I bought a pair of really nice sandals last week. They’re soft, flat, and comfortable. And is it just me or is life slower when you’re wearing sandals?

That occurred to me as I was walking home last night. For starters, I was walking slower than usual…though that could have been because I was quite tired. Somehow, though, I felt like I was more connected to the Earth than I would have been had I been wearing shoes. When you’re wearing shoes, it seems like you’re walking above the ground. When you wear sandals — depending on the kind of sandals, of course — you feel as if you’re walking on the ground.

At least that’s what it felt like last night (i.e. with all other factors combined). Still, I know the sandals played a part. Any thoughts?

Aside: My Relationship With Sandals

I have a love-hate relationship with sandals. Well, actually that’s not entirely true. I love sandals because I hate the heat, get really hot, and seriously appreciate the ventilation that sandals provide. On the other hand, my feet are — rather unfortunately — sensitive. That is, with a wrong pair of sandals (even slightly plasticky ones) my feet get ripped up — almost literally — pretty quickly. Yes, I have actually been wounded by a bad pair of sandals. So, while I love sandals (being barefoot in the library, woo hoo!), I hate badly designed or badly made sandals. Such is life.

I love Melbourne. Where else would the predicted daily minimum and maximum temperatures for the coming week look like this:

• Monday: 20 - 37 (fine, mainly sunny)
• Tuesday: 21 - 32 (afternoon changes, showers to follow)
• Wednesday: 15 - 19 (morning rain, showers or two)
• Thursday: 12 - 23 (becoming fine)
• Friday: 14 - 24 (fine)
• Saturday: 12 - 28 (fine)
• Sunday: 16 - 33 (fine)

Yes. As we head (very quickly) into summer temperatures — with lows in the 20s and highs in the 30s — two days of rains brings us down to an expected low of 12 and a high of 23!

Oh, and temperatures change quickly and drastically in the middle of the day, too. Yesterday, for example, it was hot and sunny in the morning as I went to university to attend a syndicate meeting. A few hours later, as I moved from one building to another to attend a class (yes, even on Saturday), it was chilly and cloudy. Three hours later, as I left to go home, it was hot and sunny again.

Ah, I love Melbourne. Especially the weather.

With the situation in Pakistan being what it is, Pakistani blogs are becoming increasingly important both to people living in Pakistan and to those of us who are stuck outside. I’ve already written about a couple of these blogs. This here is a more comprehensive roundup of those two and some more useful blogs. Thanks in particular to Aman from bringing some of these to my notice.

First off we have four student blogs:

• LUMS Blog: Written by LUMS alumni about things concerning Pakistan and LUMS. I haven’t contributed to this blog yet but this is the one that I’m associated with.
• FAST Rising: The excellent FAST-NU resistance blog.
• The Emergency Times: An independent student initiative that provides updates on the emergency situation and publishes a newsletter by the same name.
• ALE Xpressed!: This is a personal blog that doesn’t “report” on events but approaches them from a personal perspective.

Then we have the two I talked about earlier:

• All Things Pakistan (Pakistaniat.com): The intention of this blog is to “talk about [Pakistan’s] problems constructively and to celebrate enthusiastically that which deserves to be celebrated”. It’s not a news blog, but an excellent views blog.
• Watan Dost: This is both a news and opinion blog but is particularly good for news about Pakistan from all perspectives and from many, many sources.

And finally, we have the Metroblogging sites (the first two have more coverage than the third):

• Metroblogging Lahore
• Metroblogging Islamabad
• Metroblogging Karachi

Oh, another useful thing to do is to create a Google Alert with the search phrase “Pakistan” that sends you a daily e-mail with all news, blog, web, and video entries posted about Pakistan over the previous 24 hours. You can, of course, narrow your search term down to “Pakistan emergency” or something.

