Mobilink's GPS in Pakistan

Mobilink has recently launched MobiTrack which provides GPS services in Pakistan. If you have a GPS enabled cellular phone, you can easily use MobiTrack to find locations and get directions to those locations. I found it very useful as it has the latest data of GPS in Pakistan.

The support is limited to particular handsets only e.g. Blackberry curve 8310 is supported but Blackberry curve 8520 is not supported. You can check for handsets compatibility here. And for more detailed information, you can checkout the Trakker NAV website for MobiTrack.

The GPS services include finding a location, the search is pretty good and it has good coverage of areas at least in Karachi. I tested it to find "China Town", Clifton and it even has the blockade information near Bilawal house. The directions are voice enabled and very accurate. You can also view the maps of different areas of Pakistan and you can search for a location by typing it in search box or locating it on the maps.

I'd like to see other GPS services in Pakistan with latest data, especially during these times during which one cannot find many things which doesn't disappoint us Pakistanis.

Furniture shops in Karachi – Part 2

Almost a year back, I was searching for furniture shops in Karachi to build my kitchen, get furniture for drawing, dining, living and bed rooms. I had a budget and I managed to maintain it with the desired quality. One year down the road and I am satisfied with my choices. Below are my suggestions to help you out, if you have an above-average budget and require good quality, giving you some ideas on furniture shops in Karachi:

• Kitchen
• You have a choice to hire a carpenter to construct cabinets. This will be less costly but requires a lot of your time. But, if the carpenter is good enough, you can control the quality and I found this the most suitable within my budget. You’ll also have to manage polishing. If you like to be very selective in terms of best wood and design, plus other apparels, this is the best option for you.
• Order kitchen from Ashary’s, Clifton (expensive), Interwood, Tuaheed Commercial (expensive), Italian Kitchen, Shaheed-e-Millat (moderate), Habitt (moderate) etc.
• If you go for a carpenter, appliances such as Built-in Oven or normal Oven, hob (stove), hood (chimney) and microwave will be managed by you; plus electrician and plumber for respective sockets.

• Bed room
• Well, you have a lot of choices here. As per my limited knowledge, the best bedroom furniture in Karachi market is available at International (Tipu Sultan) and Victoria (near Abdullah Haroon road). International’s quality and service is excellent. They provide life time support at your doorstep and have a very skilled team. Though furniture is very expensive, but when you see it, you’ll know the worth, especially if you want to own it for over 20 years!
• Wellcome furnishers (near old sabzi mandi) has a lot of variety as well and they also provide good support, but again it’s expensive. You can also have a look at Habitt (Nipa, Tipu Sultan, etc.) which is less expensive and ready-made.
• The furniture market in Nursery, Karachi is the cheapest of all I’ve mentioned

• Drawing room
• Wellcome Furnishers is the best value for this kind of furniture. The price is moderate as compared to the expensive ones and obviously you’d not like to spend a lot on drawing room where you don’t spend your time that much. They have the right variety to satisfy one with a above-average budget. If you have a higher budget, you can visit International and Vicrtoria.
• Kalamkaar (Clifton) is another option, I found their way of showing the catalog great. The price is above-average, but they have good choices. They even hand over a CD to you for your brief reviewSam Abbas (Tuaheed Commercial) is another choice, but I didn’t find a lot of variety there.

• Dining
• Again, Wellcome is the best value in terms of quality and price. Kalamkaar has good choices as well
• Nursery is another option which is less expensive

• Living room
• Nursery. Why? Because I’d like to have my living room furniture replaced after 3-5 years. Habitt is another good choice balancing the price and comfort. But, I’d go for cheaper furniture because living room is very roughly used. Just ensure that you get the right material keeping in mind Karachi gets pretty hot during summers.
• If you like to go for higher value choices, International, Wellcome and KalamKaar might be worth looking.

In addition to this, you will need to buy curtains, manage lighting, doors and other appliances. I’ll be writing on the same in the near future.

