Memorializing the account removes certain more sensitive information like status updates and restricts profile access to confirmed friends only. Please note that in order to protect the privacy of the deceased user, we cannot provide login information for the account to anyone. We do honor requests from close family members to close the account completely.

To report a death of a family or a friend, fill out a simple form and Facebook will memorialize the account. You might want to put this in your will or something, if you have one.

In my view memorializing an account might not get the job done for the family of deceased, specially if the profile picture depicts a person with a middle finger or with a vodka bottle. A friend of mine lost his nephew, 18 years old, in a car accident couple years ago. The nephew, being a teenager, had a very indecent picture on his profile and people were leaving comments saying how bad they felt on his death. It all seemed like a joke because on one hand there was a picture of someone not in their best behavior and on the other hand people who were deeply hurt were sharing their emotions.

It is a good thing that Facebook honors requests from close family members to close the account completely, that’s the option I would personally opt for. Maybe I should just use this post to make it clear that “I would appreciate if my profile from Facebook is deleted as soon as I pass away.”
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4th Annual Urdu Culture Show at UC Berkeley was held on May 3rd, 2009. After being disappointed last year, I was expecting improvement this year and I am glad to say that this year’s show was ten times better than the last one.

The usual line up of acts included a live song, poem recitation, ghazal performance, funny story, Qawwali, funny news segment Khabarnama, bhangra dance, and a scripted Mushaira. Guest speakers included, UC Berkeley Urdu Professor Aftab Ahmed, Ashraf Habibullah and Naveeda Ellahie (cookie aunty).

There is a special talent that is bubbling on the UC Berkeley campus, her name is Farhat Desai. She deserves a special nod for her live song performance Yeh Mera Prem Patra by none other than Mohammad Rafi. She performed without any background music and was excellent, I can’t even imagine what she might have achieved with music.

That said, everyone else did an excellent job and most performers showed that they have good grasp of the Urdu language. Guest speakers were very entertaining and fun to listen to, specially Mr. Ashraf Habibullah who is quite talented when it comes to word delivery.

The only thing I believe that needs work is the hosting part of the show. Like last year, hosting was average and could have been better. Besides being fluent in Urdu, hosts should be lively and set the mood for the acts by incorporating various techniques. Rushing to announce the next act was a normal thing at this year’s show and that really didn’t sit well with most people, including me. Next year maybe they should not have any hosts if they can’t find people who can speak proper Urdu, that will be very odd but at least less embarrassing.

Pakistani Student Association or PAKSA has shown that with every show they strive to improve and learn from past mistakes. It was evident in this year’s show that they tried to do things differently and approached the entire show with seriousness and positive attitude. I wish them all the best in 2010 and really hope they leave the politics aside and develop a better hosting routine.

Twitter is now more popular than ever. Anita Hamilton at TIME magazine said “While some people call it microblogging or moblogging, I like to think of Twitter simply as blogging for regular people.” She said that in 2007 when Twitter was a baby… it is now microblogging powerhouse.

Bloggers shouldn’t be disappointed because even though you might like to write more detailed posts and not be limited to 140 characters, you can still use Twitter to promote your blogs and keep in touch with your readers.

Here are 5 Ways To Use Twitter To Promote Your Personal Blog

1) Choose a reasonable twitter username that reflects your personality or your blog. If your blog doesn’t have a set topic, which is the case with most personal blogs, go with any name of your liking. It is recommended you use your real name if you are comfortable or a nickname. Avoid numbers, make it simple and easy to remember.

2) Create a background image for your twitter profile page and have the name of your blog in a prominent place or tiled through out the page. Make sure you have a nice left column that has your picture and a small introduction about you or your blog.

3) Every time you publish a post on your blog, send a tweet to all your followers. Use a URL shortner to make long ugly links smaller and less scary to click.

4) Use Twitter search function to find other bloggers and tweeters who have similar interests as you and start following them. This is also useful if you want to generate topic for your next blog post.

5) Instead of just talking about yourself and your blog, try to make conversation with other people. It is as easy as replying to a Tweet that you consider useful or have something to say about. That’s how you will make friends and get more followers.

The more followers you have, the more exposure your blog will get. Time for some shameless promotion. Follow me on Twitter