A Quest for Cheeseburgers in Melbourne

Last week's Munchcast was all about geek food. That is, the almighty cheeseburger. Now I love burgers -- making them, eating them, and trying out different kinds -- and that got me thinking: what is the best cheeseburger in Melbourne? Naturally, I turned to Google for the answer and, as it happens, a lot of people have a lot to say on this topic.

Global Sources of Information

For starters, according to the World's Greatest Hamburgers website, the 9th best burger in the world is from Kermond's (in Warnabool, which is just outside Melbourne) while the 14th best is from Andrew's Burgers (in Albert Park, which is a suburb of Melbourne).

Local Sources of Information

Meanwhile, back in 2005, The Age had a whole spread on the best burgers in Melbourne (both rural and urban) which is still probably pretty accurate. Then, in 2007, a number of blogs and bloggers weighed in on the debate:

Finally, a Quest...

However the most comprehensive, scientific, and up-to-date listing of top-quality burgers in Melbourne is on the Burger Quest website. Their reviews rate burgers on a star rating (1-5 stars) and six burger joints get top honours, though two of those have since closed.

So, it is now my quest to have at least one burger from each those places during my stay in Australia (i.e. the next 3-4 years). I've already had burgers from Burger Edge (6 stars) and Grill'd (5 stars), both of which were awesome, so I'm off to a good start. Now for all the rest...

I suspect I'm really, really, really going to enjoy this quest :)

Article on the Phoenix's Mars Landing

Jeff Foust wrote a great article on the successful landing of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander in this week's The Space Review called A Second Chance at Mars:

The fact that NASA had dubbed the entry, descent, and landing phase of the mission, when the spacecraft slowed from 20,000 km/h to zero, “seven minutes of terror” was not exactly inspiring.

A lot was riding on this landing and NASA spent a considerable amount of time warning everyone how risky it was going to be but, as you know, it all turned out well in the end.

I Graduated!

Yes, I am done with my MBA. I completed my official course requirements (i.e. got my final grades) on 9th May and then on 17th May I had my graduation ceremony. I uploaded some photos and wrote about the ceremony on my professional blog (so read that first) but here are a couple of more photographs.

This is the official photo of me getting my MBA degree from the University of Melbourne's Vice-Chancellor, Glynn Davis:

Degree Presentation Photo

And here are Ayesha and Nadia in the freezing cold -- it was the coldest day in Melbourne so far and it rained continuously! -- just after the event:

Ayesha and Nadia at Ameel's Graduation

Nuzhat was also there but she had to leave early. There are more photos of all of us on Ayesha and Nuz's cameras but I haven't gotten those from them yet.

So thus endeth my MBA. Now to find a job...

'Salam Cafe' on SBS

In case you missed the first episode of Salam Cafe -- the new, very Aussie, very funny comedy panel and sketch show that debuted on SBS on Wednesday -- you can now watch it on the SBS website. I'm guessing all future episodes will be published there as well.

The show is about the funny side of being a Muslim in Australia -- which means there's plenty of Muslim and Aussie humour -- but is also about being a Muslim, particularly a young Muslim, in this day and age. Here's what The Age had to say about it.

So, set your reminders for 10pm on Wednesdays on SBS and have a good laugh.

Repaying Your Sleep Debt

Great article on the SciAm website about sleep debt, which is the difference between how much you slept and how much you should have slept.

The trick is that you can't make up for your lack of sleep during weeknights just by sleeping late on weekends, though that's very important too. For proper recovery sleep you need to be sleeping a little extra every day for a period of time till your natural sleep cycle is restored (i.e. your debt has been repaid).

Being a sleep aficionado myself, I can safely say that I already knew that. And having worked in startups for most of my life -- i.e. being someone who swings from periods of no work to periods of intense work which, as you would expect, messes with your sleep cycle -- there are a few other bits of sleep pattern wisdom that I could add. But I'll save those for another blog post since there's lots to say.

Creating a New E-mail Taxonomy

I truly am a geek. I am working on a new taxonomy for my e-mails (all of which I'm moving to Gmail, by the way) and...well, I'm having a really good time planning it all out!

