Spectacular Fall

I had seen fall foliage only in movies before. It looked awesome, but it looks better in real. If you don't believe it, allow me to show you some pictures. (Note that these are taken by an amateur photographer with a point and shoot camera):

Phishing – how easy(hard) is it to detect?

I thought phishing was yesterday’s phenomenon. But lately I’ve been getting a lot of emails trying to “phish” me. And to be honest, I fell for it the first time and ended up giving my eBay account username and password. Haven’t seen any damage as the consequence of that so far, hopefully won’t - in the future.

So, how easy or hard is it to detect the fraudulent emails trying to sell you Viagra or Rolex watches or asking your hotmail password or asking eBay item description etc. If you spend 15 seconds flat looking at the email, I say it’s as obvious as an elephant in the room. I’ll take the example of email I just got. Here’s the email:

Here’s what the actual emails I normally get from eBay looks like:

So what did I mean by you can detect it in 15 seconds? Here’s what:

• I don’t have any item unpaid (no brainer). Although this might not be so obvious if you buy a lot of items and don’t pay immediately.
• I don’t use eBay UK.
• I don’t use the email address I got that email on, on eBay.
• The fake email doesn’t contain my eBay username, real name, not even my email id. It was sent to my university’s group emails.
• The link given in the fake email goes to this link: http://c5gi-bay.ucoz.co.uk/ShowBayDispute/Unpaid-item/index.htm (I’m not sure if this link is still up or not), which obviously is not an eBay url, although it looks like one. By the way, as you might have guessed, the page at this link looks exactly the same as the actual eBay login page.
• The buttons like ‘Register’ and other links on that page don’t work. Only thing that works is the ‘Login’ button. You know why.
• The actual email contains links to a lot of things (like user agreement, fraud protection, ip addresses if required etc). But the fake email contains only one link which directs me to the login page. So either the person who’s trying to “phish” me is too lazy or (s)he doesn’t want me to waste time looking around and wants me to give my password and id as soon as I see the email.

Although, that seems like a lot of things to notice, you don’t have to notice all of them to smell something’s wrong. One or two should suffice. That’s my two cents for today. Have a nice summer!

What's terribly screwed up in the US?

[Post removed]

[Originally written on Facebook notes on 26 Feb, 2009]

How long will we have to bear with the retro-designed Nepali sites?

Disclaimer: I haven't done any extensive research while writing this. There are some well designed Nepali sites, no denial about that. But in this post I've taken two news sites viz. ekantipur.com and nepalnews.com (which incidentally are the top two Nepalese sites I visit) and written what I don't like about them and their designs. Needless to say, I can't expect everyone to agree to my opinions, more so when I'm talking about something as abstract as design and aesthetics.

To me the sites I’m talking about have oh-so-90s look. Hence the term retro-designed. Haven’t Nepalese web designers heard about the Web 2.0 yet? or is it the companies that are hiring the crap designers and programmers to build their sites?

Firstly, ekantipur.com - the official site of Nepal's no. 1 media house, Kantipur Publications. This is how the site looks like currently, as of 28 Dec, 2008 (clicking on the picture should take you to the large res version of the screenshot – this applies to other images too):

• First of all, as soon as I visit this site, I notice that it’s using the serif font to display the main news. General rule of thumb says that you should use the sans-serif fonts for the sites. Personally I find that to be true, too.
• Look at the inconsistent size, family, weight of fonts all over the place. All you can say is the designer is doing a horrible job.
• If you haven’t noticed, the ekantipur site recently changed the main page theme slightly. But it seems like they just changed the index page. As soon as you go one link deep, you get the same old layout.
• Why the hell is that NEW below the main logo blinking? Doesn’t that blinking distract you? And where is the content after NEW? What’s NEW? (update: the hidden content seems to have been fixed now).
• The part of the page not visible in this screen is even awful, really awful.
• The ekantipur.com logo isn’t clickable. We generally expect that to be clickable and take us to the home page.
• Why aren’t they using the favicon? I think favicon these days is a big visible clue about the site we’re visiting. When I visit the site without one, that’s the first thing I notice.
• The title of the homepage is ekantipur.com. What? Doesn’t that sound like the name of the site itself? and all lower-cased? Thank god the title wasn’t ‘Untitled Document’.
• The site's still using kantipuronline.com to host all its contents. ekantipur.com is just a frame that gets the content from former. I don't see a point doing that. (thanks to Basu for reminding me this).
  

Now, nepalnews.com. This site has been around since 90s. Sometimes I wonder why isn’t this site offline yet. Most of the content, with the design itself, is way dated. Here’s how it looks now (as of 28 Dec, 2008 ):

• Okay, this site has informative title, favicon, uses sans-serif fonts. But that’s about the good things about it.
• The design of this site hasn’t been changed in years. Web has evolved so much in the past decade and you don’t bother even to change layout in a decade?? Something’s not right. Here’s how this site looked on July 2, 2005:
  
  and it looked something like this on Oct 2, 2003 (some images including the logo couldn’t be fetched for this date, if we could get them, I’m sure it looked exactly the same as above):
  
• More than half the content in the front page are advertisements, that too picture ads. That becomes worse due to the fact that most of the ads are either awfully designed or blinking or both.
• The fonts size are same all over the place. In a news site, we expect some news to be given importance over others. All the news can’t have same importance. Indicate that somehow!
• As I said earlier, some of the contents is just left there. I can see the CA polls result at the top of the site. I don’t care about that anymore, do you? I watched all the results live on TV for god’s sake. Move that to archive or something. Hey I even see the SLC 2062 results there, haha.
• The nepalnews.com logo - can you make it better? I suppose you can. At least I can.
• Why do they try to cramp everything in one page? The home page has too many contents about too many things.
• There’s a page counter at the bottom saying it was visited a zillion or something times. I don’t care how many times a page was visited, just give me a better site. I don’t believe that anyway. All this reminds me of is the Geocities pages in early 2000, that used to have all kind of colorful counters.