UPDATE

A few more resources have come my way:

• Emergency 2007 on Wikia
• Academics for Freedom
• Rise of Pakistan
• Emergency 2007 blog
• Pakistan Blackout
• Democracy and Freedom
• Pak Lawyer
• Pakistan Politics
• Pakistan Politics.net

As usual, Moby kicks ass. He has released 44 of his instrumental tracks for use by independent, non-profit, and student film makers. These tracks, available for download from mobygratis.com, are free for non-commercial use and, should you want to use them for a commercial film, there’s an "easy licence" that lets you do that as well. [Via TriggerStreet]

Oh, and in case you don’t already know, his blog (which I’ve been reading for many, many years now) kicks ass too.

The good folk at Smashing Magazine have outdone themselves again. This time they’ve come up with a list of 40+ Excellent Freefonts for Professional Design. For the love of typography, take a look.

I have too many movies to watch and not enough time (or money!) to watch them all. Which is sad. My current list includes (in order, I think):

• Death at a Funeral
• Juno
• Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
• Lions for Lambs
• Michael Clayton
• Stardust
• Control
• Day Watch (Dnevnoy Dozor)
• The Kingdom
• Evan Almighty
• Bee Movie

The list is in order of preference, but I might have to adjust it depending on which of those movies (like Stardust, for example) doesn’t have much time left at the cinema we regularly go to. Yes, life is complicated.

As statements go, the one made by Yale Law School regarding the rule of law in Pakistan (or lack thereof) kicks ass:

We, the undersigned lawyers, deans, professors, law students, and law school administration and staff denounce in the strongest terms General Pervez Musharraf’s recent assault on the rule of law in Pakistan. By suspending the Constitution; dissolving the Supreme Court and the provincial High Courts and replacing them with judges of his own choosing; engaging in arbitrary and unprovoked arrests of thousands of opposition leaders, journalists, and other law-abiding citizens; and violently suppressing protests by hundreds of lawyers who were acting in the highest tradition of our profession, General Musharraf is trampling upon the very system of law that alone can justify a ruler’s power over his people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow lawyers and the democratic values that they represent, and we urge an early restoration of legality and legitimate authority in Pakistan.

And boy is that “undersigned” list a long one!

[Via the LUMSBlog]

Great. A month after I hypothetically decide to get the Fujitsu T4220 convertible tablet PC over the Lenovo X61T, Warner Crocker from GottaBeMobile goes and writes about his love affair with his X61.

To make matters worse, one my classmates at MBS, who sits right in front of me in one of my classes, has a gorgeous X61 (non-tablet) that is in my direct line of sight for three hours every week. *sigh*

So now I’m conflicted over my choice of tablet PC. And this is over a hypothetical purchase, dammit! Imagine what it’ll be like when I actually buy a darned convertible tablet PC! :) I guess I need to see someone using or writing about the T4220 to restore my sense of balance!

In all seriousness, though, as my current study term heads for the home stretch (less than 4 weeks to go!) I think back sadly over all the productivity-increasing opportunities that I missed because I didn’t have a tablet PC this term. And there were many of them.

The biggest issue, obviously, was with mobility. There were times when I had to be moving around all day — between lecture theatres, syndicate rooms, the library, etc. — with a heavy laptop on my shoulder. One that is also big and bulky and so doesn’t easily fit into my locker either. Then there were times when I couldn’t simply whip out my laptop, whenever and wherever I was, in order to get a little bit of work done. Instead, I was forced to adjust the rest of my life around appropriate laptop-using opportunities. That is, I would schedule all my laptop-related tasks in batches because I knew the settling down would only be worth it if I had at least a half hour’s worth of stuff to do. And batching is never good if you need to get lots of little tasks done during the day. However, most modern laptops would have done well on the mobility part (covering most of my needs), which is why there’s the other issue.