The thing is: I'm a very nested-folders type of person so switching to the labels-and-search model is a little scary. Why is it scary? Because, other than the default folders (inbox, sent mail, etc.), I currently have 172 -- yes, that's one hundred and seventy-two -- folders in Thunderbird. And I'm trying to cut that down to about 15.

The reason I can do this (quite easily, in fact) is that most of my existing folders are second-level folders: one for each mailing list that I subscribe to, one for each MBA course that I'm taking, etc. So really I have just 37 top-level folders. Actually, even that's too many because, back in the day, I gave sites that I'm a paid member of their own top-level folder so those will now go. I also have a couple of temporary folders in there. I've been meaning to do a good folders rationalization for a couple of years now but I've just never gotten around to it. I guess this is my chance.

The good thing -- which is making this move much less scary -- is that, having used Google Web Search and Desktop Search for years now, I'm pretty confident that, even with 15 folders instead of 172, finding old e-mails shouldn't be much of a problem.

The New Taxonomy

The key change I'm making to the taxonomy is that my labels will not be about who the e-mails are from -- the taxonomy I've been following since the mid-90s that has served me well -- but what the e-mails are about -- the taxonomy I started to move to a few years ago (and which, obviously, I use for my blogs).

This lends itself well to the whole labels concept because an e-mail can be about more than one subject. So, for example, an e-mail sent from my sister about an Internet meme will get the 'Funny & Forwards' label. However, if she also wrote some family stuff in that e-mail, I'll also attach the 'Family & Friends' label to it. Neat, huh?

The challenge, of course, is in coming up with those few, most useful labels. Here's what I've come up with so far:

  1. Friends & Family -- e-mails about (you guessed it) friends and family

  2. Funny & Forwards -- jokes, forwards, memes, etc.

  3. Life Admin -- e-mails from banks, utilities, ISPs, etc.

  4. Lists & Sites -- e-mails from mailing lists and sites I am a member of

  5. LUMS -- old e-mails from my undergrad days as well as current alumni-related e-mails

  6. MBS -- all course, admin, alumni, etc. e-mails

  7. Music -- old and, in the future, new band-related e-mails

  8. Nadia -- a whole separate label for my wife since she is, after all, more than just a friend or family member

  9. Saved Stuff -- stuff I want to keep for future reference that is not a funny or a forward (i.e. articles and the like)

  10. Sites & Projects -- stuff about non-work websites I maintain or about various projects that come up

  11. Temp Bukkit -- e-mails that I'll catch up on the weekend but want out of my inbox for now

  12. Work -- all work-related e-mail (I presume I'll be maintaining another taxonomy in my work e-mail account)


Just twelve?! Not bad, eh? :)

Of course, as with any taxonomy, I expect this one to evolve over time. So far, though, I think it's an accurate representation of all the e-mails I currently have in Thunderbird. And if it isn't, I'll probably tweak it as I upload my e-mail to Gmail (either that or I'll delete the e-mails instead!). Meanwhile, I'm quite pleased with this list. Now...let the uploading begin!

For the two people who read this blog: what taxonomy do you use for your e-mails?

Switch to Gmail & IMAP?

I have three primary e-mail accounts: Melbourne Business School, Yahoo! Mail Plus, and insanityWORKS.org. I also have three secondary ones: The University of Melbourne, Gmail, and Hotmail. I forward UniMelb to MBS, Gmail to Yahoo!, and I check Hotmail via a browser periodically. I POP mail from my primary accounts to my laptop and I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client. That is:

E-mail Changes Blog Post 1

When I'm away from my laptop, however, I usually only check my primary accounts. To do that, I use the MBS webmail interface, Yahoo!'s excellent webmail interface, and I POP my insanityWORKS mail into Yahoo!. That is:

E-mail Changes Blog Post 2

This system has worked well for the last seven years because I've always had one primary computer to work on (which, for the last four years, has been my laptop). Now things are starting to change and I'm tempted to (a) move all my e-mail online and (b) move to one primary e-mail account (Gmail) and five secondary ones (all the rest). That is:

E-mail Changes Blog Post 3

Here's why...

