International Conference on "Home-grown Terrorism Threat" in Germany

I was forwarded a link to the mentioned conference to be held in my city. It was a pleasant surprise that the conference was taking place here and that the entrance was free. So I booked a place in it and waited for it. Sadly, the conference coincided with Eid-ul-Fitr festival and so I couldn't attend all of the sessions, but those I did attend were very interesting and informative. Conference was in English and attracted speakers from all of Europe, USA and Australia. There were some lectures, debates, panel discussions and workshops.

Travelling business class with Qatar Air

I took membership of the Qatar Air Frequent Flyer program. I flew with Qatar last time. So I had gathered points. This time when I flew to Lahore, I had gathered the required 10,000 points to upgrade half of my return flight to business class (from Lahore to Doha), although this cost an extra 25 Euros. Well, the upgrade was worth it. First up, I was spared the check-in queues at Lahore airport and was checked-in at business counter. Then I was given a voucher, with which I discovered that there is a VIP Lounge at Lahore airport with free snacks, drinks and tea. There were PCs with Internet and a large TV. They informed the guests when their boarding started. I was also boarded prior to the queue. The seat in the plane was very large and had a multi-function remote control which provided a massage and could be fully to a bed. The meal was served in clay crockery and there was a large variety of drinks. The personal TV screen was also big. The blankets were thicker and they also provided eye-cover etc. There were disposable tooth-brushes and tooth-pastes in the washroom, though the wash-room size was same as Economy :)

Towards the end of flight, the head-hostess went to all the guests individually and asked about the journey. Then the pilot went to each passenger and chatted about their destination and invited to travel with them again. To me he informed of the Berlin Film Festival. From Doha to Munich, I traveled in the usual Economy class. However, only this time, the Economy cabin seemed too small and the meal too less presentable :)

I then realized, how just a few hours of travel in a different class made me very uncomfortable in the regular class people; what kind of mind-set would it be producing in the people who regularly enjoy that upper-class facilities, and some of them claim to represent us.

First snowfall of Winter in Germany - too much snow

Last Thursday, it started snowing for the first time in this winter. Overnight there fell a lot of snow. On Friday morning, everything was covered in snow. The city's snow cleaning services were working and clearing snow from roads and footpaths.

But Friday afternoon, it started to snow again. Till the evening it got very bad, so that the city had to restrict its bus system. All buses going on hills were stopped. My city lies on hills, that means many destinations were not reachable through public transport. My university has many campuses around the city. The campus where I work is on a hill. So no bus was coming to my campus as well. A colleague was nice enough to give me a ride home in his car, otherwise I would have to walk down the hill and up another hill to my home.

It has been snowing almost everyday since then and the little snow that melts during the day is replaced by new snow overnight.

Won a robotic competition in Germany

On 2nd October, one day before the national day of Germany when East and West Germany got united, we participated in a robotics competition for which we were preparing since last year. The competition was organized by a renowned German company building laser sensors and other stuff, called SICK. The competition is thus called SICK Robot Day. It comprised of a circular area with numbers drawn on big posters and hanged along the boundary of the arena. Within the arena, multiple obstacles are placed at different places on the ground. Each robot has to recognize the numbers and drive to them in sequence while avoiding the obstacles.

There were 12 German and 4 European teams. Our robot (called "Attempto") completed the whole task in 3 minutes. Our robot hit some obstacles, so including the penalties, our task time was 3:18 minutes. Each robot was given a time of 10 minutes to complete the task. The robot at second position completed the task in over 6 minutes. No other robot was able to correctly complete the task. One other robot completed the task, but it misjudged one of the numbers. Here is the video of the successful run of our robot:

Slow Tsunami - worst floods in Pakistan

These are the most destructive floods in Pakistan's history. After the flood, the real destruction starts, as the crops are destroyed, livestock killed, roads and bridges dismantled, houses unusable, and worse, diseases spreading from standing water.

United Nations is repeating calls for aid. Please help.

Google Blogaward for my Blog

Since a couple of days I was receiving comments on my blog congratulating me for winning the Pakistani blog award. I checked the section of the Google+CIO award website containing my blog, but there was no announcement there, and my blog still had less votes than some others. So I thought of these comments as spam.

But today I received congrats on an email forum of old students of FAST-NUCES, which made me very curious. I went to the home page of the award website and there I found the announcement. It was a pleasant surprise for me since I entered my blog very late in the competition and thus it had received less votes.
http://blogawards.pk/

It was a beautiful 5-hour event and I missed it :(

Country Manager of Intel Pakistan (Ashar Zaidi) was the judge of my category, and hear his flattering comments about it:



They even made an animation about my Blog Award on youtube :)




More details of the event:
http://ciopakistan.com/2010/05/1st-annual-pakistan-blog-awards-new-media-unconference-2010/ 
 

Solution of Pakistan's administrative problems?

Recently, there has been much talk in media of increasing the number of provinces of Pakistan to solve the many administrative problems. Both politicians and TV anchors have repeated this plea. Now that the constitutional reforms have been agreed upon, maybe the Government should focus on this issue. It is often said that the provinces of Pakistan are too big to manage, either population-wise or area-wise. This has resulted in the focus of govt resources on provincial capitals and around. Creating new provinces will also solve the problem of separatists and smaller provinces complaining about bigger provinces. No province will then become the center of power. All the developed countries of the world and neighbours of Pakistan have many more provinces or states than us.

So how should new provinces be created? There could be many ways and the parliament would know the best. But here are two scenarios that come to my mind:

Scenario 1: Divide each of the provinces into two parts. Since Punjab is the biggest, it may be divided into three parts to get a balance with other provinces. Then we would have 9 provinces: Quetta, Kalat; Hyderabad, Sukkur; Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan; Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan Divisions.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00maplinks/modern/pakadmin/pakadmin.html


Scenario 2: Another scenario presented in the media is to convert all the previous divisions into provinces. This scenario has two potential subscenarios: First is the divisions before 1990s. Then we would have 20 provinces:
Quetta, Kalat, Sibi, Makran,
Hyderabad, Sukkur, Karachi,
Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan, Hazara, Kohat, Malakand,
Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan, Gujranwala, Dera Gazi Khan, Faisalabad, Sargodha, Bahawalpur.

The second subscenario is the divisions that existed till 2000. These were 26 in number, thus creating 26 provinces:

Quetta, Kalat, Sibi, Makran, Naseerabad, Zhob;
Hyderabad, Sukkur, Karachi, Larkana, Mirpur Khas;
Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan, Hazara, Kohat, Malakand,
Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan, Gujranwala, Dera Gazi Khan, Faisalabad, Sargodha, Bahawalpur.

Many people complain that only 5 cities are being heavily developed, and most provincial funds are spent on the provincial capitals. Creating 26 provinces would give an immediate benefit that instead of 5 cities, we would have at least 27 cities which would be developing fast.