Small Tutorial on Torrents

Torrent (or BitTorrent) technology is arguably the best; if you need anything ranging from games to movies to songs, you can download through very easy and simple steps. If you are new to it, here's how easy it is:

• Download a torrent downloader software. I find uTorrent quite easy and feature rich
• Goto a torrent site. I usually access isohunt
• Search for anything you want to download, click on download and it'll open up uTorrent automatically
• Save it to your desired destination path

Just ensure you get the torrent with right language version from the website.

As for uTorrent, it also has features like controlling bandwidth (upload and download both) plus scheduler mode as well, using which you can easily turn it off during various timings, if you require more bandwidth for web browsing or other applications.

Chatroulette

Chatroulette is a website that pairs random strangers from around the world together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

The Chatroulette website was created by a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow.

The website uses Adobe Flash to display video and access the user's webcam. Flash's peer-to-peer network capabilities (via RTMFP) allow almost all video and audio streams to travel directly between user computers, without using server bandwidth. However, certain combinations of routers will not allow UDP traffic to flow between them, and then it is necessary to fall back to RTMP.

However, one has to be beware of controversial content while accessing the site, as there're multiple possibilities of the same.

Trip to Malaysia

It was June 2009 and I was wondering which place to plan for our honeymoon. I could name a score of people who recommended Malaysia as the ideal place for the trip, especially within the budget.

I started off with visiting the websites hosting the places to visit in Malaysia and finding out the hotel rates. Finally, I was able to create a list of billable items and to define my budget and then finalizing the package with my travel agent. We decided to visit Kuala Lumpur, Langkawi & Genting Highlands, whereas dropped Penang and Borneo from our list.

We set off towards the airport during early August for the flight at 11:59 pm for Malaysian Airlines which travels on Thursdays and Mondays only (Karachi-KL or vice versa). From Karachi to Kuala Lumpur is a 6 hour flight and we had our connecting flight towards Langkawi after a short stay at the KL airport.

Once we reached the KL airport we observed a lot of greenery outside the airport, which reminded me of the greenery which Islamabad has, where greenery just needs a reason to grow. After a short stay, we got onto the 1-hour flight for Langkawi. As soon as we reached above Langkawi we noticed the exciting landscape and the shores.

As soon as we landed, we headed towards the taxi stand and reached our hotel in the Pantai Tengah area. Apart from the sandy beaches in Langkawi, which is a nice relaxing way to spend your time, there are a few places worth visiting:

• Underwater World (Aquarium)
  
• Crocodile Farm (Lots of crocodiles)
  
• Eagle Square (a monument representing Langkawi)
  
• Mangroove Forest (resembling Amazon river)
  
• Cable Car (reaches a good height with a suspension bridge between two mountains)
  
• Seven-Wells Waterfalls (very refreshing)
  

After Langkawi, we headed towards the heights of Genting Highlands, which is approx. one and half hour drive from KL. It's a good place with indoor and outdoor theme parks. The indoor theme park is located inside the First World Hotel, the ground floor of which is a city in itself. The outdoor theme park has medium scale thrill rides along with children rides. The overall atmosphere has an aesthetic value as the clouds cover the park almost all of the time, with rains after irregular intervals.

After spending a couple of days, we headed back towards Kuala Lumpur. It's a highly developed city with good transport infrastructure such as hop-on/hop-off tourist bus service, monorail, KL Express (train service to and from airport), etc. The hop-on/hop-off bus service is a good way to visit all the tourist places with a pass for full day. One can hop off the bus to a tourist destination, spend and enjoy some time and get hop back on the next bus. Few of the places we visited or intended to visit are:

• KL tower ( is one of the tallest communicatons tower in the world) with binoculars on the top
  
• Petronas Twin Tower (skywalking on the bridge between the twin towers). There's a science section inside plus an Aquarium as well
  
• Zoo Negara
• Bird Park & Butterfly Park
• Shopping Malls

The information is readily available on different websites as well as the brochures in the hotels and at the airports which help you to plan your trip. Malaysia has all the aspects of a tourism place within the budget and is surely a place which is highly recommended. Although, Thailand has much better entertainment options, but the overall environment of Malaysia is best suited for honeymooners.