Three Major Changes

First, I've become a lot more mobile and I increasingly want access to all my old e-mails (and some of my data) regardless of where I am and which computer I'm working on. This wouldn't be a problem if I was to carry my laptop (and, therefore, all my e-mail and data) with me everywhere I went, but that's not something I want to do all the time. Also, in the future I want to use my phone to access my e-mail and I simply can't do that with my current setup.

Second, cloud computing has come a long way over the last couple of years and Yahoo!, which is by far my preferred e-mail provider, lacks a number of cloud computing features that I really want. For example, Google Reader is much better than Yahoo!'s RSS reader and Microsoft's SkyDrive is much better than Yahoo! Briefcase. I also prefer Google's Calendar to Yahoo!'s, I really like Gmail's labelling mechanism, and Microsoft's Live Mesh sounds very exciting as well. In other words, I want to start using cloud computing-like services and Yahoo! alone isn't giving them to me.

Third, we live in an increasingly connected world. My current system of downloading all my e-mail to my laptop works well because it assumes that I'll be doing a lot of e-mailing (and, in general, computing) offline and from one computer. Increasingly, that is not the case. Instead, I now use communication tools like Facebook and Twitter for which you need to be constantly online, I don't limit my e-mail usage to just my laptop, and I even access the 'net and my e-mail through my mobile phone (though I don't do much of that right now because it's really expensive on my current phone plan!).

Two Implications

This means two things. First, I am seriously considering moving all my e-mail to the 'cloud'. I want this for seamless and synchronized e-mail access across multiple computers and devices. And since I am frequently online (or at least in mobile phone signal range) not being able to access my e-mail because I don't have an Internet (or mobile phone) connection is no longer an issue.

For this to work, though, I will need an IMAP-based e-mail solution and not a POP-based one. IMAP will not only let me sync my e-mail across multiple computers and devices, it will let me work offline (before re-syncing) as well. 

Second, because of that IMAP requirement, I am seriously considering making Gmail my sole primary e-mail account. In fact, I'll start to POP e-mail from all my other accounts into this one as well (see diagram above).

Why? Not only is Gmail the only one that offers IMAP (which is why it should be my only e-mail interface), it's free and it gives me tonnes of storage, great calendar integration, and excellent e-mail search capabilities. It is also reliable, universally accessible, and, once I switch, I won't have to take regular backups of my e-mail folders any more.

I could, of course, use other (paid) IMAP services, but I think I'd be better off using Gmail for all the additional benefits I get from it.

One Decision

So I have a big decision to make. Do I move all 2.1GB of e-mail archives off my laptop, out of my direct control, and into the cloud? Some people have done that and are happy with it. Others didn't have such a great time. Until I try it myself, I don't know how things will turn out for me. What might be useful, though, is if I was to do a bit of e-mail housekeeping before uploading everything to Gmail. Doing that would be a pain up-front, but it would make life a lot easier going forward.

Actually, maybe the bigger issue is this: should I commit myself to using only Gmail (via IMAP) from this point on? I guess another way to think of this is to ask myself whether this is better than the status quo. That is: should I commit myself to using only my laptop (with occasional backups) to store all my e-mail? Or, to get the best of both worlds, does it make more sense to store my e-mail both on Gmail and to maintain a local copy of all that e-mail in Thunderbird as well? The answer, in theory, is pretty obvious. Naturally, it's much harder to go ahead and actually implement the solution.

I think I'll start off with a baby step: I'll activate IMAP on my Gmail account and will start using that with Thunderbird. I'll even try uploading copies of some of my old e-mails into Gmail to see how it goes. If that goes well, I'll spend the next few weeks moving all my folders over one-by-one. Before I know it, I'll be good to go. Let's just hope things go as smoothly as I've just made them sound!

Apple's Safari Debacle

Or is it a debacle only when, say, Microsoft does it but a minor PR issue when Apple does it? Whatever.

I've been meaning to write about this for a while now, but haven't gotten around to it (the last week of my MBA starts today! Yaay!). Meanwhile, Paul Thurrott's gone and said pretty much what I wanted to say in his article: Apple lofts middle finger at PC users, PC users thank Apple for acknowledging them. Of course, he says it much better than I ever could (and with a lot more authority, being a tech journalist and all) but that's okay.