The other issue was with note-taking and, generally, living a paperless life. There were times, for example, when I had to take complex notes in class, frequently erasing, re-drawing, and squeezing words closer and closer to the edge of my sheet of notepaper. It was only the humble pencil and eraser that saved me there. Then there were times when I had so much reading material to go through that I had to carry my reading packs in a second bag. That too in the rain! A tablet PC and a high-speed scanner like the Fujitsu Scan Snap (to batch scan all of my reading pack material) would really have helped me then.

There were other issues, of course, but those two were the biggest. I guess I’ll have to live with them for just a little longer. Oh well.

Dr. Muqtedar Khan posted a really good article on the Pakistan situation on altmuslim yesterday. He makes a number of interesting points and gives a good overview of what’s going on. Especially this bit (which relates to my earlier post on the situation):

Even some of the secular elite who have supported Musharraf’s undemocratic ways are becoming wary of his high-handedness. They appreciated his enlightened approach to Islam and saw him as a force that while subverting democracy minimally (only at the top, since the rest of Pakistan’s governments, local and national, were elected), nurtured a degree of secularity and religious freedom necessary against the rising tide of Taliban-style Islamism. But what they have finally ended up with is more Islamic militancy with extremist violence, and less and less democracy.

And he makes a good point that didn’t occur to me:

[Pakistan’s] ability to retain liberal political institutions even under military dictatorship is an important characteristic that we must keep in mind as we watch the current spiraling sequence of political disasters in Pakistan.

Let’s see how his conclusion pans out, though:

Washington cannot and will not abandon Musharraf. Indeed his move, which brings Pakistan closer to collapse, basically forces Washington to stand behind him more firmly, albeit unhappily. In the end, the current crisis can be diffused if an early rapprochement between Musharraf and the Pakistani Supreme Court can be arranged. It is here that Benazir Bhutto can play a role and reestablish herself as a major player both at home and in the eyes of the US.

Here’s hoping things work out sooner rather than later.

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago but I got busy. Rebecca Traister wrote a good article on Salon that discussed the pros and cons of J.K. Rowling continuing to talk about the characters and various subplots of her Harry Potter books even after the last one has been published:

I am a devoted reader and admirer of J.K. Rowling, and it honestly pains me a bit to say this, but from a literary perspective, she’s out of control here. Her abundant generosity with information is surely a response to a vast, insatiable fan base that does not have a high tolerance for never-ending suspense, ambiguity or nuance. As she told the "Today" show’s Meredith Vieira back in July, "I’m dealing with a level of obsession in some of my fans that will not rest until they know the middle names of Harry’s great-great-grandparents."

She’s not the first to do this either, explains Traister, since J.R.R. Tolkien did just that for years after he published The Lord of the Rings. At one level, it’s downright hard for Rowling to stop telling her story, especially when it’s already in her head and, really, there was no real need for her to have ended it where she did (except, of course, for the fact that her most major subplot, well, ended). 

Traister continues:

My brother, an adult reader who has been irritated by Rowling’s loquaciousness and was sent over the edge by this latest round of fortune-telling, said to me this weekend, "If she wants to tell us what happens, I wish she would write it in a book, because until she does, then as far as I’m concerned, she’s just describing what’s showing on the teeny TV screen inside her head, and that’s not playing fair."

The problem, of course, is that Rowling has announced that she won’t write any more Harry Potter books. Except for an encyclopedia-type book that will catalogue the past, present, and future of her characters in more detail. Sort of like the appendices that Tolkien included with LoTR. In other words, it’ll contain all the little tidbits that she is feeding her adoring fans during her US book tour.

What Traister’s article boils down to, though, is the question of how much of a story you want to remain untold — and up to your imagination — at the end of a book. In this day and age of long-running book series and TV shows than span several seasons, ending your story at what appears to be a relatively arbitrary point — that is, not when a network executive has canceled it or when you’ve gone on for eleven seasons and it’s time to move on already — only makes you want more from the author. On the other hand, you really have to stop sometime. In my opinion, then, while I like that Rowling is up for some more storytelling, I do hope she knows when to stop.