Furniture in Karachi

Whether you're going to build up a new home or you need to upgrade your current one, you'll find it hard to get great furniture. People like us who work throughout the week and find time only on the weekends during the daytime, find it hard to know where to go and have very little time for exploration. I have been trying to search for good furniture shops on the internet, the locations and the quality for each vendor, but one way or the other have hard time in locating one and finding quality within budget.

While the quality of furniture in the famous Furniture Markets (Nursery & near Garden) is controversial :), established brands seem a better choice if your budget is above average.

I, for one, didn't even know the names of the places where we can buy good furniture. While the search is still on, here goes my evaluation so far:

• International Interior Designers & Furniture (Tipu Sultan Road)
  Bedroom Furniture. Is very expensive but Teak wood variety is present which is termite-proof). Takes around 2-3 months to delivery based on the quantity.
  Sofa sets and other furniture is also available, not too sure about Kitchen.
  
• Sam Abbas Design Studio (Tuaheed Commercial, DHA, near Gelato Affair/Biryani Center)
  Mainly Sofa sets, is expensive but affordable to people who desire better furniture. Mostly Sheesham
  
• Interwood (Tuaheed Commerical, DHA, besides Mosaajees)
  Kitchens are great but very expensive. Other furniture also available in good ranges
  
• KalamKaar (near Schon Circle, Clifton)
  Bedroom, Sofa Sets & other furniture is available, but again not cheap, but affordable prices. They dealt with us in a very nice manner and the catalogue is very rich.
  
• Habitt (Tipu Sultan & somewhere in Gulshan as well)
  Generally everything is available on less expensive side as compared to the branding. I was not comfortable about the quality of some of the items e.g. the wood being used is not that durable.

I am still short of all the furniture except for the bedroom and looking for options, mainly for affordable Kitchen building and will be visiting Ashrays, ST (or Estee?) and Dreams in DHA area. There's one other shop by the name of Prestige Kitchens which I plan to explore as well.

Once I am over with the whole deal, I'll write on the summarized analysis of the same so that buyers have consolidated knowledge in one place.

Efficient or Impatient?

“Pomp, Pomp”, a sound which is usually heard from behind while I am sitting in my car waiting for the signal to turn green. This is pretty common in Karachi, the mass-operative city; though very rare in Islamabad, the so-called dead city. This is not the only noise which is disturbing; one can see many vehicles breaking signals; coming from wrong side of the road; and changing lanes quite drastically.

One can easily say that this trend of traffic is due to the fact that people don’t have enough time and they value it too much that they can even risk their own lives for it. But, quite interestingly the trend is almost 180 degrees when you enter a shop, office, governmental department or any other operational place where time actually matters. There, one can clearly observe wastage of time in gossiping, slowness of activity and simply sleeping; though these are not limited as you can find lots of other time-wasting activities and discussions going on which are simply useless and which is not what our country needs.

Most commonly discussed areas are cricket, politics and religion; which can be termed as healthy discussions if you see it from a higher level. But, my experience after being parts of such discussions (for the sake of knowledge) , was disappointing as I found these as just blames and complaints to those who are simply not hearing us. In addition, nothing can be done about it, as opposed to the workplace where one has some authority and can do something constructive.

Some people might believe that these are past-times for people and can be treated equivalent to sports or any other leisure activity; as for some people things like gossiping are recreational. To some extent, this can be agreed upon, but not wholly as people sacrifice their work for the sake of such activities whereas they’re not ready to sacrifice their time for the sake of safety for travelers.

What good is the impatience normally taken as efficiency which saves you just 2 minutes with lots of risk and tension; as compared to the hours of time-wastage coming under inefficiency but assumed as pride by many?

Comments are welcome related to the usage of semicolon