Good Times: Trekking and Playing Music

UPDATE: The Karakorams.com site has been taken offline so the photos embedded and linked-to from this blog post are no longer available. I am trying to find other versions to put here instead...but don't hold your breath. [Ameel; 25 August 2009]

A couple of friends recently posted some photographs of treks that I've been on and gigs that I've participated in over the past decade and it got me feeling all nostalgic. Since those photos were posted on Facebook, I figured I'd post some of them here while linking to other, public ones as well.

Trekking in the Karakorams

First off are some trekking photos. I did a lot of trekking and travelling while I was in college -- there's nothing quite like travelling with lots of friends while on a tight budget -- and most of those treks are nicely documented on Karakorams.com (which I helped develop, by the way). Here are photos from my three favourite treks.

My first real trek was to Fairy Meadows, which is a camp on the north side of Nagna Parbat. You can find many photos from that trip on Karakorams.com but this one is my favourites (click for a larger version):

Saad, Amir, Ameel, and Yasir at Fairy Meadows

This was taken bright and early on the second day of our trek. Alefia, who'd been feeling really cold and had woken up a couple of hours earlier, got tired of our laziness and came to wake us up. You can't quite see me in there but I'm the hint of a face in the darkness of the tent. Yasir wrote an article about this trip and even he mentions this photo :)

Our second trip was to one of the Rakaposhi base camps and, for this one, both Yasir and I wrote articles -- though mine is more of diary-type recounting of events which, when I read now, I'm itching to edit! I like two photos from this trek. This one is of me, Saqib (one of the two friends whose posting in Facebook prompted me to write this), and Alefia with the Rakaposhi peaks in the background:

Ameel, Saqib, Alefia

And this one, which shows the ridge we had to climb across to get to our camp:

Crossing the Ridge

The path across this ridge was broken in four places and that photo is of one of the easiest crossings! You can find the rest of the Rakaposhi photos on Karakorams.com as well.

My third trip was to the Deosai Plains, which is one of the highest plateaus in the world. There are lots of really good photos from this trek but this one of Hasan as he positions his tripod to take a photo is my favourite:

Hasan Karrar on Deosai

Deosai really is a stunning place and I urge you to take a look at the rest of the photos as well.

Playing Music

Moving away from trekking: Back in 2005 a bunch of us in Islamabad got together and performed a couple of really fun gigs at Civil Junction.

What was possibly more fun than the gigs themselves were the jam sessions that we had at my house in the weeks leading up to the events. Sheharyar posted some of the photos from those sessions on Facebook and here are a couple.

This one is of me and Nadia -- we did most of the drumming and "percussing" for the band and, no, Nadia isn't normally surrounded by a motion blur:

Nadia and Ameel drumming for the F-10 1/2 Acoustic Band

The second one is a wider shot of the room -- the drawing room of our old house in Islamabad -- which had awesome acoustics. Sheharyar is the one with the guitar and mic:

F-10 1/2 Acoustic Band - Jam Session

Ah, good times. Here's to many, many more in the future...

Cool Bananas

"Cool bananas" -- I've been hearing that phrase on and off since coming to Australia and I'd always wondered where it had come from but I'd never gotten around to investigating its origins. Then I heard it again yesterday and, after tormenting Nadia with it all afternoon, I finally looked it up.

Initially I presumed that it was from something like a children's TV show like Bananas in Pyjamas but, as it turns out, it's originally a Kiwi phrase from the 70s -- or at least that's what the Wikipedia consensus on it seems to be. How the Kiwis came up with it, no one seems to know. The Urban Dictionary, for example, defines it but doesn't indicate its origins.

