Joel Spolsky never fails to entertain me and enlighten me no matter how old his post/article I am reading. This is a beautifully romantic excerpt from his very useful “Advice for Computer Science College Students“.
If you enjoy programming computers, count your blessings: you are in a very fortunate minority of people who can make a great living doing work they enjoy. Most people aren’t so lucky. The very idea that you can “love your job” is a modern concept. Work is supposed to be something unpleasant you do to get money to do the things you actually like doing, when you’re 65 and can finally retire, if you can afford it, and if you’re not too old and infirm to do those things, and if those things don’t require reliable knees, good eyes, and the ability to walk twenty feet without being out of breath, etc.
Even if you’re no more a CS student or heck, not even related to Computer Sciences or Web Design, STILL do read it so you know there’s more to a geeky and nerdy friend of yours than you might think 
Go blast yourself
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A lovely designed Social Bookmarking Service Ma.gnolia is started. The jolly fellows of Happy Cog are behind it.
The team members? Jeffrey Zeldman (creative direction), Erin Kissane (brand direction), Tanya Rabourn (information architecture) Jason Santa Maria (logo/brand design), Eric Meyer (css and markup), and Greg Storey (interface design).
The interface and design is definitely better than Del.icio.us. The URL structure and Ajax thingies are also as cool as Del.icio.us offers. Since Ma.Gnolia appends /people/ in the URL that any user has, so I rather joined with just my initials “ej” thus http://ma.gnolia.com/people/ej/. It can also import all of your bookmarks from Del.icio.us or other browsers. Neat.
The best feature so far is the ability to put some URLs in Private folder/tag which means Social Bookmarking with a tinge of privacy. I certainly like this.
I am wondering since Del.icio.us got acquired by Yahoo, would Google step forward quicker this time in buying Ma.Gnolia? Who knows. This is Web2.0 year, anyway.
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Update: (4March) I am using WOL broadband and I can browse almost any blogspot/blogger hosted blog that comes to my mind. So, changing Blogging Application might not be a good idea but changing ISP would certainly be coz it comes at a cheaper cost.
It appears that my previous speculations "might" be wrong. See the news at bbc, and in urdu. So, some Dr. Imran Opal and Iqbl haider filed in the court this fab. idea of blocking websites (why bloggers only?) where infamous cartoons of Prophet Muhammad are being displayed. And as you know my dear friends, we are a nation who’d rather like to suppress our emotions and minds both than confront our fears and weaknesses (think of Jinnah’s death, 71’s war, Kargil issue, Russo-Afghan war and so on). So, it only felt "reasonable" and "applicable" to the government authorities to ban such websites but because of our worthy and potentially retarded network admin(s), almost all blogger/blogspot hosted blogs and sites are blocked. The block is not just at the DNS level, it’s also blocking IP addresses. KO has interesting comments:
Certain Indian weblogs have been banned for some months now, so some poor SOB while adding a few more blogs to the ban list fucked up, and now they’ll have to scroll all the way up down their blacklist… which is millions of urls long (as they try to ban every porn site conceivable).
Danial has some moderate solutions:
- Contact PTA officials and file your complain; express your anger and disgust and demand an immidiate action.
- Blog about this issue on your blogs and ask your readers to take similar actions.
- Send emails to local newspapers.
- Send email to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
- Contact United Nation’s Office of the Highcomissioner of Human Rights.
I just felt that blogspot, where couple of my friends’ blogs are hosted, seems to be inaccessible through various ISPs in Pakistan though they can login to their Blogger accounts. Tomorrow, on 3rd March, "they" already have a strike which seems to be of much higher level since this time I heard more about it than previous ones.
I am not sure if this really is happening that somehow, some jackass in the Government actually thought of blocking Blogger’s blogspot altogether in Pakistan on 3rd March when Bush’s coming. Whatever is the case, I can’t possibly give much shit to their cause. I, however, have few remedies.
1- If you’re using Mobilink in Pakistan, use your Power Tools service and send an email to your blog through your mobilink no. Harris’s forced to do this. You’ll need to enable this feature at your Blogger control panel as well.
2- Use Google as a proxy server. Why not. For the less-tech-savvy and cute minds, proxy server could be thought of as "Kissi K Kandhey Per Rakh ker Bandooq Chalana". So you’d browse whatever you want to browse and surf THROUGH Google’s servers etc. Anyways, translate your desired blog and rock away. Do change the url with your own.
3- Go to Anonymouse.org and browse your favorite blogs (if they’re inaccessible in Pakistan or wherever). There seems to be a problem of leaving comments at the blogs who have Captcha feature ON which forces a user to write the "Word Verification". But hang on, I might have some solution to that in a while.
4- Try any Public proxy servers from the list at Public Proxy Servers.
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