The monsoons have decided to make an early appearance, and its raining! YAY! I know the city will come to a complete breakdown in an hour, but in the meantime bring on the tea and pakoras :D

There’s a news report in Dawn today about the Metrobuses in Karachi running without any proper airconditioning. “Finally!” was my first reaction, because most Metrobuses in Karachi have had this problem since February now. While I haven’t travelled in one since my summer vacaion started, I’m sure the situation is even worse now. As the news item states:

As the windows of these so called air-conditioned coaches are usually kept closed, their passengers have to bath in their own perspiration due to no ventilation.

Metrobuses have definitely gone from being convenient and comfortable to crummy and cumbersome. Also, has anyone noticed how much more slower they’ve gotten?

Ever heard Bombay Rockers’ Rock Tha Party on guitars? I just did. And it rocked :)
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Yesterday for the first time I walked into an elevator where the women out numbered the men (5:3). One other thing that got my attention was that all five women were wearing the Hijab. I have noticed that some women tend to wear the Hijab while travelling to work and remove it when they get there, while others wear it to work but not when they are on an evening out with colleagues or friends. I guess itís just a matter of what makes them feel comfortable. I wonder how long it will be before women here can go out in public without feeling the need to protect themselves from the staring and gawking of men.

Recently, I had the dubious pleasure of visiting the Passport office because I had to have a new passport with the new, improved biometrics technology made in order to travel outside Pakistan. A day before, I had heard a Brigadier who is at the head of NADRA, the agency responsible for all these advancements in our official documents. A mere day before having to face the reality of getting a passport made, I listened to the usual presentation about how technologically advanced our ID cards and Passports have become with no mention of how the hassles involved in each procedure have increased in direct proportion to the technology.

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Metroblogging.com started this thing few months ago, called best of. How it works is that they filter the best entries from different cities, and post them at one place. It gives a nice perspective of what’s going on in other metroblogging cities. Some posts from Karachi also made it to the list. Check it out whenever you are getting bored.

In Karachi…innovation lives on

Click the picture to see a larger version

This is from Kay’s blog. Some of her photographs completely capture the essence of Karachi, as does this one.

This year, the Microsoft Pakistan Developer Conference is being held at the Pearl Continental Hotel. The 3-day conference commences on the 13th and ends on the 15th of July. Guest speakers this year include Adnan Farooq Hashmi, Alexander Diacre, Arvinda Sehmi, Aseel Mansour, Hammad Rajjoub, Goskin Bakir, Nasser Ghazi, Richard Goh and Saqib Ilyas.

PDC 2005 will unveil unreleased technologies such as Visual Studio 2005 and MS SQL Server 2005 and provide a platform for the preview and discussion of the much anticipated operating system, Windows Longhorn, something I am personally very curious about.

More Information on the PDC 2005 Website.

I was somewhat disappointed by the pet show. It turned out to be a bird and turtle show. Sure, the birds were beautiful, but I kept looking for cats and dogs but didn’t see any. And then I was personally frustrated because I got there at night and the staff didnt let me use flash to take pictures. So all my pictures came out dark :( Click below to see the pics.
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I went to the Pet Show organized by the Dawn Group today as part of the All About Lifestyles exhibition. The pets weren’t very varied – a bunch of turtles, terrapins and tortoises, a couple of hamsters, four baby chicks, a hawk, and a large number of parrots brought by a parrot breeder and a bird shop owner. One of the exhibitors (probably a pet shop owner) had also brought along a tank of fish, a starfish and a baby alligator!

The turnout was quite large, and it was really nice to see children so involved in taking care of their pets. Of course, the highlight of the evening was when the brother of the girl(and her turtle or tortoise, I’m not too sure) who won first prize, said seconds before they received the prize, “But we weren’t supposed to win!” Hmm. There’s probably a mad hare* somewhere.

*If you didn’t get this, you didn’t read enough as a child.