Random Chusses…

So I finally visited Rohtas as I’d been planning for the last month. It wasn’t easy in the incessant rain but I made it. Not knowing the way wasn’t much of a problem.  Just follow the signs. Passing Gujranwala, Wazirabad, Gujrat etc. I reached Jehlum which is around 180KM from Lahore. Rohtas is around 30KM from Jehlum near a village called Dina. Its a big fort with high walls and lots of stairs that go up and down. Built by Sher Shah Suri in somewhere around 1540s it still looks pretty solid. The surrounding hilly area is also pretty cool. Not a bad place to visit. I also wanted to go see the Mangla Dam which is around 40KM right of Dina but that area was closed by the Army or something like that. Maybe next time…

Pictures taken with Nokia E51 whose picture quality isn’t half as bad in daylight.

Another Ahmadi was martyred because of his faith in Sindh, Pakistan on Monday 19th of January 2009. There have been several Shahadats in Sindh lately.

LAHORE: Unidentified gunmen shot dead an Ahmadi shop owner outside his house in the Kotri district of Sindh on Monday evening.

The 55-year-old father of four had no rivalries and had been killed because of his faith, a spokesman for the Ahmadiyya community claimed in a press release on Tuesday.

He said Saeed Ahmed ran a small shop in the Uthwal area of the district and had just reached home when he was killed at his doorstep.

Two Ahmadis had been killed in similar but separate shooting incidents in Sindh last year, after a fatwa (religious edict) against the community. The spokesman expressed his community’s concern over the ‘serial killings’ of its members, and criticised the prominent exposure some print and electronic media gave to provocative statements against Ahmadis. Police have registered a case but has not arrested anyone so far.

Source: The Daily Times

Nokia E51 is my new Phone. I dumped my Nokia 6070 which I’ve had for the last 2 years and bought it a couple of weeks ago from Hafeez Center in Lahore. Cost me around 20k. Its a smart phone running on the Symbian OS, so one can basically install almost anything on it that’s made for Symbian which is really cool. Check out the full specifications at GsmArena. My experience with it has so far been very good. Its light, its reasonably small, no sliding or snapping stuff. Just a plain phone that’s smart too. Has all the audio, video stuff and a 16M TFT colored screen. GPRS, EDGE and 3G is in there too. A maximum of 8GB memory can be attached to the phone through memory cards. 512MB came free with mine and that’s probably all I’ll ever need.

The Symbian interface is really fast compared to some other E-series phones such as E90. There’s wifi, infrared, bluetooth, USB, email, radio etc. and all the other modern gadgets you’d expect in a great phone. The keypad is a bit small but I’m used to it now and it feels great. The buttons on the side are really hard to press though. Using the Internet on my phone and on my laptop using the phone’s miniUSB, really sucks the battery though. So I have to charge it every 2 days or so. The default browser on the phone sucks and I immediately installed Opera Mini which is an awesome browser. For IM proposes I installed Ebuddy which is awesome too. One software for my MSN, Yahoo, Google, AIM and even Facebook logins. Other softwares for mobile I got are of course Google stuff, like Gmail, Google maps etc.

Some problems I’ve encountered:

• The keys on the side are a hard (almost impossible) to press. But I rarely need them. So not a major issue I guess.
• The Camera is not too good. Needs good lighting conditions to produce a reasonable photo.  No flash either.
• The EDGE really takes the edge of the battery. So I have to charge it almost every day.