The most comprehensive discussion on it, however, is on an ABC message board in which...well, in which all they manage to conclude is that a bunch of them have been hearing it in various parts of Australia for over 30 years. I guess that's about as close as we're going to get to its proper etymology. (Darn, and here I thought the Internet knew everything!). Oh well. At least I got to blog about it so that's, er, cool bananas! :)

Lolcats to Dogs, Graphs & Politics

One of my favourite place on the 'net is the lolcat site I Can Has Cheezburger. In case you don't already know, these fine folk also have three other equally funny sites:

  • I Can Has Hotdog -- for loldogs
  • Pundit Kitchen -- for lolpoliticians; or a place where you can "cook up pictures for your political blog"
  • GraphJam -- for, well, lolgraphs; or, more accurately, "Pop culture for people in cubicles"

They also maintain Speak LOLspeak, which is the "The Definitive Lolcats Glossary" and an invaluable resource.

And then there are three other funny, but more specialized lol-related sites:

There are, of course, many, many more of these sites but those three are, in my opinion, the funniest of the lot.

Good stuff!

Peter Gabriel & Technology

Peter Gabriel, one of my all-time favourite musicians, continues to be at the forefront of technology usage -- particularly when it comes to technology for music and human rights:

On the human rights side:

  • In 1992 he co-founded WITNESS, "an international human rights organization that uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations"
  • In 1999 he started TheElders.org, which is a "new gathering of world leaders who [have] come together to guide and support our 'global village'".

So it's no surprise that he is involved in recent areas of music technology as well:

Both sound really interesting and I'll write more about them once I've played around with them a little more.

[More PG: Wikipedia, Last.fm, Real World Records, WOMAD]

Professional Photo of Me!

I recently wrote about my entry in the Melbourne Business School Class Profile Brochure on my professional blog. Since I wrote that post on the day I submitted my profile to Career Services, I didn't have a copy of my professional photograph that will be used in that publication (MBS hired a professional photographer and got all our pictures taken).

This morning, however, I was e-mailed a copy of that photo and here it is:

Ameel Zia Khan

Good photo, eh? I don't look half bad, either :)

Three Years On...

One of the best ways I have of remembering my mother is through music. When we were little she used to sing us to sleep and it's mostly thanks to her that we're a very musical family (we start to sing at the drop of a hat, for example). Since it's been three years since she died I thought it would be nice to post a few videos of the songs that she really liked or that we used to sing a lot.

She was a big fan of Edith Piaf, for example, and her favourite Piaf song was 'Non, je ne regrette rien':

Her other favourite songs included Dean Martin's 'Under the Bridges of Paris', Harry Belafonte's 'Jamaica Farewell', and Frank Sinatra's 'Three Coins in a Fountain'. I'm sure there were others she liked, but these are the ones she knew the lyrics of and sang most often.

Here's Harry Belafonte singing 'Jamaica Farewell':

Bed Time Songs

A lot of the songs she sang us to sleep with were folk songs like 'Lavender Blue', 'Red River Valley', 'Danny Boy', and 'Tom Dooley'.

Here's a video of The Kingston Trio singing 'Tom Dooley':

And, since this is too good an opportunity to pass up, here's the Muppets version of 'Danny Boy':

I remember Ami having a good laugh over this when we first saw it :)

I believe she was more familiar with the Elvis version of this song, though, so here's the tribute video made for his 29th death anniversary that features it:

Travelling Songs

There were also a number of songs that we always sang in the car, particularly on long journeys. One of those was The Three Stooges song 'Swinging the Alphabet':

Other songs included 'The Animal Fair', 'Why Shouldn't My Goose', 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat', and 'Ten Green Bottles'. There were, of course, many more.

It's still hard to believe that she's gone...and I'm glad we have all this music to help keep her memory alive.

2008 LUMS B.Sc.'99 Class Notes

Calling all of my LUMS B.Sc. Class of 1999 classmates!

If you haven't read the news item I posted on our MyFamily.com site or seen the message I sent 50 of you on Facebook, please read this blog post.

It is time, once again, to write our class notes for the LUMS Alumni Annual. Like we did last year, we are going to do compile them using this wiki: http://bsc99.wetpaint.com/

So please: visit the site and update your (or anyone else's) class note entry. Oh, and make sure you do this before Monday, 26 May. On the 27th, I'll copy edit the notes (tweak grammar, flow, etc.) and will mail them off to the Alumni Relations Office.

Finally, please tell all our other classmates that you're in contact with to do this as well.

Thanks!