So that was my rant about how and why I don’t like these sites and at the same time keep on visiting them for the news, tens of times daily. And today I don’t know why, I visited Kantipur FM site and thought man, this site needs a mention too. So here’s the honorary mention:

All I can say about this site is ‘crap’, you’ll know why when you visit the site. Hey did you notice luckily my city Nepalgunj popped up on that incessantly flashy flash animation. And btw, if you don’t know that already, you can now finally listen to the Kantipur FM live online.

After all that, if you’re wondering what I consider to be a well designed news site, here’s what I think is an example of good design – bbc.com. no-nonsense, simple, informative, clear, customizable. That’s what Web 2.0 is about, I guess.

Update on Oct 12, 2009 -

eKantipur.com and Nepalnews.com have since changed their layout. eKantipur does look a lot more professional and cleaner now, whereas Nepalnews.com basically looks the same.

Is Feminism stereotyped?

‘Are you a feminist?’ she asked.

The temperature was in minuses outside and was raining. What could be the better time than that to enjoy the sip of hot coffee, isn’t it? I was holding a cup of black coffee and sitting on a table. I don’t know why I sit on the table instead of a chair or why I sleep on a sofa instead of a bed, just don’t know. Anyways, that question certainly didn’t dissolve well in my coffee cup. So I asked back ‘What?’

‘Are you a feminist?’ she didn’t bother to paraphrase her question. As much I love the yes-no questions in the exams, I hate them in real life. I think these types of questions are kind of confrontational sometimes. So I tried to evade ‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, say yes or no. How can you not know that? You are a grad student, for god’s sake.’

‘Okaay, I think I’m not.’ had to give in.

‘So you’re an androcentrist.’

‘What? Hell no. I do believe in gender equality.’ I retorted.

The next thing I knew, she was reading the first line from the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism aloud. It said ‘Feminism is a belief in the right of women to have political, social, and economic equality with men’. I had nothing at all to dissent about on that definition of feminism. Jeez, So I have been a feminist all my life and didn’t even know that?

Now I had to explain why didn’t I like to call myself a feminist despite agreeing with the notion of feminism. I said I don’t think anyone today would think that men are superior; women shouldn’t be treated equally be it socially, politically or economically. So then virtually everyone’s a feminist. But she gave an example saying there are people, and a lot, who do think (might not be blatant, though) that women shouldn’t be treated on par with men. One of the examples was - the politicians in Nepal trying to elude the topic of women’s rights to hereditary property. Now the bill regarding that has been passed, it still isn’t as simple as - if there are two children, one girl and one boy, in a family then 50% property is boy child’s and rest 50% is of girl child’s. And yes, that was true. It was a valid point. So the conclusion, not everyone’s a feminist.

Now back to the point, why don’t I like calling myself a feminist? While trying to answer that question, I realized that I never knew the dictionary meaning of ‘feminism’. All I had on my mind was an image of a stereotypical feminist. I don’t know what you think, but whenever I think of a typical feminist I think of a woman climbing on top of the Prithvi Narayan Shah’s statue in front of Singh Durbar and chanting the slogan ‘we need 50% quota for women’ - her left hand clutching the statue’s crown preventing her from falling and right hand holding a red flag. I know that’s exaggerated, but hope you got the point. And I certainly can’t imagine myself doing that in the foreseeable future.

So I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t my fault. The feminism has definitely been stereotyped and the stereotyped definition doesn’t exactly match that in the dictionary. And it’s not the dictionary definition that most of us relate it to.

With that I sighed and took a sip of coffee. Holy crap, it was so cold already. ‘Can you make me another cup of coffee?’ I requested.

‘No I can’t. Can’t you make coffee for you by yourself?’

‘Of course, I can’ I said getting up. ‘Damn it, I forgot I was talking to a feminist’ I murmured.

[First published on Facebook Notes on 22 December 2008]
[Then published on The Himalayan Times on 25 December 2008]

No, this blog hasn't been deserted !!

Guys, if you by any chance happened to stop by this blog and thought 'Holy crap, one more no-more-active blog?', then you're not being illogical. After all some random posts (or you may call them something else, if you like) here and there and not a single post or no activity whatsoever on the blog for last 2 months...well, if I were you I'd think the same.
But I haven't deserted this blog just yet. Actually I've been very busy with my studies lately. First semester in US, I gotta be, isn't it? But you know that's just an excuse, because if I can watch 3 freaking hour long movie, watch same damn video clip of Russel Peters over and over again in Youtube (although I have the whole DVD torrent downloaded right on my computer), comment on Facebook just for the sake of it, then can't I write a blog entry? Oh well, you got me. I'm too lazy to write anything or in general, too lazy to do anything useful.
And you're seeing this post now just because I should have been doing something more useful than this. I have final exams tomorrow and no, I haven't studied anything yet.
Damn, it ain't easy being a grad student.

All (well... almost) the great people in one place.

I had got this picture in one forwarded email. Don't know who created it (If anyone knows the creator, please tell me - I'll accredit it). But it's a great picture. Almost everyone in the history of humankind that changed the path of history at one place, amazing.
And by the way, you could test your 'ability to recognize people' using this picture. I can recognize most of 'em :).